The media debate

Definition

The great "media debate" has been started by Richard Clark and Robert Kozma in the early nineties and it was anticipated by McLuhan (1964) statements that "medium is the message" and "media are extenstion of man".

Clark's arguments

“"are mere vehicles that deliver instruction but do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers our groceries causes changes in our nutrition"” (Clark 83: 445) or more subtly that "instructional method defined as {{quotation | the provision of cognitive processes or strategies that are necessary for learning but which students cannot or will not provide for themselves (Clark, 1994: 5) can be delivered to students by many media and achieve similar learning results.

According to Clark (1994) there is strong evidence that many, very different types of learning materials or learning activities accomplish the same learning goal. He claims that it is the instruction method that influences learning and that each instruction method could be designed into various types of learning materials or learning activities. In this view choices about learning materials or activities in education should be made for 1. the less expensive (for the University) and 2. the most cognitive efficient (for the students) ways to represent and deliver

instruction (Clark, 1994).

(Diederen, ????)

Kozma's arguments

Do media influence learning? Perhaps it is time to rephrase the question: How, do media affect learning? Perhaps it is time to go beyond our concern with "proving" that media "cause" learning so that we can begin to explore the question in more complex ways. Perhaps we should ask, what are the actual and potential relationships between media and learning? Can we describe and understand those relationships? And can we create a strong and compelling influence of media on learning through improved theories, research, and instructional designs? (Kozma, 1994).

Kozma's argument is that certain media “possess particular characteristics that make them both more and less suitable for the accomplishment of certain kinds of learning tasks.” (Kozma, 1994) and he refers to Salomon who argued that “media can be analyzed in terms of their "cognitively relevant" capabilities - i.e., in terms of those characteristics that affect the ways in which individuals represent and process information.”.

These capabilities relate to three aspects of each medium:

1. Technology: the physical, mechanical, or electronic capabilities that determine a medium's function.
2. Symbol system(s): sets of symbolic expressions by which information is communicated according to specific rules and conventions: spoken language, printed text, pictures, numbers, graphs, and musical scores exemplify symbol systems.
3. processing capabilities: a medium's abilities to operate on symbol systems in specified ways-for example, by displaying, receiving, storing, retrieving, organizing, transforming, or evaluating whatever information is available through a particular symbol system.

Each medium can be defined by a set of attributes that define its function, in particular how it allows representations and how it supports the learner to construct and to operate on mental representations. In other words, the assumption is that learning with media is a complementary process within which a learner and a medium interact to expand or refine the learner's mental model of a particular phenomenon.

Therefore Kozma (1994) concludes “If we move from "Do media influence learning?" to "In what ways can we use the capabilities of media to influence learning for particular students, tasks, and situations?" we will both advance the development of our field and contribute to the improvement of teaching and learning.”

The debate goes on

DSchneider believes that:

• Media do have different affordances and therefore media do belong to instructional method, e.g. are part of a pedagogic strategy.
• However, we would agree with Clark that most instructional design models could be implemented with a variety of media.

We believe that technology (including media) is not innocent and that the choice of tools does have a deep impact on teaching and learning. This does not really counter Clark's arguments of course, because he insists that tools must be chosen carefully given precise instructional goals. However, in the world of everyday practise Kozma seems to right: A lot of people do more or less randomly choose a tool and just use its affordances (e.g. a LMS) and that certainly does have an effect on learning.

Links

• The media or the message: The Clark/Kozma media effects debate
• Comments from Richard Clark to participants in the Media and Methods Debate
• The Great Media Debate: Media are mere vehicles of instruction
• Media and Learning: A Review of the Debate

References

• Clark, Richard C. (1983). "Reconsidering Research on Learning from Media," Review of Educational Research 53 (Winter 1983): 445-59.

• Clark, R.E. (1994). Media will Never Influence Learning. Educational Technology Research and Development, 42(2), 21-29. Abstract PDF - DOI 10.1007/BF02299088 (Access restricted)

• Clark, R.E. (1991) When Researchers Swim Upstream:Reflections on an Unpopular Argument About Learning From Media, Educational Technology (34-40).

• Cobb,Tom, Cognitive efficiency: Toward a revised theory of media, Educational Technology Research and Development, 45, 4, 12/18/1997, Pages 21-35, DOI 10.1007/BF02299681 (Access restricted)

• Diederen, Julia, (2005) Design and Evaluation of Digital Activating Learning Materials for Food Chemistry Education, Thesis Wageningen University, The Netherlands, 2005. ISBN 90-8504-271-2 PDF

• Kozma, Robert B. (1991). "Learning with Media," Review of Educational Research 61 (Summer 1991): 179-211.

• Kozma, Robert B. (1994), The Influence of Media on Learning: The Debate Continues, School Library Media Research, Volume 22, Number 4, Summer 1994. HTML

• Koumi, J. (1994). Media Comparison and Deployment: A Practitioner's View. British Journal of Educational Technology, 25(1), 41-57.

• McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

• Salomon, Gavriel (1997). Interaction of Media, Cognition, and Learning, San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1979.