Starting off as a journalist, I have been trained to be a storyteller that covers news to a useful and enjoyable experience with text, photos and data visualizations. During my time at Insider Inc., I focused on data visualization on the 2020 Presidential Elections and COVID-19 Pandemic almost every day, in addition to regular news coverages across the board.

For many people, reading the news can be seen as a learning experience that we are learning something new happening around us. The fact is that people of different data literacy might end up getting different information and insights from the same data visualization. Here is where the text (for the story and the data visualization) plays out, which I think could be the narratives that really explain the real knowledge to the readers.

Narrations can also be a tool that makes the learning experiences more engaging, fun and meaningful. Recalling my memory back in elementary school, my teachers started with projectors in assist to lectures; in middle and high schools, most teachers switched to slide decks with video and audio materials as alternatives. Now during this unprecedented pandemic situation, I started to get into knowing and trying out a lot of new educational technologies and media which really help to create collaborative and engaging learning experiences for students of all levels. Visuals and audios are important no doubly, while narrations should still be considered as an important factor of making successful and engaging learning experiences. Narrations should be seen as the scaffold for learners that help the learners to understand the to-be-learned knowledge under the specific context.

While the challenge here for the learning designers to understand and think through is: given that different media technology platforms are so different in the way knowledge and information is presented to the learners, the best way to narrate the to-be-learned knowledge to be effective but not overwhelming worth studying and practicing. And this what I want to learn in this class that to best utilize narration in support of learning in all kinds of educational technology.

In the previous learning science and cognitive science for learning classes, I have learned some basic learning theories, cognitive load theory and Mayer's multimedia learning design principles. Especially from a cognitive perspective, written narrations are always seen as a potential source for increasing extraneous load (eg. modality principle and multimedia principle) while visual and audio presentations are seen as a more effective representation of information.

Learning and exploring narration creations in different types of media technology help learning designers with better decision-making when designing learning materials that actually make narrations useful to increase germane load without giving learners too much extraneous load. I hope this class could help me to better understand the role of narrations with different media technology, and bridge what I have learned in learning science and cognitive science for learning into better practice to design learning materials that are extremely engaging, fun, and impactful.