New technologies that are changing our concept of media

The new media, especially digital media, differ from traditional media in a number of ways. In our view, what is of most significance to the future of education, especially for students with disabilities, is the unequaled flexibility and transformability of digital media.

Print-based media provided some clear advantages over earlier forms of communication such as oratory. Print enabled permanent recording, was portable, and was, at least by the 20th century, relatively inexpensive. In time, and with these advantages, printed text came to dominate learned discourse, and education became dominated by book learning.

The new media (digital text, digital images, digital audio, digital video, digital multimedia, and networked environments) provide many of the advantages of print-based media but they also bring new advantages. Notable is the malleability of the new media. While they, like print, can provide a permanent representation, they do not have the same "fixed" quality as print. Instead, they remain malleable, transformable from one thing to another, more like raw clay than fired pottery.

The consequence is enormous flexibility and the capacity for transformation from one medium to another (e.g. text-to-speech, speech-to-text, text to touch (e.g.Braille), image to touch (haptic images, tactile graphics) and others). In addition, the new media allow multiple representations of meaning that may be used redundantly for clarity, complementarily for enhanced meaning, or even discordantly for multiple meanings (e.g.using text on video (captions), video on text, multiple sound and visual tracks, graphics on video (e.g. signed captioning), sound maps, visual light organs, and others).

The capacity to use multiple media in these and many other ways leads to a more diversified, flexible palette for communication - a palette that takes advantage of the varied strengths and weaknesses of each medium. While the hegemony of printed text has already disappeared in such high-impact fields as advertising, entertainment, and communication in the culture at large, the legacy of print continues in schools. In the years ahead it is clear that text, still dominant in education, will give way to a more intentional use of varied media for instruction.

Instructional designers in the future will tailor their use of media to the task, to different kinds of learning, and different kinds of students. They will use the transformability and flexibility of digital media to reduce the barriers and inefficiencies inherent in fixed, one-size-fits all, printed textbooks. Moreover, they will develop expertise in the representational and expressive qualities of each medium, and the new blends that will develop, so that they can reach a broader set of students, with a broader range of knowledge.

Students with disabilities, for whom the transformations and multiple representations will vastly increase access and learning opportunities, (e.g. talking books, descriptive video, ASL tracks) are the first beneficiaries of the new media. The incidental beneficiaries will include the teachers of subject matters like math, music, geography, physics, and other subjects that have never easily yielded their magic through linear text. But the ultimate beneficiaries will be all learners, each of whom has experienced in one way or another the barriers to motivation and comprehension that an over-reliance on text and other fixed media have wrought.