Philip Savage

Combining Best-Practice and Experimental Approaches: Redundancy, Images, and Misperceptions in Multimedia Learning

This experiment combined controlled experimental design with a best-practice approach (i.e., real course content, subjective evaluations) to clarify the role of verbal redundancy, confirm the multimodal impact of images and narration, and highlight discrepancies between actual and perceived understanding. The authors presented 1 of 3 computer-based lecture conditions: audio, redundant (audio with redundant text), or complementary (audio with nonredundant text and images). Audio and redundant conditions produced similar actual understanding, whereas the complementary condition produced greatest actual understanding. Redundant condition learners perceived their understanding as greater than their actual understanding. Findings encourage multimedia research to balance controlled experiments with a best-practice approach to better understand effective multimedia design.

Canada’s Audience Massage: Audience Research and TV Policy Development, 1980–2010

In Canada, audience research has been a useful link between the needs and wants of audiences and the type of television content they receive; this link is made manifest in part by approximately

Transformative Radio and Stubborn Audiences: A Tale of Two Cities

200 million (Cdn.) invested in research as part of the

Learning Management Systems and Principles of Good Teaching: Instructor and Student Perspectives.

20 billion-plus media industry.1 Canadian media and advertising firms employ precise social scientific methods and the latest tools to ensure ever-more accurate measurement of media behaviour and of public opinion. Canada was among the first to adopt the Portable Peoplemeter (PPM), developed by Arbitron in the United States but extensively tested for the first time in Montreal, ten years ago (Savage, 2006). Canadian citizens, governments and corporations have been among the most eager in the world to adopt new communication technologies: in the past five years, Canadians have embraced the web 2.0 environment — including interactive digital media production and social networking.2 All of which is meant to put Canadian audiences at the centre of media production and distribution, so that programming can be edited and created in a fashion more reflective of the audience’s identity and preoccupations.

Good Teachers, Scholarly Teachers and Teachers Engaged in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: A Case Study from McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada.

A decade ago the regional programming of CBC Toronto successfully transformed itself with a new notion of community reflection that utilized a range of emerging digital platforms but put narrative radio storytelling at its centre. With the launch of CBC Hamilton in Spring 2012, as Canadas sole digital-only public broadcasting outlet (no over-the-air TV or radio), audio storytelling was conspicuously absent from the equation. Based on the only publicly available research conducted with CBC users and community leaders prior to and following both launches, the authors raise questions about audience conceptions and the enduring value of audio storytelling in an era of digital broadcasting and social media.