Media Format Lab: One Story, Two Registers (Beau Johnson)

Media Format Lab: One Story, Two Registers

The same historical facts, delivered as a classroom textbook and as a comedy podcast. You do the comparing.

Built by Beau Johnson from the Educational Psychology research study on comprehension and media - "Our Man, Hugh: Narrative and Distributed Cognition via Comedy and Text.” 2015.

The study gave two learners the same story of the frontiersman Hugh Glass through different media, one reading a textbook, one hearing a podcast, then had each retell it. On a fact quiz the two media came out even. What changed was what stuck, and why. Pick a moment below and see the same events in each register.
THE TEXT  ·  classroom pamphlet
THE DOLLOP  ·  episode 10
Then two students retold it

The point of the lab

Same facts, different delivery. The textbook hands over dates and names, the exact things a quiz asks for. The podcast trades some of that precision for momentum and a reason to care. Then a student retells it and changes it a third time, through personality. Media is the delivery system. The person is the medium.

The textbook column is Beau's original study text. The podcast column is adapted from The Dollop for length and to keep it portfolio-safe, with the hosts' incredulous, tangential register preserved. Student lines are drawn from the recorded presentations. The Hugh Glass story includes real violence and dated framings of Native peoples that the study itself critiques; it is presented here as historical source, not endorsement.