As far as I’m concerned, this principle of immersing is appealing to me. I think that in the context of classroom, this principle will have a very important impact on the classroom understanding. Understanding our students’ culture and getting them to understand the interaction between what is going outside the classroom and what is going on inside are enabled by this strategy of immersing. Of course, this has an impact on how classroom activities and tasks, especially literacy ones are performed.

This led me to discuss another strategy mentioned by Myers and Beach, that is, representing. According to the author, “Students use hypermedia to represent their own beliefs or to explain how texts are used to represent worlds to achieve certain purposes”. This reminds me of the Super Heroes by Dyson (1997). In this book, Dyson explains how children use symbols like superheroes in popular culture to achieve a sense of social belonging and personhood and to construct their social identity. Knowledge is definitely constructed by using the cultural and social tools available.

However, I think that we need to pay attention to the critical aspect of the cultural and social tools used to construct knowledge. As the editor to Myers and Beach’s article, these tools “provide affordances and constraints”. Even if hypermedia enlarges the possibilities to construct knowledge and reduces the limitations of our cultural and social tools, we still need to be aware of the fact that these tools will always pose some constraints as culture has an evolving aspect we usually tend to forget.  

In general I agree with the point made by both authors. However, I think that they don’t address all types of learners, especially when special education is concerned. How valid is their claim when the learner’s brain is damaged, that is, if one of two the channels becomes inoperative after an accident? What will be the multimedia designing in such a situation?