[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Interactive Multimedia
Twice a day, 180 days a year, millions of American young people get on a bus and travel between home and school. Each day, the bus travels the same labyrinthine route through neighborhood after neighborhood. Yet, if you asked students to retrace that route on their own, they might not be able to do it. They were just along for the ride. The process of learning is more than a passage through new territories. Engagement is crucial. Without true interaction, without a sense of "self propulsion," learning cannot occur. But give students a map and the power to make decisions and follow their imaginations and their natural curiosity will have them circling the globe.
Self-propulsion is a core empowerment of interactive multimedia. It taps into our basic need for self-determination, making us active participants in life, explorers and not idle passengers. Self-directed learning embraces all further powers of the individual: from self-discovery to self-confidence, initiative, inspiration, and leadership. Based on self-directed learning, interactive multimedia reshapes the very structure of our access to knowledge. In traditional presentations, from textbooks to lectures to audio tapes to films, knowledge is imparted linearly. Students are instructed to read from page "X" to page "Y," or to sit in room lecture hall "Z" for 50 minutes a day all to "absorb" linear information. (Piet A. M. Kommers, Scott Grabinger, Joanna C. Dunlap, 1996)
But the human mind isn't a tape recorder. Even the youngest child possesses a highly intricate "database web," in which each piece of knowledge is related to the next in a fabulous matrix of experience. Students can't simply absorb knowledge. They assimilate by relating each piece of new information to their own very personal structure of thought. Without agency, without self-direction and the power to form each new connection themselves, knowledge passes through their minds like sand through a child's fingers...............
