Multimedia: Myths and Realities

Abstract

From the 1994 CAIS Conference:
The Information Industry in Transition
McGill University, Montreal, Quebec. May 25 - 27, 1994.

Multimedia products are now widely available on a variety of platforms, and there is a widespread assumption that the addition of still images, animation and sound to text will enhance any information product. The research reported in this paper investigates such claims for multimedia in an educational context and for a specific user group: grad-six primary school students. The students' ability to recall, make inferences from, and comprehend articles presented to them in print, as text on screen, and in mutlimedia format has been mesured. The findings to date suggest that the impact of multimedia is subtle, and that generalisations about the effectiveness of multimedia, at least with children in an educational context, should be employed cautionously. The long-term goal is to identify design criteria which can be employed in the production of multimedia products for schools.