To “get” from a PLN you need to “give.”

I think that we are getting the idea of more interactivity, of more engaging real stuff, not just making it spin and zoom and move. And I think the authoring tools that have made that easier have certainly helped people understand that learners need to actually get their hands on the content in some way.

<p>You do not blame the hammer because the house fell down. It’s the person using the tool. It’s really about effective design. You can do fabulous stuff with PowerPoint. You can do dreadful stuff with PowerPoint. You can do dreadful stuff no matter the tool.</p> <p>In PowerPoint you can actually build nice little branching scenarios and reveals. You can make choices. You can do interactivity. There’s a lot of stuff that I think people just don’t take the time to learn.</p>

In his inaugural attempt using the application, Ferriter posted VoiceThreads about a variety of topics online, encouraging students to comment on them voluntarily on their own time. He got dozens -- even hundreds -- of comments on each. It was a revelation. "I can basically extend my classroom," he says.

Ferriter says more students participate more actively in digital discussions than in the classroom. "You don't have to be the loud one or the popular one," he points out. When he asked his students about their online involvement, he said they cited the sense of safety: "They can think about their comments beforehand." They also liked the fact that any VoiceThread has multiple conversations going on at once. "In a classroom conversation, there's generally one strand of conversation going at any one time, and if you're bored by that particular strand, you're completely disengaged," says Ferriter.

Ferriter says more students participate more actively in digital discussions than in the classroom. "You don't have to be the loud one or the popular one," he points out. When he asked his students about their online involvement, he said they cited the sense of safety: "They can think about their comments beforehand."

Direct Manipulation Principle: As the complexity of the materials increases, the impact of direct manipulation (animation, pacing) of the learning materials on the transfer of knowledge also increases.

However, when the average student is engaged in higher-order thinking using multimedia in interactive situations, on average, that student's percentage ranking on higher-order or transfer skills increases by 32 percentile points over what the student would have accomplished with traditional learning.

In fact, Michael Moore, of the American Journal of Distance Education, wrote that interactivity between a learner and the content is “the defining characteristic of education. Without it there cannot be education, since it is the process of intellectually interacting with content that results in changes in the learner’s understanding, the learner’s perspective, or the cognitive structures of the learner’s mind .”

William Horton, a leading expert in the field of web-based instructional design, in his work titled Designing Web-Based Training. Horton writes, “Interactivity boosts learning. People learn faster and develop more positive attitudes when learning is interactive.”

What is a good length for a module? Through countless hours of instructional design, field testing, and client feedback, I have found that 30 minutes is about the maximum, and less than 15 is too short.

"Many people," Kornell noted, "have had the experience of listening to a computer instructor open a menu and go through a series of steps. Then you try to do it, and you don't even know which menu or what the first step is. If you are passively following along, you won't remember it as well as if you're forced to do it yourself. Active learning is much harder, but if you can do it successfully, you will remember it much better in the long run.

They focus group energy, they permit real-time interaction (which can help develop group cohesion, especially for those less familiar with media-based learning) and, most importantly, they provide a familiar instructional environment that mimic many positive features found in the traditional classroom environment (i.e., synchronicity, verbal rather than text-based interaction, instructor presence, whiteboard presentation facilities, hand-raising for turn-taking, public and private messaging capabilities).