STUDENTS AS MULTIMEDIA COMPOSERS

This study is distinguished by distancing itself from the type of multimedia research that looks at the effects of multimedia instructional units on students. The approach; instead, is within a constructionist learning paradigm and the research task is to take the first steps to begin to know what we don't know about the student creation of multimedia documents. The outcome of preliminary research on the use of Media Text, a multimedia composition tool, with high school students across several disciplines indicates from an analysis of document level and link level data on 62 student-produced multimedia documents across individual students and assignments that students unfamiliar with multimedia tend to apply their existing writing skills to produce annotated text rather than integrated compositions, in which the links are clearly part of the structure of the data.