What Are My Course Expectations?

Social media, interactive and multimedia learning has made me come up with various scenarios, myths and reservations. I would want to explore all these thoughts I have through this course.

Social media and various mobile applications were created to connect people and to be used as a tool to help you increase your reach but not be used as the only tool. Shopping is done online, dating is done online, whatever you want you can find online. People seem to have a greater disconnect with each other in the social media era. People’s lives are now on front street for everyone to see and the line that divides real life and “fiction” is now non-existent.

What made me pick this course

What is Multimedia Learning?

According to Mayer, the term multimedia refers to the simultaneous presentation of both words and pictures (2014). Multimedia learning also refers to the learner being bale to construct knowledge from a combination of words and pictures. There are various basic principles to optimise the design of multimedia learning. These principles include Signalling principle, Segmenting principle, Redundancy principle etc. The video below ⬇️ describes Mayer’s Principles or multimedia learning.

Summary of Some of Mayer’s Principles

Learning increases when corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously rather than successively.  Also, people learn better when irrelevant details in information, sounds, or pictures are excluded. Personalizing narration helps people learn better.  For instance, narrating in a conversational style as opposed to a formal style increases learning.  Additionally, interactivity also increases learning.  People learn better when they have control over the pace of the presentation.  Moreover, signaled speech increases learning.  Examples of signaled speech include emphasizing key facts, using headings, and adding connectives between text. 

Mayer’s 12 Principles of Multimedia Learning are a Powerful Design Resource

Let’s Talk About Interactive Or Multimedia Learning Experience

Nokia 3310

In the early 2000’s Global System for Mobile Communications (G.S.M.) released the popular Nokia 3310. It had a 84x 84 pixel pure monochrome display and storage space of approximately a 100 text messages. However, cloud storage came along in the dot-com bubble. According to Wikipedia, “Cloud storage is a model of data storage in which the digital data is stored in logical pools, the physical storage spans multiple servers (and often locations), and the physical environment is typically owned and managed by a hosting company.”

Image by [Bharat sharma/India times(https://www.indiatimes.com/technology/news/dumbphones-nokia-3310-making-comeback-565058.html)]

Google Drive

Google drive is a cloud storage service that was created by Google. Besides file storage Google Drive also permits editing of text documents, spreadsheets, power point presentations, drawings and more. Google offers every user 15 GB of free space for all Google App users. Google also offers an unlimited storage for educational and work purposes for at least a 5-member group. All this has enabled some team projects to go much smoother. Group projects can be completed with group members not necessarily having to meet and edit documents in real-time. Same as Github, google drive hosts some of my coding files and projects. It is also important as it backs up my notability notes from my iPad besides my iCloud.

Abacus

Abacus

This ancient technology called an abacus was an efficient tool that set me on this path to pursue my mathematics degree. As a technology, the abacus predates the making of glass and the invention of the alphabet. The Romans had some sort of counting device with beads. So did the early Greeks. The word “calculate” comes from the expression â€śdrawing pebbles,” basically using some sort of abacus-like device to do math. This was a non digital interactive piece of technology that was useful for me.

This device segmented information for me in terms learning units, tens, hundreds etc. It also had the visual interaction for me and I could count physical which made me believe practically that what I was being taught could be proven. There was some aspect of signalling involved because I focused on the principles I was supposed to learn. You can focus on addition and a=subtraction and that basically all you can do on this device.

Image by[DeAgostini/GettyImages(https://www.gettyimages.ca)] via [Vox Websites (https://www.vox.com/first-person/2017/3/6/14766970/abacus-math-learning-lessons)]

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