Summary (from "The Impact of Television")
To sum up: the introduction of television made kids more aggressive, harmed the acquistion of reading skills, decreased creativity scores, and cut participation in non-TV leisure activities. The important question then becomes: are these effects general or are they restricted to small-town British Columbia?

The book ends with a discussion of this. Williams believes the results are generalizable for the following reasons:

• The general test scores of children here match those in the rest of Canada, and overall demographics are similar.
• The effects were much more pronounced between Notel and Unitel/Multitel than between Unitel and Multitel. That is, the presence of TV itself was the important factor, and not its content.
• The side conclusions of the studies, such as the lack of correlation between IQ and creativity, match those of other studies. That is, the administration of the tests is not unique to this study.
• The conclusions with respect to television match those of other studies.

These conclusions are not novel and are not peculiar. The effects of TV are obviously great and are obviously far-reaching. What all the effort, all the rigor, all the detailed analysis of this study shows, is that the effects are negative.

(c) John Redford, Jan-95

Re: "the effects are negative"
Do the effects of TV have to be negative? Can an increasing proportion of educational content on television begin to counter of even turn the balance in favor of the positive? I believe we have the responsibility as educators to try.

I currently reside in Indonesia and I have been working in the education sector (mainly in Australia) for 36 years, with 30 of those years being in education technology and more recently teaching and school development. As an education technologist I screened/watched thousands of educational films, videos, and other presentations. I frequently heard audiences remark that the programs were dull, even boring! And, this was from audiences who were watching with the specific objective of learning. What did they expect, entertainment?

Can educational programs be entertaining? If not, looking at the broader scenario, how can they possibly compete with the lure of general commercial programs? How can we possibly begin to counter the negative effects of commercial television upon the public and especially our children?

Whenever I think about this issue, my mind always drifts back to my teens when I would forbade all else to watch the science program "Why is it so?", a science program that was screened on Australian television from 1963 to 1986. Ok, I was interested in science, but so many of my friends who watched the series weren't, they just watched it because it was so entertaining, and because we all came to love Professor Julius Sumner Miller, the presenter. People do enjoy being EduTained, but it takes special skills, and very special people to make programs that are informative, challenging and EduTaining.

Are people like Julius Sumner Miller a rare natural phenomenon, or can we train and produce EduTainers? What will the cost be? What is, and what will be the cost to society if we don't make the effort now?

Julius, sadly I never met you, but we all miss you!
Phillip R.