Browse Books

Reviewer: James L. Rogers

In their introduction, the authors describe this book and its accompanying CD-ROM as “a small museum with a few chosen examples that can build a framework for designing and thinking critically about multimedia environments for children.” They list three goals for the book: to survey “past, present, and future trends in multimedia for children”; to “compare the process, results, and impact of different multimedia approaches”; and to provide “a framework to develop your own approaches to multimedia.” The book's two best features are the authors' advice for multimedia design teams and the examples of multimedia products included on the CD-ROM. Of the many recommendations the authors offer to those embarking on the development of multimedia materials for children, two stand out as particularly prudent and valuable. First, they advocate involving children throughout the design process. This is simply an application of Deming's admonition that the most important member of a product design team is the end user. Also, they state that development teams must include people who bring many different skills to the process. In these terms, multimedia development is just a special case of what people in industry and publishing have been doing ever since illustrations were incorporated into printed instructional materials. The CD-ROM provides a wonderful opportunity to sample short segments of a number of products discussed in the book. The examples of full-color and sound movies and animation are particularly helpful and interesting. However, the material from some of the chapters in the book consists of nothing more than color stills of the black-and-white illustrations encountered in the text, hardly worth the time it takes to access them. As for accessing material on the CD-ROM, there are some bugs. For example, four hot spots for the material in chapter 2 are supposed to access segments from Living Books, First Encyclopedia, The Way Things Work, and Carmen Sandiego. Clicking on First Encyclopedia takes you, instead, back to page 3 of Living Books. Clicking on The Way Things Work brings up First Encyclopedia, and clicking on Carmen Sandiego displays The Way Things Work. You never do access Carmen Sandiego. The only hot spot that works the way it should is the one leading to Living Books. It would have been helpful if, somewhere in the book, there were indications of what can be found on the CD-ROM, but the CD-ROM is only mentioned in the introduction and in the QuickTime software license on the last three pages. This lack of connection between the software descriptions in the book and the CD-ROM samples is a major omission, placing the burden of integrating the two components on the reader. Parts of this book demand rejoinders involving matters both of fact and interpretation. For example, the book states that “while videodiscs are similar to CD-ROMs, what differs is how information is stored on each. With CD-ROMs, the video information is translated into a digital format, unlike videodiscs in which the video remains in an analogue form” (p. 98). This statement is simply false, and, although it has no particular bearing on the subsequent discussion, it diminishes the authors' credibility. A more serious matter is the discussion of different approaches to learning and teaching: “[Skinner's] development of teaching machines and programmed instruction [my italics] was also well-known and imitated in labs as well as textbooks. Negative reinforcement was becoming a teaching strategy as well as a psychological tool” (p. 34). This offhand, unsupported assertion brings into question the authors' understanding of these matters. I know of no programmed instruction produced by Skinner or his followers—in or out of a teaching machine—that employed negative reinforcement as a teaching strategy. On the contrary, Skinner was one of the first to identify the damaging effects—on both the student and the would-be teacher—of using negative reinforcement in instruction. He consistently advocated the sole use of positive reinforcement because in the long run, it is more effective than negative reinforcement, and because it does not generate the harmful side-effects that accompany negative reinforcement. A lapse that reverberates throughout the rest of the book is the authors' categorization of different learning approaches, grouped by them as “constructionism/Piagetian learning, constructivism/discovery learning, and behaviorism/rote learning” (p. 8). Whether one is discussing theory or practice, lumping behaviorism and rote learning together is not defensible. While this review is not the place to untangle these issues, confusing behaviorism and rote learning, and describing the work of Skinner and Suppes as the authors do, only detracts from an otherwise useful and interesting book.