Section 2:
The Impact of Learning“ From” Media and Technology in Schools
Section 2:
The Impact of Learning“ From” Media and Technology in Schools
The Meaning of Media and Technology as Tutors
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The foundation for the use of media and technology as“ tutors” in schools is " educational communications," i. e., the deliberate and intentional act of communicating content to students with the assumption that they will learn something " from " these communications( Krendl, Ware, Reid, & Warren, 1996). In educational communications, information or knowledge is encoded visually or verbally in the symbol systems( media) that are enabled by various technologies. For example, animation is a form of media that can be delivered to students via a variety of technologies such as the World Wide Web. Within a web-based science tutorial, an animation of the movement of the moon around the earth might be shown to students so that they can visualize and learn about the lunar phases.
The instructional processes inherent in the“ from” approach to using media and technology in schools usually can be reduced to a series of simple steps:
1) exposing students to messages encoded in media and delivered by technology, 2) assuming that students perceive and encode these messages, 3) requiring a response to indicate that messages have been received, and 4) providing feedback as to the adequacy of the response.
Interaction in the“ from” approach, if present, is normally operationalized in terms of student input via the technology such as clicking a mouse button to indicate a response to a multiple-choice question, some form of answer judging, and feedback in the form of another message previously encoded in the media. Instructional technologies( e. g., films and teaching machines) were first introduced early in this century in the belief that they could“ teach” in a similar sense that teachers or tutors are said to teach( Cuban, 1986). This section of this report focuses on the two most widely used forms of media and technology as tutors today, specifically television and computers.
Learning“ from” Television
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Popular Beliefs about TV
Since the first educational television broadcasts began in Iowa in 1933, there have been decades of research focused on the educational effects of television, and yet controversies about the impact of television in schools and society as a whole persist. For example, some well-known social critics( e. g., Postman, 1995, 1994, 1985; Winn, 1985) maintain that television viewing is cognitively debilitating. A
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