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Week 10 - Activity 2 - Blog reflection

What is different about developing instruction with both images and audio combined? Are there limitations? Benefits? If so, what are they?

For this week’s assignments, we changed our instruction set to include text, audio, and images.  This has been so far the most challenging part of this project because InDesign is a program that cannot be learned in a matter of a couple of weeks and because the content is extensive.  Watching the training videos were not enough to understand how InDesign behaves, particularly how rollover and buttons behave.  InDesign is also a program that has so many options, menus, layers, etc. that it becomes daunting to get all the content to communicate properly with one another.  Having the limitation of working with only one page made the assignment a bit more difficult to manage as one has to repeatedly hide and unhide layers.

Is it more efficient? Do you think about how you instruct someone differently?

Using multimedia to create instructional material is not necessarily more efficient, I would say using more than two types of media at once can be inefficient and repetitive.  That been said, I do think that there is instructional content that could benefit from multimedia design.  I would caution that creating such content takes a lot of working hours planning and designing.

One has to be mindful of redundancy when creating multimedia content.  Redundancy is defined by Hsia (1971) as “the ratio of identical information between the ratio and video channels.”  The more redundancy the less like the information presented will be lost.  Dr. Adam Gazzaley, an American cognitive neuroscientists, explains how the brain is capable of rapid parallel process, which permits us to take complex stimuli in our environment, the brain also has limitations (Gazzaley, 2011).  Therefore, when creating multimedia content, we need to make sure that our users are not overly stimulated.

References

Gazzaley, A. (2011, April 17th). Brain: Memory and Multitasking. Retrieved from http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxSanJoseCA-Adam-Gazzaley-MD.

Hsia, H. J. (1971). The information processing capacity of modality and channel performance. AV Communication Review, 19, 51-75.

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