Media4[ME] Den Haag

Last week, I was in Den Haag at the first Media4[ME] conference. During my talk, I presented the first preliminary results of my computer and eye tracking experiments that I conducted about one month ago. During the next two-three months, I will further analyse all the data I gathered during these experiments in a way to provide an answer on the question 'do multimedia, interactivity and hypertext benefit the learning process and knowledge outcome during and after online news consumption?'. I let you know if the results are there!

ICA Montreal

Two weeks ago, I was in Montreal for the annual ICA conference. I presented two papers, the first one about parental mediation of television viewing throughout adolescence, the second one was titled redefining multimedia: the (dis)integrated use of media and modalities.

The latter presentation discussed an important part of my Ph.D. research about the concept of multimedia. I question the use of the concept multimedia when speaking of the combined use of text, video, pictures and audio on for example news websites. In this paper I suggest that it is better to use the concept of multimodality instead of multimedia.
I received a lot of interesting questions and suggestions during and after my presentation. Especially the notes of my respondent, prof. dr. Singer (U.K) were very valuable for me, for which I want to thank her again. During the next two weeks, I try to rewrite this paper into an article for publication.

Apart from the conference, I just fell in love with Montreal! Great city, nice athmosphere, friendly people, beautiful hotels, ... this trip made me get charged up again.

Read aloud modality

When I was looking for some news coverage about the tragedy of the Belgian soccer player Francois Sterchele who died this morning in a car crash, I discovered a great modality of interactivity. On the Dutch news site of NOS.nl, one can click on the 'read aloud' button so that a gentle woman reads the message aloud. Apart from some pronounciation problems (clearly it is a a computer software program who transfers the written text into voice so that for example names aren't well pronounced), this feature can be a great help for people with hearing problems!

I haven't seen this feature on another website, if someone of you knows another example of this innovative feature, please email me!

Important three days

Tomorrow and the two days following tomorrow will be of high importance for my research. During these days, my third research phase takes place.

Research question: how do online vs. standard online news messages differ in effect on information-processing and objective and subjective knowledge outcome

Procedure: computer experiments + eye tracking experiments

Manipulations: 4 stories in 16 different versions: Form (2) x complexity (2) x Story (4) x Order (4)

Location: Centre for Media Research in Leuven

Participants: 70-95 students

Wheather forecast: hot, hotter, hottest

My personal condition: very tired, but excited

Special thanks to: my supervisor Prof. d'Haenens for making this idea possible, dr. P. hendriks-Vettehen and dr. Peter De Graef for their valuable contributions to my experimental design, the Flemish Ministry of Media for funding this innovative research and of course Koen Moens, webmaster of HLN.be for doing a great job when manipulating the online news stories and answering my email questions so quickly!

Third research stage: manipulations of online news stories

The first two research stages of my ph.d. (content analysis of features of online news media and online survey towards the differences in use of online news media and features) are finished, so it is time to move on to the last stage. In this phase I will test the effect of multimedia, interactivity and hypertext on the information-processing and the knowledge outcome during online news consumption. To test the impact of these formal and structural features, we have to set up some manipulations so that there are different versions of online news stories, one version with an adequate degree of multimodality, interactive features and hyperlinks, and another representing the same story but in a standard (or better offline) version without the key features of online news. We will conduct some knowledge and eye-tracking experiments to test the online consumption of different stories presented in different versions.

But since I'm not a webbuilder, I needed someone who could make the manipulations of the online stories. I needed a website that uses already as many as possible features of multimedia, interactivity and hypertext, so that it won't be a big problem to ad some specific features like reactions, videos etc. Therefore, I decided to ask The Persgroep (editor from HLN.be, demorgen.be en VTM.be) to make the manipulations. After a very interesting and stimulating meeting with Gert Francois (manager New Media) and the webmaster, they decided to help me out and to make the adjustments on the selected online news articles I found on the internet. These manipulated online articles will be used in the experiments that will be conducted on 7-8-9 may.

A special thank you goes out to The Persgroep!