BLOG POST #3

Dr. Ray Pastore in his video follows the principles of split attention principle and coherence principle. According to split attention principle, it is not appropriate to combine texts and pictures because readers or audience need to check between texts and pictures back and forth all the time, which will spill their attention, increase pressure on brain processing and undermine the learning effect. In Dr. Ray’s video, most PowerPoints choose to only present key words or connect words and pictures. In this way audience can better understand the content without making too many efforts and checking between different media forms. What’s more, Dr. Ray also adopts the coherence principle, which means detracting the irrelevant details. By doing this, audience won’t be distracted and confused. We can see Dr. Ray’s video sticks to the principle by only presenting the reverent key words or concepts, and even when there are pictures, they are used to illustrate the principles.

As far as I am concerned, the reason why an expert would not be able to follow all the principles because these principles are aimed at each particular situation. Each principle supports certain combination of media. If an expert adopts them all, then there would be many kinds of media, which would put more burden on the brain and the audience would have to spend more time to figure out the connections between different forms of presentation, which would go against the original intention of multimedia learning. In this way it’s better to hold on to a consistent combination of media, so that the audience won’t need to adapt to the changes all the time.

This week, I did a screencast about climate change. In the process of completion, I think it’s too convenient for us who are taking online classes now. Teachers can record the course in advance with screencast, and then put it on the Internet, so that those students who are not in a timezone can easily participate in the course.