I am interested in the article ‘The Principles of Multimedia Learning’ on Robert Mayer’s suggestions and theories about multimedia learning objects. Presentations are an essential mode of teaching and learning in our future work and our studies. Although PowerPoint looks simple and helps us to teach better, the process of making it requires a lot of skills and rational design. At least for me, creating multimedia teaching is a very challenging task.
Before I read this article, I had three requirements for myself in creating PowerPoint: no excessive text and being organized, no reading to the script during the presentation, and pictures or other media must be shown. However, I often can’t make an effective PowerPoint.
I have learned a lot after reading this article. I hadn’t thought about understanding the cognitive theory of multimedia from a psychological point of view. The human cognitive range and storage capacity are limited, and overloading the content will burden the viewer and make it indigestible. One sentence in the article that impressed me the most: “People learn better when extraneous material is excluded rather than included.”(Davis and Norman, 2016 ) I usually insist on adding some elements to make my PowerPoint look more interesting, however, the more complex and extraneous things only bring negative effects and interfere with the learners.
Here is a video I found on YouTube about the interpretation of Robert Mayer’s Principles of Multimedia Learning, which is more detailed and provides many examples for us to better understand and apply these theories.
Reference:
Davis, G., & Norman, M. (2016, July 19). Principles of Multimedia Learning – Center for teaching and learning: Wiley education services. Center for Teaching and Learning | Wiley Education Services. Retrieved September 18, 2022, from https://ctl.wiley.com/principles-of-multimedia-learning/
Devlin Peck. (2021). YouTube. Retrieved September 18, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9WpfWriY7A.
September 18, 2022 at 11:46 pm
Hi Isabella, I definitely think that you did a great job at analyzing Mayer’s suggestions and theories, in which it provided informative aspects of essential PowerPoint creation and how it should be best presented to the people, and how from a psychological stand point it helps to create presentation, and use it as a factor to be considered in adjusting the format and the layout of our presentation. It is important to know how human brains work if you want to teach it to learn something So I think that is very useful when you know the psychological standpoint of things.
October 12, 2022 at 10:38 pm
Agree, Powerpoint slides are meant to designed as indicators, as a logic organization. And if you are good at PowerPoint, you can simply use sequence to more detaily show audiences that how your idea is going. To me personally, I am a big fan of Steve Jobs, he was always using tide slides in the PowerPoint and make his own speech within most initial ideal content, and in the slides, there only neither data or indicator like graph or simple texts. With the improvement of technology, more and more elearning will be required, so i agree with your opinion upon PowerPoint principles!