Requirements
Instructional Barriers – Materials – How Our Brains Interact with Media
First, let's clarify “media.”
Often, when the word is used, many people conjure up mental pictures of technology – digital equipment, a computer screen, a television, etc. However, media is simply the plural for medium (yeah, we know you know that, but it's an important reminder). There are different mediums for communicating information and ideas, and therefore for facilitating learning.
We often rely on speech, or lecture, as the main medium. We're so used to it (and think we're so good at it) that we've forgotten it is a medium. However, it IS a medium – and therefore a selection of a given transmission vehicle for content.
Each transmission vehicle, or medium, that we have available to us today has certain characteristics that make it good choices for certain uses (and poor choices for other uses). That choice – or that decision point on what medium to use for what – is precisely the intersection of where how our brains operate and how materials are designed.
Next, let's discuss “information channels” into our brains.
Our brains process sound differently than how they process visual images, and text becomes even more complicated because we “recode” the words we read (see) into sounds in our brains. Think of sound and visuals as different types of traffic that flows in and out of different highway structures to and from the brain.
There are certain features of sounds or images that help them “hook” in our brains. Audio information or visual information lacking those “hooks” isn't likely to stick very well in memory.
 |
 |