It is important to realize that in the realm of multimedia and presentation for learning, less is often more. While it can be tempting to get bogged down in using the wide variety of creative features we now easily have at our fingertips, such as animations, videos, audio, and eye-catching graphics, these instruments can have the unpleasant side-effect of making material difficult to sift through.
Multimedia is important to include in a wide variety of works. It can be found everywhere, in all forms—from an interactive slideshow in a news article to a flash animation on a school website. When used correctly, it helps enhance and bring to life what would otherwise be a very bland block of text. As Atkinson and Mayer (2008) point out, it has been discovered by numerous studies that people learn more from text with graphics than text alone. Effective multimedia can be as simple as a photograph and as elaborate as an interactive learning simulation, but one must be careful to ensure the focus of the viewer is not distracted by what they are viewing.
Therefore, I sincerely believe—and would explain the process of adding multimedia to a colleague—that multimedia should only be used to support the base information being presented. A rule of thumb that I use is this: if the viewer’s attention is more on the type of multimedia that was used rather than the information being conveyed, it is probably not an effective application.
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