STUDENTS AS MULTIMEDIA COMPOSERS

This study is distinguished by distancing itself from the type of mult imedia 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 multime dia 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 ind ividual students and assignments that students unfamiliar with multime dia tend to apply their existing writing skills to produce annotated t ext rather than integrated compositions, in which the links are clearl y part of the structure of the data.