Author: larrymc

Apart from the MET program, it’s been a lot of years since I’ve taken formal instruction. And there have been scarce uses of multimedia to convey content in the MET program (which makes me wonder whether the instructors & designers see the value of multimedia, at least for graduate courses, but never mind).

Scavenging in Haiti. New York Times photo.

So I have no other experience to draw upon in discussing “examples of how multimedia have been used effectively to enhance [my] learning.” But that’s just fine — it gives me the opportunity instead to discuss the uses of multimedia in the New York Times.

Each of us accesses his/her lifelong learning where s/he finds it, and I resort frequently to the Grey Lady, which continues to educate me about the world. Over the past few years I’ve watched the NYT enthusiastically embrace multimedia in many forms — interactive maps, audio slideshows, and the like. The NYT has become a state-of-the-art purveyor of  highly meaningful multimedia objects.

An example is Scenes From a Ruined Boulevard, which consists of photos of one street in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in the wake of the quake. The photos are arranged left to right, overlapping, in an extremely horizontal collage hundreds or thousands of pixels wide. A scrollbar allows the user to “move” along this path, viewing many blocks of destruction and, occasionally, people among the ruins. When people do appear, text pops up explaining what they’re doing. (While the page employs a lot of javascript, the interaction itself is Flash.)

From “Scenes From a Ruined Boulevard,” New York Times

“Scenes From a Ruined Boulevard” has what I would call a dimensionality far exceeding the power of text — and, indeed, conventional photojournalism. In scrolling, the NYT “reader” is overwhelmed by the severity and relentless ubiquity of the destruction as well as the severe depopulation of the city. Yet the text pop-ups underscore the humanity among the ruins — the numerous ways that people are coping, or not, with the devastation: e.g., by looting, or trying to engage in commerce.

Thus one has a sense not unlike driving in a jeep along the ruined street and seeing not just the collapsed buildings but the stories behind and among them. It’s journalism 2.0. And interestingly, this complex presentation was conceived before the photographer took the photos and the reporter investigated the little stories, because the photographer had to know that a complete record of the entire street, building by building, was needed. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have bothered to shoot every linear inch of the streetscape. Regardless,

Foyer of Patience Orphanage. New York Times photo.

A similar yet different effect is conveyed in Panorama: Foyer of Patience Orphanage. Here, a special camera has been used to photograph the interior of a school in all (360-degree) directions, thus vastly exceeding the frame of the photographic image while still utilizing the power and acuity of the still image. As the image pans 360 degrees on the webpage, the viewer takes in the complete context in all its emotional force — the beauty of the students, the wretchedness of the poverty — with a sense of standing in the middle of it and confronting it firsthand. (The viewer cna pause the camera at any point to view it in more detail.) The educational strengths are obvious — as the view rotates slowly, patiently, the crisp details (much, much crisper than in video) are seared onto one’s consciousness. I could easily see something like Panorama: Foyer of Patience Orphanage used as a learning object — e.g., asking students to watch it and record their observations and impressions.

One reason for the NYT expending such resources on these learning objects is overtly educational. The newspaper positions itself as a resource for K-12 instruction — which is of course a form of long-term marketing, i.e., reaching and cultivating future readers.

From “Perspectives on Haiti’s Earthquake,” New York Times

Perspectives on Haiti’s Earthquake takes a different approach again — it’s a webpage/menu of 18 four-minute audio files, each one accompanied by a photo of the person speaking. They’re categorized as “Aid Providers,” “Journalists,” “Academics & Authors,” and “Concerned Americans & Haitians” — thus providing a range of perspectives a student is apt to find rewarding, especially given the  details that surface as these individuals are describing their experiences and thoughts. The student or reader learns not only how these diverse people respond but how they think about and evaluate the situation differently.

The hidden beauty of “Perspectives on Haiti’s Earthquake” is that it’s not necessarily resource-intensive to produce. Most of the audiofiles sound like they were recorded over the phone. And thus is speaks to what newspapers do better than TV — depth of coverage. Unencumbered by TV camera crews, newspapers can provide depth and breadth, and usually faster.

And as illustrated here, newspapers can present it interactively (unlike TV), allowing the reader or student to choose what to focus on — which portions of the encompassing image; which perspectives on the disaster. These multimedia objects are engaging not only because they’re highly professional, but because they engage the student via real-world current events of enormous magnitude.

Unlike the passive medium of TV, this is active, constructive learning, allowing the reader/viewer/student to assemble his own meaning from the fragments. And the fragments all count — each gives “texture and depth to the educational experience” (to quote our Vista content this week). Nothing is superfluous or gratuitous.

All that being said, while these superb learning objects may set a shining example to aspire to, it’s sobering to consider the gulf between them and what’s really feasible or justifiable in the “real” educational context. We don’t have such multimedia artists/journalists to draw upon. And the NYT can justify the expenditure as (a) bringing media-rich information to its readers in a competitive market; and (b) marketing to the next generation of readers, via the classroom.

