Clark and Kozma Debate is it Still Relevant

Summary
Facebook has more than 800 million active users, the world sends 400 million tweets per day, and users watch over 4 billion hours of video each month on YouTube. This is today’s media, and this has a massive impact on how we receive and share information. The new media rich world also has had a huge impact on an old educational debate.

When re-examining the Clark and Kozma debate, I focused on today’s current digital native students and the explosion of interactive media. Rob Mancabelli (2011) refers to these new developments as the game changers for education. He boils this down, “Here are the two game-changing conditions that make that statement hard to deny: if we have access to the Internet, (1) we now have two billion potential teachers, and soon, (2) the sum of human knowledge will be at our fingertips.” Does these game changers have an impact on the Clark and Kozma’s debate? To answer this I reviewed the debate, focused on 21st century learning, reviewed online content, and explored interactive media.  The out-coming question was “Is this debate even relevant anymore?”

History of the Debate
The debate seems to be more about technology and its ability to help our students learn better. Clark and Kozma’s great debate focusses on whether technology or media affect the learning process or is media just the vehicle for instruction. In 1999, Dr. Constance Mellon, a professor at East Carolina University, wrote “… teachers are more important than even the most sophisticated tools.” Dr. Mellon’s statement fuels this debate even more. Richard Clark’s article was published in 1983, down played the role of media to a mere delivery mechanism. After ten years, Robert Kozma wrote a rebuttal to Clark’s agreement. Thus began the debate of media versus method (Mellon, 1999).

Clark’s Point-of-view

The basic idea of Clark’s argument is that teaching methods have the most influence on learning. Media is merely a delivery device and has no significant difference in the learning outcome. Clark based his theory on research and data collected throughout many different research projects. He analyzed research that started in the 1960s and was tracked all the way up to the 1980s, but the data did not indicate how different teachers instructed. Therefore, he felt the information could not be used as significant evidence to show how media influenced the student’s learning objectives. Clark also mentioned that authentic problems or tasks seem to be the most effective influence to learning. Since he believed that media had no learning benefits, he stressed that a moratorium on further research dealing with media’s influence on learning was necessary (Clark, 1983).

Kozma’s Opposition to Clark

The key differences between what Kozma’s believes and what Clark believes is that media could  and should be used more than a vehicle for delivery. Kozma’s article showed how using the correct medium could have an impact on the student’s cognitive skills. He viewed both the medium and method to have a crucial role in the design of instruction. Kozma (1991) defines media as follows: “Media can be defined by its technology, symbol systems, and processing capabilities.” Throughout his article, he discussed how books, television, and computers influenced the process of learning, connected learners to their prior knowledge, and helped learners to understand complex concepts. He also speculated about how integrated multimedia environments can bring all these processes together (Kozma, 1991).

Digital Learners
Today’s high school students are best described as Marc Prensky (2001) coined them as being “Digital Natives.” They are digital learners who quickly use the Internet when searching for answers before asking peers, parents, or instructors. They do not know of a time or a place where there was no such thing as the World Wide Web or a personal computer. These learners surround themselves with computers, cell phones, digital games,  and other social media. They spend hours of their time searching the Internet, texting, and interacting digitally. Asking them to become unplugged is like asking them to harm themselves physically.  So how does all this play-out in the factor of media versus method? Today’s learner are surrounded by media every minute of every day. They record their lives either by YouTube videos, tweets, Instagrams, or other forms of social media. Digital learners use the World Wide Web, not just as entertainment, but also as an educational resource. Today’s students easily find the YouTube video to show them how to do something before they even crack open a book to look for answers. These resources weren’t even possible 30 years ago when Clark’s article was originally published.

The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) has embraced this shift to digital learners by changing their definition of literacy. NCTE developed six contexts critical to today’s literate readers: 1. developing proficiency with the tools of technology, 2. building relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally, 3. designing and sharing information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes, 4. managing, analyzing, and synthesizing multiple streams of simultaneous information, 5. creating, critiquing, analyzing, and evaluating multimedia texts, and 6. attending to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments (Richardson and Macabebelli, 2011). Students technology literacy has become as important as the ability to read, to evaluate, and to write.

21st Century Media and Education
One of the over used terms in education today is ‘21st century learning.’ The truth is that technology’s role in education has changed. To become more connected to your students, educators have become plugin to high tech tools. The roles of the teacher and students has changed. New pedagogy has been explored, and our digital learners have changed the way teachers deliver content (Prensky, 2008).
The 21st Century has also changed the learner. Richardson and Mancabelli based a book on the idea that these learners develop “learning networks” to teach them the skills or knowledge they need. Using social media and our interactive tools, today’s learners search not only content, but the instructors to teach it. Some of these instructors post blogs, create videos, some are professional, but most are not (Richardson and Macabebelli, 2011).

One learning experience using interactive media is the new Gallery One at the Cleveland Art Museum. This learning experience is unlike any other museum experience in the world. Art museums are designed typically as a quiet meditative environments where you can see but you do not touch. Cleveland just changed that experience with a new high-tech and highly interactive environment.

The digital learner experiences artwork in three different high-tech environments. The first is an app that can be downloaded to your iPad. The ARTlens app is a guided tour of the museum. One of the apps functions is to hold your iPad up to a piece of artwork, it recognizes the artwork, and then supplies the viewer with video and a written description of how it was made, history of the art, and other useful information.

