The Power of Digital Media
Although digital media also represent information through text, sound, and images, the similarities to traditional media end there. By virtue of one essential feature— flexibility—digital media surpass traditional media in their ability to meet diverse students' varied needs in a variety of instructional contexts. This flexibility is inherent in the way digital content is stored and transmitted.
Over the last six thousand years, we humans have invented a wonderful array of storage mechanisms for our communications, ranging from stone to parchment to vinyl. Most of these techniques are an application of the same basic concept: Information is stored by taking a direct or encoded representation (a letter, an image, a sound) and physically embedding it in a medium (paper or vinyl), where it becomes permanent.
In digital media, content is stored in an entirely different manner. Rather than being embedded in a physical medium, the information is transformed into something abstract ( bytes: ones and zeroes), which can then be presented in almost any medium and quickly transferred from one medium to another.
Consider the familiar image of DaVinci’s Mona Lisa (see Figure 3.3). A conventional print reproduction stores the masterpiece (paint permanently embedded in canvas) in a similarly fixed format: as ink permanently set on paper. A digital reproduction stores Mona Lisa as a set of numbers in a computer. When these numbers are "read," the image is re-created on the computer screen. But unlike the paint-on-canvas version or the ink-on-paper version, this image of the Mona Lisa is not permanently fixed in this one format and location. On the contrary, you could display the same content on your 14-inch computer monitor, a 40-foot video screen in Times Square, a Web page in Singapore, or a Palm Pilot.
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- Figure 3.3 -
A Digitally Manipulated Mona Lisa
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| Image created by Martin Kausal. Reproduced with permission of the artist. |
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Moreover, the digital Mona Lisa is malleable: The whole image can be made darker or lighter, the greens subdued, or the edges sharpened. Parts of the image can be transposed or deleted, duplicated and recombined (as was the case with the image in Figure 3.3.) What once was permanent can be altered, removed at will, or restored—multiple times.
Digital media offer a remarkable, almost paradoxical, set of features. They can save text, speech, and images reliably and precisely over time, and yet they offer tremendous flexibility in how and where those text, speech, and images can be redisplayed. The same content that is irrevocably fixed in a traditional medium can be flexibly accessed in a digital medium and changed or adapted. This is very useful to a teacher with a diverse classroom. Four aspects of digital media's flexibility are particularly beneficial for classroom application: versatility, transformability, the ability to be marked, and the ability to be networked. Let's examine each in turn.
Digital Media Are Versatile
Unlike a printed book, which can present only text and images, digital media can display content in many formats—text, still image, sound, moving image, combinations of text on video, sound in text, video in text, and more. Compared to print—and indeed, to any traditional medium—this versatility is astonishing. What's most exciting is that it offers users the chance to work in a preferred medium or interact with multiple media simultaneously. In a digitally equipped class studying Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech, for example, a student with reading problems, a student with a preference for visual material, and a student who loves to read could access the material as speech, video, and text, respectively. Or they could access it as video and text or text and speech.
Digital Media Are Transformable
Because the display instructions are separable from the content itself, digital media allow the same content to be displayed in multiple ways. Web pages are a familiar example. Various users accessing the same Web page can alter how the site's content is presented; they can change the appearance of text or images, adjust sound volume, turn off graphics, and so forth simply by selecting a different browser, changing browser settings, or using a different computer. We call these kinds of adjustments "within- media transformations," because they adjust the way something is presented without changing it to another medium. That is, a loud or a soft sound is still a sound; large or small text is still text.
With digital media, "cross-media transformations"—transformations from one medium to another—are also possible. Speech recognition software, which automatically translates spoken language into text, is one example. Text-to-speech software, which transforms text into speech, is another. These tools can now be embedded into Web browsers and other software programs via translation algorithms so that the transformation from one medium to another can take place automatically and just in time—right when users want to access the material.
The capacity to transform digital content, both within and across media, is a powerful asset. Using within-media transformations, students who have trouble seeing small text can increase its size; those who have trouble understanding speech can slow the speech down or increase its volume. Using cross- media transformations, a teacher can set up a computer to read words aloud on demand for a student with dyslexia. These are just a few examples of the almost endless possibilities for application.
Digital Media Can Be Marked
Hypertext markup language (HTML) is a code for constructing Web pages. HTML allows a Web page designer to "mark up" text, tagging different structural components such as the title, subheadings, or main body. Newer markup languages, like XML, provide an increasing variety of "tags" and even give designers the ability to invent their own tags. Once content is marked, a Web page designer can direct the display of the different components (put all text marked as headers in a 12-point Helvetica font, for example).
The advantage of these marking tools is that they allow teachers and students (with only a small amount of training) to flexibly alter content to accommodate needs or preferences. If you wanted to use a particular text to teach your students about literary devices, you could mark all the sentences containing similes and set them to be displayed in boldface type. A Latin teacher could mark the text to italicize all words that have Latin roots. Students trying to understand a detailed piece of text could mark it to underline all the summary sentences as a way to keep track of the most important information.
What differentiates the marking ability available with digital media from that used with traditional media (a textbook and a highlighter pen, for example) is that with digital media, markups can be shown or hidden, amended, expanded, or deleted. The same store of information can be marked in different ways for different students. It can also be unmarked and re-marked to suit the evolving needs of any particular student.
The fourth great advantage of digital media is that it's possible to link one piece of digitally stored content to another. This "networkability" allows digital media to incorporate embedded hyperlinks to all kinds of learning supports-from direct access to dictionaries and thesauruses, to prompts that can support reading comprehension, to supplementary content that builds background knowledge, to electronic notepads or visual organizers. Networkability makes possible rapid navigation between a word and its definition, an image and its description, a video and it caption, or a text passage from Robert McCloskey's Make Way for Ducklings and an audio file of real ducks quacking. All these things are possible with multimedia packages and a local network of rich digital resources. And if the network includes the World Wide Web, educators and learners gain access to all this and more-widely varying and continually updated materials, not to mention the perspectives and contributions of diverse experts, mentors, and peers from all over the world.
The Web is itself an excellent illustration of the four flexible characteristics of digital media. Its strengths parallel those of neural networks. Like neural networks, Web information is distributed across many different locations and interconnected via a dense collection of links. From any networked computer, there is near-immediate access to information elsewhere in the network. Even with billions of Web sites, the Web is far less complex and infinitely less intelligent than a human brain. Nevertheless, compared to traditional media, it has capabilities that are a much better match for the potential and diversity of the human learner.
