The Great Debate : Media v.s. Method

does media really influence learning?

Generally speaking, everything influences learning, good or bad. The living environment, learners' emotions, characteristics, personalities, family structures, cultures, and even your mom or the orange juice you just had influences your learning. So does media. Absolutely.

However, if talking about "is media an essential component cannot be substituted in learning to cause a better learning outcome?", I'll take it a no. I'm a supporter of Clark, and I'm happy to be assigned to defend for him.


 personal experiences

1. Instead of learning by using the computer, students are working on the program or system, not really the content.

2. I may happen to try something using media, but when I figure it out how the system or program is like, I lost interest of using it to learn as well, which indicates that media could be a stimulus or motivation to encourage learning to happen, but it doesn't really change one's own mind or attitude "whether I want to learn".

Learning happens everywhere and anywhere, part of it is based on personal interests (a history/mathematic fan), some part of it is because the learners are required to do so (to pass an exam to enter a good university and find a good job to earn more money to buy a bigger house to live in and to save more money when you get old......).

I would say, it doesn't matter using which media when learning occurs out of your own wish. You like reading? Printed papers, limited classical hardcover edition, on-line text, stored in your palm, an audio CD, etc, etc, you name it, whichever media really doesn't matter, you just want to READ.

For the same reason, when learning occurs because of the outer drive, media doesn't influence a lot as well. Suppose you are going to take the GRE test, options in front of you are official instructional textbook, CD, instructional video,on-line learning, distance instruction classes, no matter how fancy the format is, you have to memorize those 20,000 words and do some or a lot of practices to get an ideal score. It's boring and tiring and time-consuming to reach the goal, but you are required to do so, no matter you like it or not.

Computer is just to help you to increase your interest on continuous learning.

I may like to put method as the essence and media as appearance.