RE this quote:

> Books don’t work for the same reason that lectures don’t work: neither medium has any explicit theory of how people actually learn things, and as a result, both mediums accidentally (and mostly invisibly) evolved around a theory that’s plainly false.

This reminds me of the intro chapter in Derek Alexander Muller's PhD Thesis, which is a very useful summary of a lot of ed-tech research, particularly about video: http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/super/theses/PhD(Muller).pdf#... (see Chapter 1 "Framing the study")

Some useful quotes from Muller's thesis:

- [prior work is...] body of research that has failed to establish answers to fundamental questions about learning with multimedia.

- [...] technology developers have focused on the ground-breaking abilities of the new technology to promote interest in its application to the educational domain. Thomas Edison’s appraisal of the motion picture is an oft-cited example of the excitement that accompanies innovation. Promoting his invention, he proclaims “that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks,” (Edison 1922 as cited in Cuban 1986, p.9).

- When Clark (1983) concluded that no particular media had a unique impact on learning and that research seeking such an impact should be abandoned, he believed the point to be uncontentious and well-supported by the evidence. “Media are mere vehicles that deliver instruction but do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers our groceries causes changes in our nutrition,” he wrote (p.445). The paper kicked off debate in the research community because, stated explicitly or not, the notion that media inherently affects learning had been a presupposition of virtually all previous studies in educational technology [...] he proposed the ‘replaceability’ challenge: “to find evidence, in a well designed study, of any instance of a medium or media attributes that are not replaceable by a different set of media and attributes to achieve similar learning results for any given student and learning task.” The challenge was meant to demonstrate the equivalence of different platforms and highlight the methodological differences that actually impact on learning.

- “It is time to shift the focus of our research from media as conveyors of methods to media and methods as facilitators of knowledge-construction and meaning-making on the part of learners” (Kozma 1994a, p.13).

- The equivalence principle in multimedia states that the relevant cognitive processes inspired by different formats of multimedia can be made indistinguishable, by choosing appropriate methods. [...] Consider a student reading a book with words and pictures about Newtonian mechanics. Then, consider the same student watching a movie about Newtonian mechanics. The two experiences appear very different. One involves written text and static images while the other involves spoken text and dynamic images. If we found that following these two instructional treatments, our hypothetical student performed equally well on the same test, what could we conclude about the two different forms of multimedia? We might, like Lewis (1995), suspect that a movie may not be an appropriate medium for teaching Newtonian mechanics, or perhaps that the movie was deficient in content or presentation. The alternative is to conclude that both media encouraged similar cognitive processes in the student.