ICT in Education

First impressions: “Using multimedia in a constructivist learning environment in the Malaysian classroom”

March 21, 2007

Neo, K. (2003). Using multimedia in a constructivist learning environment in the Malaysian classroom. Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 19(3), 293-310. http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet19/neo.html

Extract: In recent years, the infusion of multimedia into teaching and learning has altered considerably the instructional strategy in our educational institutions and changed the way teachers teach and students learn.

The traditional teacher-centric method of teaching used for decades in our educational system has been modified and enhanced. Currently, modern education theory is moving from the traditional recall of facts, principles, or correct procedures into the areas of creative thinking, problem solving, analysis and evaluation. These are skills which are very much needed in today’s knowledge based economy.

This shift in focus on learning has presented Malaysian educators with serious challenges as well as opportunities in restructuring their curriculum to meet the rising demands of the knowledge based society, which is currently being initiated by the Malaysian Government.

In this paper, we focus on designing a course which is oriented towards a constructivist based paradigm by using multimedia as an instructional tool, and where students are active learners, involved in constructing their own knowledge in the learning process and determining how to reach their own learning outcomes.

A survey was carried out to ascertain the reactions of students enrolled in an interactive multimedia course in the Multimedia University, Malaysia towards this constructivist based learning mode. The results indicated that these students reacted positively towards this study mode and improved their interpersonal and collaborative learning skills.

My first response to this paper wasn’t a particularly positive one. As you can see from the extract, it is about the experiences of students in a constructivist situation (one where the learning is “built” by the student in a situation where they are presented with a problem as their assessment and make their own decisions about what they need to learn to solve it.)

It is also very much about how the use of multimedia is meant to slot into this constructivist model, with the students using audio, video, animation, interactive flash, images and more to create a final product that brings together everything that they have learnt.

The students then complete a questionnaire providing feedback on their enjoyment of the learning experience and how valuable they felt that using multimedia was in constructing their knowledge.

The problem here is that these are multimedia students at a multimedia school – this is a field that they want to work in and one which the Malaysian Government (and it seems the author of the paper) is very keen to develop in Malaysia.

Using students trained in the use of multimedia to determine the effectiveness of using multimedia as a learning tool seems an entirely questionable place to start in this instance. (Unsurprisingly, the students all felt that using multimedia helped them to learn).

In addition to this, the paper seems heavy on pro-constructivist rhetoric and light on concrete examples of how or why this practice actually supports learning.

Language such as “students obediently listen to the lecture” in describing conventional “chalk and talk” teaching seems slanted – the word “obediently“grates in particular as something regressive, something to be judged.

On the other hand, descriptions of the Constructivist model are all glowing and faultless – “students work individually or in small groups to explore, investigate and solve authentic problems and become actively engaged in seeking knowledge and information, rather than being passive recipients.”

(My personal belief is that a Constructivist approach can be highly effective and that learners will connect more strongly with knowledge that they have found – particularly after they have identified their own need to have it and found ways to relate it to their existing knowledge.)

The fact that learners were taught in a seemingly more conventional manner how to actually create the multimedia projects in the first place is quickly glossed over in a sentence – <blockquote> These students have no a priori knowledge in multimedia authoring and authoring tools and, therefore, were given lectures and tutorials to provide them with basic skills in multimedia application development. </blockquote>

I believe it is a rare occasion that an exclusively constructivist approach would be used in a classroom and while problem based learning is a great approach for autonomous learners and group-based learning, most students still expect a reasonable level of support from their teacher and for their teacher to be more knowledgable about the subject than they are.

Having students create multimedia resources to examine the usefulness of multimedia in a constructivist approach makes a lot of sense but seems to get too “meta” when the students are creating multimedia resources for the sake of creating multimedia resources. Their knowledge of the subject matter of the aforementioned multimedia resources apparently went up, which is certainly encouraging but given that the learning outcome was more focussed on the students developing product management and design skills, this seems somewhat irrelevant.

However

I’m meant to develop a Heuristic based on this article – not that I’m overly sure what a heuristic is meant to do – from the examples I’ve seen, it seems like a concise headline summary of a larger (400 words approx) summary of an idea contained in the article. The finer points of what a heuristic is, what it is for and so on appears to have been covered in the face to face classes of this subject -however as a distance student, I missed out. (The last time I asked a question about concept maps I was advised to google it on wikipedia – which I had already done incidentally – so I’m somewhat reluctant to ask again).

This leads me to the question – if I disagree with the approach to a subject that is covered in a paper, can I still pull a reasonable opinion/position from it which takes the shape of a heuristic.

The article has some interesting things to say about the purpose of the constructivist approach, I think this is the place to begin.

Update - ok, so there is actually a pretty reasonable looking guide to writing heuristics tucked away in the course content.

I might just post quickly about that too.

Entry Filed under: 911, constructivism, e-learning, heuristics, multimedia, video. .