in a
non-linear
environment
Teaching Culture in a non-linear Environment
After having been cheated out of everything but her pedagogic rhetoric, that is now threatened as well. Her fifty minute lesson that starts with A, and goes via B and the logically C and D culminating in the explanatory or conclusive E, is disrupted violently, her linear rhetoric is replaced by a non-linear mode where students can leave her reasoning at every step of the way. The teacher is no longer able to speak in a persuasive and teleological rhetoric, in a non-linear environment the student is able to turn her back on her and her precious arguments any minute.Education
and
Narrative
Organisation
Narrative and learning
Narrative has been a means of structuring texts for centuries. Ever since Aristotle, we have learnt that stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end - in other words, a linear construction. But narrative doesn't only apply to fiction: the television news is presented as stories, documentary programmes frequently use narrative as a framing device, and we recount our daily life to others in story form. We use narrative to shape experience and to help us remember.Interactive communication between people is even older, but the concept of interactivity has only recently been applied to the design of media. Users can change direction, vary the pace, repeat sequences and input responses, so the narrative can be suspended and altered and may thwart or confuse our expectations. But although multimedia superficially appears to combine media with which we are already familiar, such as film, television, and books, the 'reading' or interpreting skills we have acquired from exposure to these traditional media are not directly transferable. Can we apply what we know about the relationships between narrative and learning in linear media to the design of interactive media?
Educational context
The use of interactive media in schools is accelerating. More than 90% of secondary schools have at least on CD-ROM player, and the use of other interactive media, such as CDi, is also growing (National Council for Educational Technology estimates from 1994). Over the next few years we can expect accelerated growth in the commercial provision of multimedia materials for the home education market, in direct competition with UK educational materials.With such rapidly expanding interest, it is important to develop a clear understanding of how these media work in the context of education. It is the aim of this study to pursue that understanding.
We have recently completed a large-scale evaluation study of interactive media in the classroom, which was commissioned by the Department for Education. The study encompassed more than 200 schools in England and Wales. A summary of the findings has been sent to all primary and secondary schools, and the full report is available to all educational institutions (Laurillard et al, 1994).
One of the clear findings from this study was that although teachers are generally satisfied with the hardware of these technologies, they are very disappointed with the design of the software. Children were frequently unable to make sense of the programs without considerable teacher preparation or supervision, and their work on multimedia sometimes remained fragmented, and poorly understood. Moreover the interactional style of some sequences led to non-reflective processing in comparison with off-line work on the same problem (Laurillard and Taylor, 1994). These findings are compatible with other research projects which show that the narrative structure of multimedia programs, or sometimes the lack of it, affects learners' comprehension, often adversely (Plowman, 1991; Stratfold, 1994).
Designers of interactive media are in a
difficult position, as there is a singular lack of theory from which design
decisions can be made. If the field is to progress, a theoretical account
of the impact of detailed design features on learner behaviour must be
articulated as clearly as possible. This study proposes to develop a theoretical
understanding of the forms and functions of narrative in interactive media,
which is based on empirical research, and is capable of informing instructional
design.
(Source: MENO (Multimedia, Education
and Narrative Organisation) Background
to the research)
Source: Book
of Kells |
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