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Week 6 - Activity 2 Reflection

What is different about developing instruction with both images and text combined? Is it more efficient? Do you think about how you instruct someone differently? Are there limitations? Benefits? If so, what are they

For this week’s assignment, our project changed from using image only instructions to a combination of multimedia, using images and text.  We also switched to another program, this week it was InDesign.  I am new to InDesign and I don’t know if the quick tutorials were enough for me to feel comfortable with all of my work, but I tried my best.  I’m glad I learn a new application and hope to put it to good use doing instructional material at work.  I will just need to come back and finished watching all the other tutorials.

With the combination of images and text, my layout changed from the previous week.  Although at first, I wanted to include an image next to each step, I felt some steps were easy enough and descriptive enough that they didn’t need an image to go along with them.  While creating my layout, I removed redundant steps and combine a couple of them.  I didn’t want my reader to become overloaded with unnecessary information.

I am of the opinion that developing instructional material with both images and text is a lot easier than creating image only content.  With text and images, one can easily explain complicated steps that might have otherwise taken longer to explain with pure text or with pure images. But using combine media in an instruction set can also be more difficult because it requires the use of multiple applications.  If one is not familiar with Photoshop or InDesign then the process can become a lot more complicated.  From this readings, I learned that not all combined multimedia can be effective so I had to keep that in mind.

The article by Hede (2002) was really helpful for this week’s assignments.  According to this article, studies have shown some positive and negative effects of learning with multimedia.  Success with learning and multimedia depends on the media and on the type of instruction.  This same article stated that multimedia is best for learners with a highly visual style.  This is why I think an instruction set with both text and images would be successful with different styles of learners.

What I’m taking from this assignment is that I didn’t expect to change so much of my content!  I think if I had visualized how the project was going to change from week to week, I would have simplified some steps from the very beginning.

Reference


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

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