Can we learn from TV or movie or interactive media rather than be distracted by it?

SwitSof

Electoral Member
The finding in an experiment study on the paper: Remembering Television News: Effects of Picture Content by Barrie Gunter found that recalling of brief TV news items can be significantly affected by picture content.

And it's strengthened by the result of an experiment study to compare between learning from TV and books amongst Dutch children in the article: Learning from Television and Books: A Dutch Replication Study Based on Salomon's Model by Johannes W. J. Beentjes. The study suggested that TV may be considered less superficial medium than another study by Salomon with childen in the US.
Whereas the study by Gavriel Salomon in his article: Television Is "Easy" and Print Is "Tough": The Differential Investment of Mental Effort in Learning as a Function of Perceptions and Attributions, found that less mental effort is invested by his subjects, children in the US, thus resulted in worse inference making.

Some lecturers in some universities in the US especially have been using say commercial movies, documentaries, novels such as works of Shakespeare to teach about economics and to present examples in the real-world context by using these mediums. Another reason is to make the learning experience more interesting for the students by using mediums that would engage the students with the interactive modality and with the storyline.

For you yourself, do you reckon you can learn by watching TV or movies or videos (can be training videos which are less commercial and more of real-world context too)?

ps: you can google these articles to see the methodology of the experiments done
 

MikeyDB

House Member
Jun 9, 2006
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Sure I'd be lying if I didn't believe that some television programming is useful in spreading knowledge and understanding....

It's just my distaste for the enormous bulk of television programming that's mindless appeal to appetites with its only interest in making millionaires out of con-men.

It's my revulsion at being addressed like I'm a two year old....use this soap see the nice cartoon geni will come into your house and make your life wonderful....talking breakfast cereal and everything anthropomorphized so the great unwashed think in terms and make judgments not on the basis of reality truth and awareness but because ...Oh see how sexy Juia looks in her new dress...Oh look how macho and smart Joel is when he's driving his Lexus....Oh just witness how happy Mary Bob and Glen are when they're using a bar-b-que from Canadian Tire....

Television appeals to the lowest common denominator and while I agree that this segment of the population could certainly benefit from education and awareness available through the media, the far greater energy and expense is expended not in the name of making folks aware and knowledgeable, but in dumbing them down and keeping the conditioning going...
 

SwitSof

Electoral Member
There is evidence to show that TV material is generally perceived as lifelike and realistic and that considerations of authenticity and veracity of TV presentations are rarely expressed even among 6th graders (Morison et al., 1981).
It is reasonable it's assumed to expect children to treat realistic material in a shallower way than material that is contrived, for the former would be assumed to allow assimilation with fewer mental elaborations.
I suppose the same applies to adults too according to MikeyDB, so what kind of TV/video materials that can be educational instead of dumbing the viewers? :lol: