EDT619 Blog

What is the role of media in the educational process? Is it a major factor or just an interchangeable tool? Researchers Clark and Kozma took a deeper look into this subject and formulated two opposing viewpoints. Clark (1994) viewed media as “mere vehicles that deliver instruction” to which any related benefits could be effectively replicated in an instructional method that did not contain media. On the other hand, Kozma (1994) takes a stance that media is a design science, to which humans have the ability to steer the direction of its progress. To Kozma, the real question to discuss was “will media be designed with the intent to influence learning?”. He believes that media’s underlying structure can support the cognitive and social processes we know to be apart of learning. Kozma believes Clark’s determination to separate method and medium is unnecessary. Both are apart of instructional design and should be valued as having an integral relationship. “In good designs, a medium's ca...

Throughout my extensive education I do not believe I had a meaningful learning experience with technology until this current semester. Up until now, technology was just a means to an end. A way to submit assignments more efficiently or to save trees. My high school had more limited access to technology, so technology based projected had to be planned well in advanced by my teachers. In my undergrad, most of my assignments were simply essays that needed to be typed and occasionally could be turned in electronically. However, this semester I am taking a course about data literacy in social studies, and my professor is utilizing Scalar, an open source publishing website that allows us to easily upload visualizations and add text descriptions. The screenshot shown above was taken from our Scalar page. As we learn about different types of data visualizations, we then have to actively search credible examples and add them to a classroom board. As Jonassen discusses in the article “What Is ...