The Web 2.0 software we experimented with this past week presents affordable ways of generating multimedia learning objects — if crude, basic ones. But in most instances, that will do the trick. One can still take away from the NYT a sense of design rigour and clarity of purpose that needn’t break the bank.

It’s fun to look at my classmates’ creations using the 50 tools, and to ruminate on how these tools might be used in the classroom, but I also find it disquieting. For me, it raises a moral dilemma. If an instructor gets his grade 5 class to build mashups with PhotoPeach or some similar tool — a fun, inspirational project — should the teacher also teach these tender young minds about copyright and the need for attribution?

In other words, is it okay simply to let the students “have at it” — to scavenge and appropriate materials from all over the Web and combine them willy-nilly into their “own” documents without any reflection on the fact that they’re using other people’s work and subsuming it into their “own”?

Shouldn’t this project provide a teachable moment on these moral (and legal) issues? Or, would the teacher just be throwing a wet blanket on his/her students’ innocent efforts if s/he required them, say, to append a list of sources at the end? (Just a simple list — we’ll forgo MLA or APA style at this point.) And teach them about Google’s and Flickr’s creative commons searching as well? At what age, then, is it incumbent on us to introduce these concepts?

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Image © www.bruceclay.com/

Over the years, I’ve been intrigued from time to time  regarding the educational possibilities of interactive timelines. Lately I’ve been inspired by the vivid timelines (and similar interactive objects) on the New York Times.

In the educational context, interactive timelines can be constructed by the instructor (or learning technologist) as learning objects to complement a course of study; or can be assigned to students or groups of students as projects — an alternative to the traditional essay, allowing the students individually or in small groups to construct a navigable, multidimensional picture of a development over time (historical, political, current events, their own life stories, etc.) using shorter blocks of text plus images and other media such as video clips.

If a student or group were assigned to do a timeline of “key events in BC history,” then s/he or they would have to distill the sweep of provincial history by judging and selecting which events to include — and how to present them. However, I think the affordances of timeline software can be seductive. Because of the power of photographs to tell a story on their own, their is less onus on the author’s or authors’ text — unless the instructor makes those requirements very clear.

So when it came to doing this activity, and because I’ve already done audio slideshows in the past (with PhotoStory 3), I felt it was time to get my feet wet with a timeline. I chose xtimeline because the description claimed it was sophisticated and advanced. My disappointment with xtimeline mainly concerns the management, manipulation and display of images.

Xtimeline is certainly easy and intuitive to use. The results are less inspiring, however. Your timeline comes out looking austere, very plain — at least, in the default view. The alternative view, which is accessed via a green icon in the upper right (and which I’ve shown at right), improves matters because your photographs then appear in the timeline. But why isn’t this view the default?

Then, your images appear cropped into squares rather than retaining their original landscape or portrait proportions. This makes selecting the photos a challenge — you have to choose photos that will survive this brutal cropping with their subjects reasonably intact (or, crop them into squares before uploading).

I chose to make a timeline of a long trip I took in the early 1980s through East Asia, South Asia, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand and Tahiti. This made the activity appealingly personal for me. But it also made it different from most educational timeline projects in that the images are my own rather than scavenged from the Web.

When you switch to the better timeline view and your images appear in the timeline, they appear adjacent to the wrong text. Thus my photo of Bali, for example, appears related to “Sydney and the East Coast of Australia” instead. Likewise, my photo of the Yangtze’s Three Gorges appears to relate to Shanghai. This problem is compounded by the fact that xtimeline doesn’t allow the author to attach cutlines to the photos to explain what they show, although you can append this information to the text block itself. Also, this view is less like a timeline — each event gets equal spacing, one after the other, more like a linear slideshow. And finally, the photos are quite small, at least on my high-res monitor, which makes it difficult to discern much detail. While a disadvantage, this might also have some advantages, forcing students to choose how much and which parts of a photo to use, and then to crop carefully.

All in all, I’m concerned that students might find xtimeline (which is beta) frustrating and disappointing. Then again, perhaps I expect too much from it — and perhaps I’m underestimating students, who may be able to navigate the image file-management easily and may take delight in what xtimeline produces for them.

I retain a faith in the ability of timelines as compelling educational technology, because of they can enable learners to conceptualize a chain of events, with its sequential and causal relationships — the arc of events rather than simply events in isolation. (I’m also intrigued by the notion that a timeline could show students taking a course the sequence of events/activities/assignments in an online course, perhaps better than an html table could do.) I’m reminded once again of the power of free online technology to enable students to actualize — to engage with the “outside” world by publishing. There are many tools besides xtimeline, and some of them, such as TimeToast, appear to be better. UBC even has its own homegrown one, prosaically called Timeline Tool.

