Lesson 7 - Choosing Media

Many years ago, when I first developed the ACTIONS model, I was approached by a good friend who worked for a large international computer company. (This was so long ago that data were entered to computers using punched cards). We sat down over a cup of coffee, and he outlined his plan. Here’s how the conversation went.

Pierre: Tony. I’m very excited about your model. We could take it and apply it in every school and university in the world.

Tony: Really? Now how would you do that?

Pierre: Well, you have a set of questions that teachers have to ask for each of the criteria. There is probably a limited set of answers to these questions. You could either work out what those answers are or collect answers from a representative sample of teachers. You could then give scores to each technology depending on the answers they give. So when a teacher has to make a choice of technology, they would sit down, answer the questions, then depending on their answers, the computer would calculate the best choice of technology. Voilà!

Tony: I don’t think that’s going to work, Pierre.

Pierre: But why not?

Tony: I’m not sure, but I have a gut feeling about this.

Pierre: A gut feeling? My English is not so good. What do you mean by a gut feeling?

Tony: Pierre, your English is excellent. My response is not entirely logical, so let me try and think it through now, both for you and me, why I don’t think this will work. First, I’m not sure there is a limited number of possible answers to each question, but even if there is, it’s not going to work.

Pierre: Well, why not?

Tony: Because I’m not sure how a teacher would score their response to each question and in any case, there’s going to be interaction between the answers to the questions. It’s not the addition of each answer that will determine what technology they might use, but how those answers combine. From a computing point of view, there could be very many different combinations of answers, and I’m not sure what the significant combinations are likely to be with regard to choosing each technology.

Pierre: But we have very big and fast computers, and we can simplify the process through algorithms.

Tony: Yes, but you have to take into account the context in which teachers will make media selections. They are going to be making decisions about media all the time, in many different contexts. It’s just not practical to sit down at a computer, answer all the questions, then wait for the computer’s recommendation.

Pierre: But won’t you give this a try? We can work through all these problems.

Tony: Pierre, I really appreciate your suggestion, but my gut tells me this won’t work, and I really don’t want to waste your time or mine on this.

Pierre: Well, what are you going to tell teachers then? How will they make their decisions?

Tony: I will tell them to use their gut instinct, Pierre – when they have read and applied the ACTIONS model.

This really is a true story, although the actual words were spoken may have been different. The fact that we do have artificial intelligence these days that technically could do this hasn’t changed my mind, because what we have in this scenario is a conflict between deductive reasoning (Pierre) and inductive reasoning (Tony).

Deductive Reasoning

With deductive reasoning, you would do what Pierre suggests: start without any prior conceptions about which technology to use, answer each of the questions I posed at the end of each part of the SECTIONS model, then write down all the possible technologies that would fit the answers to each question, see what technology would best match each of the questions/criteria, and ‘score’ each technology on a recommended scale for each criterion. You would then try to find a way to add all those answers together, perhaps by using a very large matrix, and then end up with a decision about what technology to use.

A major problem though is that every teacher and every learning context is somewhat different each time a decision needs to be made. Experienced teachers, in particular, will bring a whole lot of knowledge with them  – ideas about effective teaching methods, knowledge of the students, the requirement of the content and the skills they are trying to develop at the moment of decision, and above all the context in which the medium will be used (home, classroom, etc.) – before they have to make a decision.

Inductive Reasoning

My solution is very different from Pierre’s. Mine is a more inductive approach to decision making. The main criterion for inductive logic is as follows:

As evidence accumulates, the degree to which the collection of true evidence statements comes to support a hypothesis, as measured by the logic, should tend to indicate that false hypotheses are probably false and that true hypothesis are probably true.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

In terms of selecting media, you probably start with a number of possible technologies in mind at the beginning of the process (hypotheses – or your gut feeling). My suggested process is started with your gut feeling about which technologies you’re thinking of using, but keeping an open mind, then move through all the questions suggested in each of the SECTIONS criteria (that is, collecting evidence for or against your initial ‘gut feeling’.) You then start building more evidence to support or reject the use of a particular medium or technology. By the end of the process you have a ‘probabilistic’ view of what combinations of media will work best for you and why. This is not an exercise you would have to do in detail or even consciously every time. Once you have done it just a few times, the choice of medium or technology in each ‘new’ situation will be quicker and easier, because the brain stores all the previous information and you have a framework (the SECTIONS model) for organising new information as it arrives and integrating it with your previous knowledge.

Rapid Decision Making

Now you’ve read this lesson you already have a set of questions for consideration (I have listed them all together in Appendix 1 for easy reference). You are now in the same position as the king who asked the alchemist how to make gold. ‘It’s easy’, said the alchemist, ‘so long as you don’t think about elephants.’ Well, having read the lessons on media in full, you now have the elephants in your head. It will be difficult to ignore them. The brain is in fact a wonderful instrument for making intuitive or inductive decisions of this kind. The trick though is to have all this information somewhere in your head, so you can pull it all out when you need it. The brain does this very quickly. Your decisions won’t always be perfect, but they will be a lot better than if you hadn’t already thought about all these issues, and in life, rough but ready usually beats perfect but late.