The student response was an audible gasp. The picture had emphasized my point in a way that could not be duplicated by any amount of eloquence. In many fields, graphical displays have become a standard method for presenting the large data sets that result from computer processing. Mathematical software, like Maple or Mathematica, allows undergraduate students to create such visualizations. Techniques that are this important and this widely used cannot be ignored in our courses.
Multimedia offers much more than just the combination of text and pictures.
After all, teachers have been doing that for years with slide shows. Modern technology allows for the integration of text and images to create a new type of instructional environment. To comprehend and make full use of this new environment, faculty must carefully assess how they use images in the classroom. Each member of the class can share the same information, using it as a basis for cooperative analysis. This workspace acts as an external memory, compensating for the fact that only a limited amount of information can be stored in the human working memory and also keeps a record of the discussion.