Lesson 7 - Choosing Media

The key takeaways from this lesson are:

• Technologies are merely tools that can be used in a variety of ways. What matters more is how technologies are applied. The same technology can be applied in different ways, even or especially in education. So in judging the value of a technology, we need to look more closely at the ways in which it is being or could be used. In essence this means focusing more on media – which represent the more holistic use of technologies – than on individual tools or technologies themselves, while still recognising that technology is an essential component of almost all media.

• There is a very wide range of media available for teaching and learning. In particular: text, audio, video, computing and social media all have unique characteristics that make them useful for teaching and learning.

• The choice or combination of media will need to be determined by:

• The overall teaching philosophy behind the teaching;
• The presentational and structural requirements of the subject matter or content;
• The skills that need to be developed in learners; and
• The imagination of the teacher or instructor (and increasingly learners themselves) in identifying possible roles for different media.
• Content is now increasingly open and freely available over the Internet; as a result learners can seek, use and apply information beyond the bounds of what a professor or teacher may dictate.
• The SECTIONS model provides a set of criteria or questions, the result of which can help inform an instructor when making decisions about which media or technologies to use.