Pixeled Multimedia Teachers Association

glad to join the discussion, but wondering whether I'm eligible to comment since it's only 1.55 in the afternoon and the other posts have been late at night, 4:38 am even. who sits at their computer at that time? oh, downloading from kazaa, i see!

anyway, more seriously, i was taken by susan's comment in the post about "workshops", in the second paragraph -

"What we should be doing for high school students is giving them lots of practical work to do so that they can go and experiment with filmaking or multimedia and then make a decision whether they wish to pursue more theoretical based studies at a later date."

i couldn't agree more - here at Fitzroy the year 8 students are playing with lots of high-end programs, eg photoshop, dreamweaver and flash, making movies, making websites with flash etc etc, learning little bits of actionscript and some html, and a tiny bit of theory about web architecture and networks. they love what they do and many of them are producing excellent "work" which is satisfying largely because it's self generated.

it's also (on the other side of the ledger) a bit hard to assess rigorously, and leads to very messy timetabling issues. we have to be more flexible, which is not always easy.

at some point students need to come to grips with more theory, but i'd suggest that multimedia learning is not essentially different from most areas of learning. humans learn well when motivated, free to experiment, expect success, are given the tools, and have access to experts as and when they need their advice. i reckon we tend to rush our kids into theory and the boring stuff far too early - maths teaching is the worst example of that.