Good educational Video

This is an interesting and educational video on the four tones in Mandarin Chinese. The length of the video is about 3 and a half minutes. It starts with a quick introduction, explanations of the four tones and sums up with a review.

This video follows some basic principles of
multimedia learning environments so  that people can learn better:

1. Multimedia principle: The video uses both words (mostly spoken, and text) and pictures (graphs).
2. Split-Attention principle: The graphics of each tone marks are physically  and temporally integrated. When the teacher talks about another tone mark, the previous one disappeared.
3. Modality principle: The narration was accompanied with proper graphics and animations that help people to understand the concept better. 
4. Corresponding words (text in the lower left-hand corner) and pictures are presented near   rather than far from each other on the screen  and also in time with audio.  

Good vs. Bad Visualizations

The good example of visualizations is The Huffington Post. Most stories are accompanied by pictures. The pictures they chosen usually tell a lot of the stories already. It’s very easy to navigate and these pictures with titles tell the story clearly.  This is a good example of the dual coding theory where information is presented through both an imagery/nonverbal system and a verbal system. Including graphics in text may support better retention of the information. They also have a “Quick read” option, which present the first few sentences of the story and readers can click on “Read the whole story” options if they wish to continue. I feel it’s very easy and less time-consuming to scan through the website to know what’s going on.

On the other hand, The New York Times’s website is very heavy on text even though it’s a good read. It takes longer to navigate and to scan through in order to know what’s going on of the day. Even though the website has few pictures, it’s more like icons. Frankly, they are quite small and I am not quite sure what are the messages they are trying to convey. Moreover, the fonts and colors of the texts are not very clearly distinguished. I think this website takes more working memories and cognitive loads for readers.

Simple table of contents, glossary, and appendix

I started to learn English as a second language when I was 8 years old. Then I started to learn Japanese when I was in middle school. Back in time, there were not many hypertexts or hypermedia available. All we had were traditional textbooks. I still remember the English textbooks we used were called “Let’s go!” I still have a clear image of the level one textbook cover, which has a red background, bolded title “LET’S GO!” and happy-looking children on it. My Japanese textbook cover was with large Japanese characters (Genki) outlined in green on a white background.

Then I remember the table of contents, glossary, and appendix in those textbooks. If I needed to look for grammatical explanations on past tense, I go to the chapter where we learned about “My weekend with my family.” I knew on that particular page, there were a timeline and a box explaining the concept of past tense. However, I just don’t remember the page number. Thus, I went to the table of contents to look for the page number.  Moreover, I would use the glossary to look up information quickly. I would also use appendix for a quick reference.

I found having a table of contents at the front, a glossary and an appendix at the end goes hand in hand. In between are knowledge and information. It is simple.

I would imagine that a table of contents is a navigation bar on the left, which contents hyperlinks to specific chapters. It hides while users read, and appeals when mouse slides through it. A glossary can be embedded throughout the text. For example, users can place their mouse on phrases and definitions will pop up in small windows. These windows will fade out as their mouse move away from phrases.