You can hardly pick up a computer magazine or newsletter today without
being pounded by the "MULTIMEDIA" word. There are articles
about multimedia platforms, multimedia standards, multimedia packages, and
multimedia promises.
Are they hype? or are they real?
First you need to check your source to find out what is meant by multimedia.
There seem to be several different meanings in common usage.
A multimedia presentation is, as one pundit said, any presentation that
requires you to make two trips from your car to carry the equipment to the
meeting room.
Commonly, multimedia is used as a modern name for interactive video. It
simply means using a computer to control the presentation of video images
to an audience. It lets you do glitzy presentations of boring data. In my
view, this is hype.
However, in its more profound sense, multimedia can be seen in an historical
context that places it in the tradition that began with Mr. Vannevar Bush,
Director, U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development, who published
an article, As We May Think in the Atlantic Monthly in 1945. In that
article he suggested a "future device for individual use, which is
a sort of mechanized private file and library." Multimedia also belongs
to the tradition based on the work of Douglas C. Engelbart, working at the
Stanford Research Institute, who began to develop a system for augmenting
human intellect. Additionally, multimedia is the present day representation
of "hypertext" , a word coined by Theodor H. Nelson in 1965 for
non-linear, or non-sequential, writing and reading. He envisioned a multidimensional
text with junctions for burrowing into the material for details, definitions,
and background information. For me, multimedia is the extension
of hypertext to include graphics, video, animation, and sound to offer non-sequential
learning. Now I believe this use of the term multimedia is
not hype! Multimedia offers us wonderful new possibilities for knowing and
teaching physics.
For us to know physics as we presently do, we had to gradually change our
patterns of reasoning and advance to another level of understanding. This
is a life-long process of change. It occurs when what we think we know about
nature is not substantiated by our experiences, that somehow nature does
not quite make sense. "Knowing" is rooted in our innate desire
to want to understand ourselves and our environment. Hence, the primary
task of hypermedia in knowing physics is to facilitate these on-going changes
in our mental processes as related to concepts in physics. What we need
from with multimedia is not to try to make physics superficially easy, but
to reveal its appropriate level of complexity. Thus the multimedia task
is to provide a credible reality and a challenge to our existing mental
processes, in short, to provoke us into an appropriate level of cognitive
conflict and motivate us to continue the process of knowing.
Some of us were motivated, in the beginning, to become physicists because
we loved story problems. We liked the fantasy world build around physics
problems. Fantasy can make learning environments more interesting and more
fun. A good fantasy helps us apply old knowledge to new situations and by
provoking vivid images a good fantasy can help us remember. We are fortunate
in physics. We have a wide variety of visual images from which to select
that can be interesting. Multimedia can enable us to offer physics stories
where different students can choose different fantasies, or story problems,
that may include text, sound, animation, graphics, and full motion video.
We were intrigued by physics because the goal of understanding nature is
challenging. It is a challenge which provides a goal whose attainment is
not certain. It is a goal which became personally meaningful for us to achieve.
Physics used the skills that we were being taught. Understanding nature
is a good goal because it allowed us to develop a sense of power, once wehad
accommodated some new knowledge, then we could do more. Multimedia, I believe,
provides us with with some wonderful new approaches to this aspect of intrinsically
motivating learning. Multimedia enables us, as physics teachers, to provide
our students with experiences of variable difficulty and randomness, simulating
nature.
An appropriate challenge is captivating because it engages our self-esteem.
Our students should have higher self-esteem at the end of our physics courses
than at the beginning. Proper multimedia experiences can help us empower
people and enhance their self-esteem.
Thirdly, we were captured by physics because of curiosity. A learning task
needs to provide an optimal level of informational complexity for us, as
learners, to be attracted to it. If a task is too simple we are not interested.
It should be surprising and novel, but not completely incomprehensible.
We are made curious by both sensory stimuli and cognitive stimuli. Multimedia
with images and sound allows us to provide both of these. Multimedia needs
to present just enough information to make our existing knowledge seem to
be incomplete, inconsistent, or unparsimonious. Then our natural human curiosity
helps to motivate us to learn more.
In conclusion, I believe that multimedia can be useful in disseminating
physics when we use it to encourage active learning, develop cooperation
among people, enhance people's self-esteem, respect diverse talents and
ways of learning, and encourage contacts between novices and experts. I
believe, that once we learn how to properly use multimedia, we can offer
people in every situation, from a classroom to an airport kiosk, a bit of
physics, which they will complete with a heightened interest in the natural
world and an increased sense of self-esteem. That is my dream.
R.G. Fuller
11/17/92