Learning with multimedia and hypermedia: Promises and pitfalls

Learning with multimedia Multimedia and hypermedia seems to be the learner's paradise: Important facts and complicated structures are understood at a glance. And everything can remembered easily with the help of sounds, animation, and videos. Visual knowledge maps and new forms of navigating the multimedia knowledge space allows incidentally learning about medieval lyrics, the principles of evolution, and the theory of relativity. Not to mention the cyberspace: You can visit archeological places, museums, opera houses, and the human metabolism without leaving your living room (e.g. Jonassen, Beissner & Yacci, 1993; Unsworth, 1996). Multimedia has been defined in various ways. First, a technical definition: Multimedia is a combination of static and dynamic media in one interactive computer application. Looking at it from a more psychological point of view, multimedia could also be defined as a combination of information presented to different senses (like seeing, hearing, touching) that can be actively influenced by the user (Kozma, 1994). Despite the differences in the definition of the term "multimedia", most researchers would agree that it has had an enormous impact on various aspects of education