Following a few links from the previously mentioned Elluminate session, I found this on Randy Meredith’s blog (at least he calls it a blog, but Bloglines picked up no feeds from it).

Podagogy�Blog Archive � Visual versus Audio Messages

This journal article, reviewed here by Randy, interestingly suggests that the current prevailing (?) wisdom that visual messages are more powerful than audio ones, and that learners these days are becoming more visual (and less print-literate) and less audio-verbal may not be correct:

This article provided very informative and helpful background on studies conducted to assess the effects of audio and video. In summarizing the findings of a number of studies, the article indicated no one medium (print, audio, and audiovisual) has a clear advantage in its ability to persuade, inform, or create emotional responses. Rather, a large body of research indicates “the effectiveness of the medium depended in complex and conflicting ways on the characteristics of the communicator, the message, the situation, and the audience member” (Crigler, Just, & Neuman, 2004). The variation in medium effectiveness is demonstrated in Table 1, which gives an overview of the findings by McGuire’s (1969, 1985) studies on the persuasive effects of identical messages in different media….
Their findings clearly demonstrated the audio channel carries the bulk of the information in an audiovisual study. Further, results indicated the amount of learning was essentially the same for the audio only messages and the audiovisual messages….
These findings support many earlier studies indicating recorded audio narrative is an effective medium for communicating information….
Audio leads video. That is, the video track must logically follow the audio track to be most effective…
If audio does communicate the majority of information in a recorded story, it may be less important in some contexts (and therefore less expensive) to produce effective educational podcasts and audio recordings.

On Del.icio.us: edtech, education, pedagogy, audio, video, learning_styles, article_review, Randy_Meredith