The Human Factor in Multimedia

With the help of multimedia, learning is like playing – all fun and leisure. This is what publishers promise selling their edutainment products. "Edutainment", the combination of education and entertainment, 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 learn 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). All of these breath-taking wonders are based on the general assumption that the more stimulation and the more media is involved, the easier it is to learn. There is hardly a multimedia book or oral presentation that does not refer to charts or other visual aids, because "hearing & seeing " results in better retention rates as compared to "hearing alone". This theory assumes that there is a simple addition of effects of media upon learning (Hasebrook, 1995a). But it is easy to realize that this cannot be the only truth. Consider, for example, a student who swears that he would study Latin best, when listening to the radio, watching TV, and reading a Latin dictionary. Certainly you won't believe him – so why believe the multimedia industry that any combinations o