Principles, theories, and models
Understand many theories and models, choose from among them appropriately, and apply them effectively.
EDTEC 541: Educational Web Multimedia Development
Cognitive Load Balancing and Shedding Article (HTML page with SWFs)
I've spent a lot of time and effort over decades trying to impart knowledge to others. It has always been one of the major objectives of my job, whatever that happened to be, and in the last 10 years a big part of my association with the Boy Scouts of America.
Ideally, it would be nice to simply transfer knowledge to a person's brain as you would upload data to a computer. This idea has been explored in science fiction many times. In Dean Koontz's Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein is still alive and living in modern New Orleans where he's cloning the "New Race" to take over the world. As each creature is born, all of their knowledge is uploaded directly into their brains. In the real world, there is a lot of discussion about Mind Uploading and Whole Brain Emulation. Until that fantasy becomes realized, research such as that done by Mayer & Moreno (2003) suggests the next best alternative.
Way back in EDTEC 541, I wrote an article for the Encyclopedia of Educational Technology called Cognitive load shedding and balancing. The article, based on the research of Mayer & Moreno (2003), explains how to avoid overloading a person with multimedia information using nine methods to reduce or rebalance the information input. In the article I briefly addressed each of the main points of the cognitive theory of multimedia learning, listed the five types of overload and the nine methods for mitigating them, and created two little movies to illustrate these ideas. (Ironically, my article violates some of the principles.)
As I watch the movies again, I’m struck by the similarities between mind uploading and the cognitive theory of multimedia learning. Whatever form mind uploading might take, it would necessarily involve some kind of input, just as the cognitive theory of multimedia involves the visual channel and the auditory channel.
I remember being excited about the Cognitive Load Theory when I first read about it. The idea that working memory was so limited made sense to me and explained a lot about why people had so much trouble learning.
The ultimate irony would be that after centuries of work, research reveals that the sensory channels we are born with are better at uploading knowledge to our brains than any artificial channels we can devise. And that the trick is to package the information, as cognitive theory suggests, in a way that best takes advantage of our natural capabilities and avoids our limitations.
Mayer. R., & Moreno. R. (2003). Nine way to reduce cognitive load in multimedia learning. Educational Psychologist, 38(1), 43-52.