Facebook and other social media have been hailed as delivering the promise of new, socially engaged educational experiences for students in undergraduate, self-directed, and other educational sectors. A theoretical and historical analysis of these media in the light of earlier media transformations, however, helps to situate and qualify this…

Does the modality of instructional messages affect learning? How does it affect different media? In this paper, I offer an answer to these questions by first proposing a theoretical framework from which effective instructional methods can be derived. Then, I report a set of studies where one method, the modality principle, was tested across…

Arguing that a well designed graphical display can function as a memory store, this article suggests three principles for the design and use of computer graphics: parsimony, accessibility, and reflection. It is suggested that "progressive graphics" are particularly suited to computer implementation. (Author/MBR)

Presents insights gained by studying media use in existing distributed research communities. Describes the "Virtual Mobility and Distributed Laboratories" research project and three naturalistic case studies, highlights the concepts of activity theory and media-richness theory and suggests an integration of the two, and addresses the applicability…

Discusses instructional design and the integration of computer-assisted learning (CAL) into corporate training. Topics include the social context of learning in models of instructional design, and CAL as a substitute for other instructional media, as an enrichment, and as an organizational innovation. (LRW)

This paper examines current practice in the evaluation of learning technology in the UK and proposes a new approach informed by Activity Theory. It is based on our experiences of using Activity Theory to understand students' and lecturers' experiences of technology-based teaching environments. We discuss the activity of evaluating learning…