Multimedia Learning - Going Back To Cali

Richard E Mayer is a ridiculously well-published doyen of mul-ty-mee-ja-lernin'. And his first lecture at UNSW was a damp squib. Apparently pure "discovery learning" or pure exposition are not as good as guiding participants. Anyway, this was a sucker punch coz his second lecture on multimedia instructional design was fantastic. 50 mins of best (& worst) practice for designing courses.

The only grating note at the end was a jibe against social psychologists - and hence social theories of learning (see the note on Wenger below). Coz we don't ever learn in isolation. We learn for a reason. And that reason is often as not linked to the social environment we live in (e.g. the workplace). Any approach to learning that does not acknowledge this will end in gibbering autism.