The Wiki activity left me cold — even a bit depressed. It did not feel like a collaboration. Nor did it feel like a group discussion. Instead, it felt like a number of individuals talking to themselves. In the spaces where we were supposed to discuss the five strategies and challenges, there was no discussion. A wiki would seem like a poor substitute for a discussion board.

It didn’t even seem to me that most of my fellow students were following the activity instructions, to “contribute a “sighting” from your own experience,” Rather, it seemed like they were merely offering broad, general opinions, not specific sightings.

In the end, I suppose we created a document of sorts. But the five strategies and five challenges simply appeared, as a fait accompli. And to my mind, they weren’t very good — they were often vague, repetitive, and sounded like the pronouncements of a school board rather than strategies to engage learners. For example, “Develop a critical vision of technology” is not a “challenge for engaging students.”

What this depressing activity taught me is that when using social media for educational purposes, even a seemingly well-structured activity (at least, I thought the instructions were clear enough) can very, very easily go off the rails. And because this activity was unmonitored, and we were left to our own devices, it certainly did go off the rails, in my opinion.

The introductory text to Module 4 awakened decades of associations for me.

We like to think of Web 2.0 (the Social Web) as an invention of the 2000s. And when we describe the Social Web, we typically leave out any mention of discussion forums — I suspect because they were around in the 1990s, and so they lack the cache of newer formats and software such as blogs and del.icio.us. As well, forums tend to lack multimedia glitter. (And, as Wikipedia notes, usage of the term social media “most often refers to activities that integrate technology, telecommunications and social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio”.)

In fact, discussion forums pre-date the Web entirely and formed the very structure of pre-Web entities such as The Well, a mammoth online forum that people found addictive in the 1980s. Moreover, they are quintessentially “read/write”. They are, in other words, the father of Web 2.0. What is Facebook, after all, except a latter-day discussion board — albeit, one that is more compartmentalized into silos of people whom we’re already acquainted with, and as a result is often less satisfying than discussion forums because the “discussions” are restricted to an extended circle of friends and family rather than dispersed networks of people with similar interests.

When I do visit Facebook these days, people’s comments typically hold no interest for me. As further evidence of this malaise, these comments, rather than generating meaningful “threads”, either go without response or elicit only the most trite responses (e.g., a thumbs-up). Of course, Facebook’s imposed limitation on postings/responses, of a couple of dozen words (i.e., microblogging), contributes to the blithe atmosphere. Elaborate thoughts or opinions are not wanted.

But the root of the matter is that a circle of acquaintances does not a discussion forum make. Instead, it’s like a social gathering where soon you’re looking at your watch, tired of the unfocused small-talk.

This is not to discount the potential of some of these 2.0 applications for educational purposes; only to caution once again against technolust. Concept mapping and wikis may have their specialized uses. But by and large, for the sake of social constructivist approaches in online learning, we need often look no further than discussion forums.

What Web 2.0 has really done is popularize the interactivity implicit in discussion boards. And it has achieved this through, on the  one hand, ease of use, and, on the other, bells and whistles. Discussion boards were and are bare bones — a blank canvas for ideas and responses. Posting or including an image or link requires effort. The social media cushion all of this — thoughts must be brief; visuals gets greater prominence; the interfaces are push-button easy, like a microwave oven.

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Image courtesy of www.myspace.com/mamitachula

After considerable tinkering, I’ve realized what I should have realized sooner — that Moodle doesn’t allow the integration of JavaScript interactions (i.e., a common type of learning object) into HTML course pages.

The reason is fairly simple — Moodle doesn’t allow the course author any access to the <head> of an HTML page which means the JavaScript that belongs in the <head> can’t be inserted. You’re restricted to working within the <body>. If memory serves, this same limitation exists in WebCT and Blackboard.

This explains a lot — for example, why so many course authors don’t author in these LMSs; they build most of their content outside the LMS and only send their learners into the LMS for quizzes and exams. It also explains some of the popularity of Flash for learning objects — a SWF file is self-contained and doesn’t require script in the <head> of the html page.

Boris’s idea for an online self-assessment tool is a good one — students usually like these self-test devices, and the right questions could be a strong bridge between labwork and examinations.

But Boris’s need for two kinds of feedback – instant and formative – raises interesting questions. Can the same self-assessment tool do both? Is formative feedback implicit in instant feedback anyway – or, rather, implicit enough for high school students to be able to infer where they need to increase their studies.

Any Web-enabled “machine” self-assessment tool should be able to do this, at least in a crude fashion. Get a question wrong on krypton, and the machine response to that question tells you to study that specific part of the table of elements more closely. Some question-authoring software should allow the instructor to program formative feedback based on the student’s total score, drawing broad areas of deficient understanding to the student’s attention and suggesting how s/he can address those deficiencies with remedial study.