The second feature are kiosks that are in different areas of Gallery One. These kiosk machines allow people to use the touch-screens to gather information, play games, and interact with concepts that deal with the artwork displayed. These touch-screens offer a unique experience linking different types of artwork together in ways that you would never have discovered before.

The last feature is a gigantic 40 foot touch screen which allows 16 different users to search the whole collection at once. It is like a gigantic iPad, so that you can expand the view of a piece of artwork, learn more about it, and find out where it is located in the museum. This systems actually transferred the image to your iPad itself. Transferring to the iPad allows the digital learner to take this to experience and revisit it again using the device at home.

Video by Cleveland Art Museum

This example shows the best of how media and technology can change your experience and heighten the learning possibilities for the digital learner.

Web Content
The Pew Internet & American Life survey recently released results that indicated that 84% of teachers believed that using technology and online content in the classroom leveled the playing field of their students across the social economical spectrum (Bock, 2013). To understand the impact of web content, I reviewed four sites that contained strong media influence  and that were designed for educational purposes. These sites offer quality media that are interactive. They also are designed to guide the student or learner in a direction that completes the learning objective. I rank the sites in four areas: media content, varied grade levels, instructors presence, and educational standards based. I rank them used a rubric.

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http://www.pbslearningmedia.org/
PBS has been a long standing source of how to use media effectively for learning. This site uses of 30,000 of these resources in a useable search platform.
Media Content: 4
Varied Grade levels: 5
Instructors Presence: 4
Educational Standards: 5

http://explorerschools.nasa.gov/web/nes/home
This site is a virtual classroom for teacher to design lessons and projects using the media resources of NASA.
Media Content: 5
Varied Grade levels: 4
Instructors Presence: 5
Educational Standards: 3

http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/educators.aspx
ArtsEdge is  media rich site offers learning environments for both educators and students. This site uses the arts to teach across curriculum.
Media Content: 5
Varied Grade levels: 5
Instructors Presence: 5
Educational Standards: 5

http://www.rockhall.com
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame site is abundance with educational information. The site has resource for educators but does not have searchable standard base content or grade levels.
Media Content: 3
Varied Grade levels: 3
Instructors Presence: 5
Educational Standards: 3

After reviewing these four robust media sites, the findings show that the instructor’s presence was still necessary. These sites where preselected because of their media content, and educational purpose, but the sites were not preselected based on the educator’s role. The access of the information need these sites would have been impossible during the time of Clark’s article. The web content is also well instructionally designed. These sites are media rich but have a purpose, and are a blend of both sides of the media vs. method debate.

Conclusion
30 years after Clark’s article, media has evolved into an informational multimedia hub. This hub can be accessed anytime anywhere. Today technology and media is a huge part of the educational framework. In the last decades, we have see the addition of classrooms that have 1:1 devices, BYOD policies, and smartphones as classroom tools not as distractions. These events have changed this debate.

The expanse of media content, the creation of the digital learner, and the re-definition of literacy have created the revolution in education. This revolution has developed a student center environment that embraces media and technology. This new world has developed new challenges and obstacles for learning and education. The role of the teacher has changed but is more important then ever as a designer and facilitator of learning. These influences have also changed this debate.

Clark and Kozma’s great debate is finished and the winners are everyone. Design is the key influence to the learner. Both medium and method are important elements in the design. To reach today’s learner,  we must include technology or the learner will seek it out alone. The Internet has billions of teachers and content is growing substantially. Thus even if you agree with Clark’s point-of-view, our learners will still find that media any way they can find it. Ergo educators need to embrace this fact because it is not going away. The next great debate will be not if media affects learning but does technology affect teaching. What will be the strategies used to effectively use media and technology for learning?

Resources
Clark, R. E. (1983). Reconsidering Research on Learning from Media. Review of Educational Research, 53(4), 445.

Kozma, R. B. (1991). Learning with media. Review of Educational Research Review of Educational Research J1 – Review of Educational Research, 61(2), 179.

Kozma, R. B. (1994). Will Media Influence Learning? Reframing the Debate. Educational Technology, Research and Development, 42(2), 7.

Clark, R. E. (1994). Media Will Never Influence Learning. Educational Technology, Research and Development, 42(2), 21.

Chapter 32 in Reiser & Dempsey BOOK: “Using Rich Media Wisely” by Clark & Mayer

Dwyer, F. (2010). Edgar Dale’s Cone of Experience: A Quasi-Experimental Analysis. International Journal Of Instructional Media, 37(4), 431-437.

Mellon, C. A. (1999). Technology and the great pendulum of education. Journal Of Research On Computing In Education, 32(1), 28.

British Journal of Educational Technology. Nov2012, Vol. 43 Issue 6, p847-858. 12p. 2 Color Photographs, 1 Chart, 3 Graphs.

Moreno, R. (2006). Learning in High-Tech and Multimedia Environments. Current Directions In Psychological Science (Wiley-Blackwell), 15(2), 63-67. doi:10.1111/j.0963-7214.2006.00408.x

Wanago, N. (2013). EFFECTIVE Web 2.0 Tools FOR YOUR CLASSROOM. Techniques: Connecting Education & Careers, 88(1), 18-21.

Richardson, Will; Mancabelli, Rob (2011). Personal Learning Networks: Using the Power of Connections to Transform Education. Ingram Distribution. Kindle Edition.

Bock, M. (2013). Pew Survey Gauges Teachers’ Attitudes About Tech., Equity. Education Week, 32(23), 14.