《计算机专业英语》第三章 英文原文

Chapter three

Section A the media is the massage

During the 1960s, a Canadian literary scholar, Marshall McLuhan, gained worldwide prominence as someone who had a profound understanding of electronic media and their impact on both culture and society.

In a series of books so densely written as to be almost unreadable ( the ironically titled Understanding Media [1964] is a good example ), McLuhan outlined his vision of the changes that were taking place as result of the spread of radio and television. He proclaimed that the medium is the message. In other words, new forms of media (message) transform our experience of ourselves and our society, and this influence is ultimately more important than the content that is transmitted in its specific messages.

McLuhan coined several phrases and terms that have become part of the common vocabulary we use to talk about media and society. He suggested the terms global village to refer to the new form of social organization that would inevitably emerge as instantaneous, electric media tied the entire world into one great social, political, and cultural system. McLuhan didn’t bother to concern himself with

questions about control over this village or whether village members would be exploited. To McLuhan, these questions didn’t matter. He was more concerned with microscopic issues, with the impact of media on our senses.

McLuhan proclaimed media to be the extensions of man hand argued that media quite literally extend sight, heating, and touch through time and space. Electric media would open up new vistas for average people and enable us to be everywhere, instantaneously. But was this an egalitarian and democratic vision? What would ordinary people do when their senses were extended in this way? Would they succumb to information overload? Would they be stimulated to greater participation in politics? Would they flee into the virtual worlds that were opened up to them by their extended senses? In a series of book, occasionally, his ideas were profound and prophetic. More often, they were arcane, mundane, or just confusing. McLuhan‘s observations concerning the global village and the role of electronic media in it continue to be prophetic. At a time when satellite communication was just being developed, he seemed to foretell the rise of the Cable News Network with its ability to seemingly make us eyewitness to history as it’s made on the battlefield or at the barricade. At a time when mainframe computers

filled entire floors of office buildings, he seemed to envision a time when personal computers would be everywhere and the Internet would give everyone instant access to immense stores of information. But as one media critic noted, to be everywhere is to be nowhere-to have no sense of place. To have access to information is not the same thing as being able to select and use information effectively. The global village isn’t situated in space or time. Is it possible to adjust to living in such an amorphous, ambiguous social structure? Or will the global village merely be a fa?ade used by cynical elites to exploit people? These questions go far beyond the paeans to electronic media that can be found throughout Understanding Media. McLuhan’s idea achieved enormous public popularity. He became one of the first pop culture gurus of the 1960s. His pronouncement on Nixon and Kennedy propelled him to national prominence. His ideas received serious attention.

Section B Media Research

Media refers to a class of instructional resources and representing all the mediation of instruction through the agency of reproducible events. It includes the materials themselves, the instruments used to deliver the materials to learners and the techniques or methods employed.

Media can be defined by its technology, symbol systems and processing capabilities. The most obvious characteristic of a medium are its technology: the mechanical and electronic aspects that determine its function and, to some extent, its shape and other physical features.

There are three major objectives of media research:

1.Obtain knowledge about the educational or instructional

effectiveness of a chosen medium;

2.Increase understanding of how media and technology function

and what psychology effects they have on a learner;

3.Improve the practice of education through the provision and

evaluation of better materials, media, procedures and

technologies.

Schramm, as cited by Salomon, stated that while all media can teach very effectively, “learning seems to be affected more by

what is delivered then by the delivered system. This has become the basis of disagreement among experts.

Section C The great media debate

Clark lays out his basic position in Reconsidering on Learning from Media (1983). After reviewing research studies from 1912 to the early 1980s, he concludes that instructional designers gain no

learning benefits from employing a specific medium to deliver instruction. Any performance or time saving gains that researchers observe, he says, are the result of uncontrolled instructional method or novelty.

Clark uses an analogy of a delivery truck to explain his position. Instructional media, he says, “… are mere vehicles that deliver instruction but t do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers our groceries and courses changes in our nutrition”

What then influence learning? In Clark’s view, media, and the systems of symbols used with them provide “operational vehicle for methods that reflect the cognitive processes necessary to perform a given learning task”. To achieve success, the designer must find a way to translate cognitive process feature into a symbol system the learner can understand, for example. The moves necessary to play chess then deliver this information through a media delivery “vehicle”. If the designer does a good job of this cognitive translation, the student will learn, regardless of the symbol system or medium used. The benefits of so –called “attribute of media” (television’s ability Robert “zoom in “ for

example) can easily be replicated in a different way I another

medium, with the same beneficial effects.

Clark dismisses studies that show the media can have an influence on student learning. Firstly, he questions their design: were they comparing apple? Clark maintains that when examining the effects media, only the media can differ. “All other aspects,

including subject matter content and method of instruction must be identical”.

Secondly, Clark believes that teacher’s and student’s efforts play an import role in improved results. Teachers, presented with a novel technology, spend increased time on instructional design and so develop more effective presentations that take less time to complete. In turn, students make greater efforts and spend more time with these novel media. With everyone more interested and working harder, results naturally get better.

Clark concludes that take further media comparison research, noting that the evidence of increased learning is simply not there.

In 1991, Robert Kozma responded to Clark in his article Learning with Media.Kozma believes that Clark’s view of media as “delivery trucks” creates an “unnecessary schism between medium and method.” He proposes an alternate theory of learning; the “learner

strategically manages the available cognitive resources by extracting information from the environment and integrating it with information already stored in memory.”

From Kozma’s perspective, media have an important role in learning. Different technologies can process or operate on the available symbol systems. For example, students can search for information in a different way with a videodisk than they can with broadcast video. Media can provide certain representations or model cognitive operations that are salient to a learning task, often the ones that learners cannot or do not perform for themselves.

Media, than, are an integral part of the instructional design process. Kozma compares text, audio and video media and outlines their strengths and weaknesses as learning tools. Some students will learn a task regardless of the delivery device. For others, though, Kozma believes that a careful use of media will enable learners to take advantage of its strengths to construct knowledge. In contrast to Clark, he calls for continued media comparison studies.

Section D

Perhaps the most quoted and misunderstood body of research on distance education has been the work of Russell, who reviewed 355 studies on distance education produced from 1928 to 1998. Some of

the early studies examined correspondence courses, but most studies compared instruction over videotape, interactive video, or satellite with on-campus, in-person courses. Students were compared on test scores, grades, or performance measures unique to the study, and also on student satisfaction. Consistently, based on statistically test, ”on significant difference ” between the comparison groups was found. However, only 40 of the 355 studies specifically include computer-based instruction, and compilation was completed prior to the blossoming of courses using the Web.

It is important to understand the ramifications of Russell’s work. Despite the technology used, the results are the same: no difference in student achievement. Russull concludes, “There is nothing inherent in the technology that elicits improvements in learning”, although “the process of redesigning a course to adept the content to the technology” can improve the course and improve the outcomes. In other words, learning is not coursed by the technology, but by the instructional method “embedded in the media”. Technology, then, is “merely a means of delivering instruction, ” a delivery truck, so to speak, that does not influence achievement. Russell concludes, “no matter how it is produced, how it is delivered, whether or not it is interactive, low-tech or high-tech, students learn equally well”.

Russell expressed his frustration that, after so many studies, people continue to believe that technology impacts learing.