Rich Mayer is clearly missing a chapter in his book, the Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning. It should be titled “All the Ways that Common Sense Will Lead You Astray,” and would be a practitioner-oriented version of Chapter six on “Ten Common but Questionable Principles.” What follows is a brief outline for the missing chapter, which should give Dr. Mayer plenty of time to write before the third edition comes out.
 
Common Sense Says: Repetition is Useful!
 As most teachers of fifteen-year-olds can attest, if you don’t say it at least five times, consider it forgotten. Given the number of times I have to go over the same things with students in live presentations (directions, expectations, etc), it seems fitting for a multimedia presentation that in order to help make the content really “sink in” I would repeat it a handful of times in slightly different ways. I could give verbal directions with scrolling text, then elaborate on the expectations just to reinforce the ideas. Based on my classroom teaching experience, common sense would seem to suggest that repetition of content is useful. False. According to the Redundancy Principle in Multimedia Learning, “redundant information interferes with... learning” because when the “same information is presented concurrently in multiple forms” or with excessive elaboration, the redundancy of the message may interfere with learning. The safer bet is to “eliminate redundant material” from a presentation.
 
Common Sense Says: More Ways is Better! 
 The second way in which common sense will lead you astray is by making you think that “more ways” is better. I’ve always thought that in order to teach the diverse population of learners in my class, I should reach out to all of them by crafting lessons that are inclusive of all of the different learning needs in my class. If everybody has an entry point to the lesson, it’s a good day! Although effective differentiation is still often seen as the high-water mark among educators for a productive lesson, some ways of scaffolding are apparently much more effective than others. Pulling learners in simultaneously through audio, images, media will likely just trigger the redundancy principle. Let’s focus instead on principles for reducing extraneous processing. The brain learns best when all the extraneous words, pictures, and sounds are ruthlessly pruned away. Instead of offering the same (redundant) message in many different forms, a clever curriculum designer would focus instead on principles like cueing, signaling, and spatial / temporal contiguity to help reinforce the assignment. The need to focus a message also made me think about this week's emphasis on voice editing and maximizing the one really great tool we have (the human voice!) by cutting out all the clutter of images, video, and other visuals. When we narrow in on just listening actively, the message becomes so much more clear.
 
Common Sense Says: Pretty and Interesting is Better Than Plain and Boring! 
​ Let’s not even talk about the presentations I made in my first few years of teaching. I made some really pretty PowerPoints, complete with cool transitions, words that flew in from outer space, images that spun in circles, and of course, me reading all the words on the slide. I poured my attention into making sure my presentations were pretty and aesthetically pleasing. But, according to the coherence principle, I should instead have “eliminate[d] words, pictures, and sounds that are not relevant to the instructional goal.” Less really is more.
 
​For more on my understanding of this week’s principles, check out the video I created for teachers new to creating effective multimedia presentations.

I think it is safe to say that I am in “that” part of my doctoral studies -- three years in, past the point of no return, and exhausted -- and I can’t help but think that where I would like to be in five years is on a beach somewhere with a drink in my hand. But self-indulgent thinking aside, I do have a professional endgame in mind, which I will gladly share.
 
I love being a classroom teacher, and five years from now, I still plan on being one. When I started grad school, a number of my colleagues asked me if I really wanted to be out of the classroom… so soon. I was 28 when I started at USF, and thirty-something seemed awfully young to “retire” from teaching. Honestly, I was a bit frustrated hearing, person after person, that a doctorate would make me over-qualified to be a classroom teacher. (There’s such a larger conversation to be had about teacher preparation and standards for teaching and public perception of the qualifications required to teach, but I’ll leave that for another day.) So much has changed since I was last in graduate school. LCD projectors have replaced overheads, student laptops and tablets have dated the single computer lab, and tools for online communication and collaboration have liberated teachers from lesson planning for students working together in a face-to-face only environment. When the whole world of the classroom looks and feels differently than it did in 2008 when I last graduated, it would seem that it makes sense to re-consider what teaching and learning can -- and should -- look like. I’m back at USF in large part to undertake that process of investigation, to reconsider my own pedagogy and help push along others in the field toward more relevant curriculum design. If that’s part of my aim, then the classroom is the exact place I should be in five years. Plus, it’s where my professional heart is. I just can’t get enough of those teenage rapscallions.
 
