Though any of these could be accomplished using other media, multimedia and on-line technologies are clearly more efficient and economical with little if any experiential cost. More important, they are misapplications that deprive students of those human interactions and hands-on experiences that yield feeling, thinking adults. Media clearly enable us to design better instruction. For the past 30-plus years, film and video have brought the world into the classroom. Unfortunately, we relied on film and video to bring the community into the classroom rather than the class into the community.
Multimedia provides the opportunity to interact with the images behind a glass screen.
Let's hope we don't let it replace interaction with each other and the world around us. Multimedia and other technologies are simply tools that assist with instruction. They have no more influence on achievement and wholeness than a scalpel has on healing. Click here to access biographic information for Richard Lookatch .