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Week 5 - Activity 3 Blog

What have you learned thus far about designing instruction from a multiple media perspective? How do you think the use of visual-text instruction will benefit teaching and learning? What do you think will be potential issues with the use of visual-text instruction? How do you think it will impact your teaching and learning?

What do you think is better about using both images and text? What not? How do you feel about using multiple forms of media instead of a single medium for delivering instruction?

After working in InDesign this week, I feel like there so much in this program to learn.  This program can be a little intimidating at first as there are so many options and tools.  This program is a very powerful application which allows for the creation of very nice looking instructional material.  I think InDesign is perfect for designing content with both images and text as it provides a lot more freedom to do different kinds of layouts.  Other applications like Photoshop, Word, or PowerPoint lack this ability.

Some studies have shown that using multimedia in instructional material can lead to poor design. Some combinations of multimedia can even cause ‘split-attention’ (Hede, 2002).  However, effective multimedia can support a better mental representation from words and images over the traditional method of involving words only (Mayer, 2003).  Based on this information, I will continue to use both text and images when creating learning content.  Although this is going to depend on the content at hand.

When creating instructional materials, one should try to design the content so that it reaches the cognitive learning styles of all types of learners.  Therefore, using a combination of both text and images might best the best solution.  Although there are learners who do well with text-based material that is well organized in a sequential order, there are others who do not.  These are people whose thought processes are predominantly in the right hemisphere of the brain and who do better with visual content. (West, 1997).  Providing these learners with the necessary information can make a difference in their learning.

The visual design or instructional material impacts the ability to communicate with the users.  Whatever one chooses to use to create instructional material, a bad design of a document will not deliver the intentional message.  When thinking about the layout of a document, contrast, repetition, alignment and proximity of the content should be considered.

References

Hede, A. (2002). An integrated model of multimedia effects on learning. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, 177-191.

Mayer, R. E. (2003). The promise of multimedia learning: Using the same instructional design methods across different media. Learning and Instruction, 13(2), 125-139.

West, T. G. (1997). In the mind's eye: Visual thinkers, gifted people with dyslexia and other learning difficulties, computer images, and the ironies of creativity. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

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