Haiku Deck

Haiku Project

This week I was asked to do something that is completely contrary to my natural state as an instructor, minimize my use of words within a presentation. Inherently, my natural instinct is to fill the slide with text, but being introduced to the modality principle and cognitive theory of multimedia learning convinced me to drop my defenses and give the idea of “less is more” a try.

Click here to have a view of my Haiku presentation. This program is user friendly and is designed with the minimalist of message in mind.

The Modality principle describes the notion of utilizing audio narration with graphics as opposed to using just text and images alone. The point of this recommendation is to minimize the overload that learners experience by trying to process words and graphics at the same time. Within our reading we are told of two processes of assimilating information, one being visual/pictorial processing and the other being audio/verbal processing, which if attempted to utilize both at the same time may create a cognitive overload that produces a decrease in the learners’ overall ability to retain information. This is an interesting lesson in changing ones approach from thinking that an educator’s point of instruction is to just provide information and it’s the job of the students to learn it, the filling of a empty vessel type of mantra versus the more viable approach of not over-taxing the learner through separate channels of processing and improve the chances of quality knowledge retention.