Positioning

The task this week was to take the information that we learned in the readings and put it to work! Our assignment was to take a task that we perform relatively often and are familiar with and to teach someone else how to do that in a static multimedia presentation format. I decided to do mine on how to control columns across pages in Microsoft Word. This entails being able to break them into different kinds of sections and modify their sizing. Out of the many computer things I do, I find that knowing some of the basic skills to be the ones that I most often am either happy that I know how to do or am looking up how to do. When you have the ability to do them then it allows you much more control in how your documents look. Which ends up allowing you to create much more professional-looking documents! I find that controlling columns is one of those critical elements that is not so basic that everyone knows it, but can be very helpful in creating a good looking and not laboriously long document!

My intended audience could really be almost anyone that uses computers. This is a skill that anyone who works with text documents and wants or needs to create multi-column layouts (educators, business people, people at home that type up their recipes, etc.). Most of the time when I put these skills to use it is just because it allows me to shorten a document, so that I can print it and look at the data! I do assume that these are people that are already familiar enough with Word to have documents in Word already that might benefit from a columnar formation. I imagine most users would pick which learning outcome they were interested in and go straight there (possibly already knowing how to do the other pieces).

My learning outcomes for the project were:

1. Insert and Configure Columns in a Word Document:
   • Navigate to the appropriate menu in the layout tab.
   • Understand how to insert multiple columns into a document.
2. Control Column Breaks:
   • Navigate to the appropriate menu in the layout tab.
   • Manage where text breaks from one column to the next using column breaks.
3. Adjust Column Width and Spacing:
   • Navigate to the appropriate menu in the layout tab.
   • Customize the width and spacing of columns to suit the specific needs of the document.
4. Apply Different Column Settings to Different Sections:
   • Navigate to the appropriate menu in the layout tab.
   • Create sections in a document that allow for different column settings in different areas of a document.

This tutorial has us putting the multimedia principle to good use. The multimedia principle basically means that people understand and/or remember information better when they get it in both words and pictures instead of just words (Mayer, 2009). I put the instructions or notes and screenshots together on each page to demonstrate this principle.

The contiguity principle also is well shown off in this project. On each page or slide the text is located very near to the object being discussed, which is mainly what that principle tries to get people to do. Having the text and object of discussion close keeps our brains from having to do a lot of extraneous processing (Mayer, 2009). This allows us to learn better and faster.

When I read the reading, these concepts made total sense to me (some concepts were not new to me and others just make sense)! As I was actually working through the project though, I had a funny moment that brought home the concept of these principles. I was working on the assignment and wanted to go back and look at the directions. The second time I did that I copied the directions onto this page, so that I could access them as I went along with the project and this writing. I know it is not directly the same, but in the chapters that we read, Mayer was discussing how it is distracting to the learner to have to go from one document to another(2009). I often do exactly what I did in this case-copy information from one page to the next, I just did not realize the reason for that was I was wanting to reduce my cognitive load! By not having to remember all the instructions, I was able to focus on the work at hand.