[quoting Brack, 20 Oct 96] I think that many of the "media is not important" findings are truly confounded by the attempt to have a simple, single learning outcome that can be compared. The selection of this outcome will have dramatic effects on the results--and rote memorization of phrases isn't a really useful learning outcome. If you "want" to prove one media is better or worse, you just need to select an appropriate learning outcome measure...
I agree with Chris Brack relative to the notion that not all content to be learned deals with factual regurgitation--that there must be more to cognition than that--and Chris makes his point nicely.
Having also made an attempt at learning Mandarin, I wonder if the materials, exercises, and audiotape repetition of vocabulary Steve was provided might not have been perceived quite differently had the instructor showed video clips of contemporary Chinese language "in situ" and with all the local color and mystique of a local bazaar in Beijing, or if he had had a chance to get tutoring assistance from someone who was fluent in both English and Mandarin? It sounded as if the Mandarin class had much the same objectives as one covering physics or organic chemistry, with loads of facts to learn but little context.
Steve quotes Clark's confounding areas, among them the novelty effect and lack of equity of instructional design and strategies as being relevant to his (Clark's) defense of the statement that media do not influence learning. These theories, while written some 13 years ago, and again reiterated as late as 1994, seem to center on theoretical constructs as opposed to what is happening among our learners today.
I would argue, for example, that video, having now been used so often in classrooms, is no longer among those media formats for which there is much novelty. Interestingly enough, even the much more recent use of Power Point or other computer-based presentation strategy is, already, losing its novelty halo--students now accept it in classes in much the same way as they did overhead transparencies.
Look what is happening to the instructors, however. We are increasingly forced to better organize our information, to make it aesthetically pleasing, to make it more interactive, etc. When such is not the case, the novelty effect enters in as what we deliver is not up to the level of the students' expectations.
In terms of inequality of instructional design or strategy being a confounding element, here too I think the emphasis has been on rote delivery of facts. I see little attention being paid to learning style differences (for which the technology is admirably equipped, in the hands of a good instructional designer) to address this area.
Little has been said, as well, of affect and how material is mastered via this mode. Clark seems not to address such areas very much and it is here that real and long-term recall of events comes to the front of the line. We seldom remember many of the words or formulae we studied from text-based materials, unless we use them on a frequent basis. The things our memories do keep intact, however, are those intangibles such as extrapolate meaning to how we felt when first hearing of the Blitzkrieg, of seeing our nation (pick one) win the world cup, or of remembering how we felt when our first planted tomato seed became an actual fruit-bearing plant.
I agree with Steve in his disagreement with Clark's premise, but perhaps for different reasons.
PS: I still like Clark's metaphor of the grocery truck, I see his point, and subscribe to the basic premise that it is not the technology about which we should pay the most attention but the learning process. Technologies will come and go, learning keeps on keeping on.