And, although I struggle to imagine working entirely outside of the classroom, I also struggle to imagine my professional life existing solely within the four walls of the classroom. For the past few years, some other intellectual need has been drawing me out. Early on in my teaching career, I was introduced to the moniker “reflective practitioner,” and since then, I have aspired to become one, and a good one at that. I know I want to have one foot in the classroom, in practice; but, I also know that I would like one foot in spaces of reflection and research where I can refine my own teaching and promote best practices in our profession, especially around multimedia design and learning. So far, that has taken the form of writing for a practitioner audience around technology integration in the curriculum, and supporting teachers at my own school and others who are making the transition into 1:1 teaching and learning. I anticipate in the not-too-distant future that the “reflective” part of reflective practitioner will also include teaching about digital pedagogy and multimedia design at the graduate level and writing for other researchers as well as for teachers.
​ 
And don’t tell my husband, but I already have an idea brewing for the next book...

This summer, I spent some, shall we say, quality time with what I've come to affectionately call the Mayer Bible (aka: the 900+ page tome by Rich Mayer called the Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning), mostly in anticipation of a doctoral course I'm currently taking on multimedia instructional design, but also to better understand a medium I use often to communicate with my high school students. I do a great deal of multimedia work with my students, especially as a means of supplementing their reading instruction. Sometimes, my support of students comes in the form of a video think-aloud; other times it is a podcast with an accompanying PDF; and others still it is an excerpt of a novel with its corresponding selection from an audiobook. In delving into the Mayber Bible, I started to rethink my reading instruction practices, wondering if my methods were ineffective (Well, that’s not totally true. I started to rethink absolutely everything I have ever done that relies on multimedia instruction...and judged myself).

Multimedia Take-Aways (so far):
​ A few things stood out to me as worthy take-aways for future instructional design: First, that students -- all students, not just “visual learners” -- learn best through a combination of words and pictures rather than words alone. Second, that the information we give students needs to be integratedso that words and images show up as close to simultaneously as possible. Third, if we want to expand the (fixed) capacity of the working memory, we need to carefully present our information in two modes: visual and auditory, but must be careful not to give redundant information, or overload one channel in our dual-channel sensory memory.

Multimedia Applied to Reading Pedagogy
 So, where does that leave me? Honestly, a bit confused. As you can probably tell by now, I’m seriously focused on (writing my dissertation on) multimedia worked examples and their efficacy as a teaching tool for supporting differentiated reading instruction. So, what happens when I’m reading a passage aloud while students follow along in their books? Or, what happens when a struggling student plays a chunk of an audiobook while reading along in his copy? In each of these cases, the working memory has to simultaneously process and integrate disparate sources of information (two different forms of words). So, wouldn’t that be a breach of the split-attention principle? A violation of the multimedia principle? Does this principle apply equally to students with low and high prior knowledge? How do I reconcile the theories with the practice, as anecdotally, the lessons above seem to work well for many (the majority) of my students. Is it because they are all novices, and the expertise reversal effect hasn’t taken hold yet? What is the right course of action to take in this scenario, and why?

Good Teaching
 Questions aside, perhaps what I appreciate most about the context for the Mayer Bible (presented in the opening chapters, most especially in Chapter 6) is the value placed on “Good Teaching.” The authors remind teachers that the effect of teaching with technology is about the teaching, not the technology. Technology might equip a teacher to do things she couldn't do before, but the reason it works isn't because it's on a screen, but rather, because it is well designed. Mayer calls on us to focus on crafting quality learning experiences for students. I love that message.