Multimedia: enhancing my learning

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The most obvious case of multimedia enhancing my learning in the past couple of months that I can think of is a a YouTube video that I wanted recently on how to network two PCs running Windows XP with a crossover cable.

I’m pretty technical, but I’m a Mac guy. When you want to network 2 Macs, there’s about 3 steps on each computer … and you’re done. Windows – particularly XP – is different. One resource I consulted listed as many as 35 steps to complete on each PC.

Needless to say, I needed help … and help is exactly what I got on YouTube. I managed to find a 7-minute video that walked through the process step-by-step … and then I managed to duplicate it with the two PCs I needed to network.

The helpful part for me was that many things were easier when you had a visual … and good commentary. This would have been harder to duplicate in a plaintext document, certainly, and potentially also challenging in an illustrated document.

The video was helpful, the audio was insightful … and it was a great example of just-in-time multimedia learning.

Story-telling in School

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Story-telling may be the oldest knowledge-transmission technique. In oral cultures, it’s often the primary means of sharing and propagating knowledge and culture. But how can it be used in modern school?

This one of the questions I was considering as I created a social media artifact for ETEC 565: Tripping out from Vancouver to Amsterdam to Cairo (see also Reflection on Creating Social Media).

Stories are known to be glue elements that tie seemingly disparate events together into a narrative, helping learners relate chunks of knowledge and understand them better (Akkerman, Admiraal, Huizenga). By fitting elements together in a story that contains internal (and ideally also external) logic and consistency, teachers can help students maintain attention, interest, and motivation … important elements in understanding and retention.

Perhaps because stories have been with us so very long, they are a very natural way to convey and receive information (Hill & Baumgartner). In an era when much of what happens in school may seem divorced from reality outside of the classroom, that’s a valuable thing.

Anything that can be put in narrative form without being forced could potentially be taught in story. Geography, history, and science are obvious candidates. Even math and physics can enlist narrative: who doesn’t remember the famous story of Archimedes in the bathtub discovering the principle of displacement? Gravity, of course, has its own (probably apocryphal) story of Newton and the apple.

The critical component, I think, is authenticity. If a story is obviously fake or made-up … something dreamed-up by a teacher desperate to help students learn … it is less likely to capture imagination and stir motivation. There is such an animal as willing suspension of disbelief, but it only goes so far, and probably not as far for lower-quality stories than higher. A story that is rooted in human experience (whether actual or metaphorical) has a greater chance to engage students.

Stories, of course, are far more than words. Certainly recently, teachers are adding rich media to their story-telling efforts. Young and Kajger speak about digital video and image technologies being integrated into English and Language Arts classrooms (2009).

And it’s not just teacher creating stories for students. Perhaps the true power of narrative is realized when students start telling their own stories … using words, images, video, audio, and other rich technologies.

That, perhaps, should be the goal of every story-telling teacher: students who in turn teach through narrative.

References

Akkerman, S., Admiraal, W., & Huizenga, J. (2009). Storification in History Education: A Mobile Game in and about Medieval Amsterdam. Computers & Education, v52 n2 p449-459.

Hill, C. & Baumgartner, L. (2009). Stories in Science: The Backbone of Science Learning. Science Teacher, v76 n4 p60-64.

Young, C. & Kajder, S. (2009). Telling Stories with Video. Learning & Leading with Technology, v36 n8 p38.

Reflection on creating social media

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This is a little odd, to be truthful. I’m reflecting on creating my social media creation before I’ve actually posted it! There is a reason, however, and it’s part of what I’m going to reflect on.

I created a video presentation that highlighted many of the photos and videos that I took on a recent trip to Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Cairo, Egypt. The way I decided to do that was via a screencast from my desktop.

Technical
The photos were stored in iPhoto, but for easy and quick access to just the right ones I exported them to my desktop (that’s a fancy way of saying I dragged them to my desktop) and then simply opened them in a simple, light-weight image viewer, Preview. The videos (short, low-quality video from my digital camera) were also in iPhoto, and I dragged selected ones to the desktop as well for simple, sequential access.

As I used Preview to show the pictures, and QuickTime to show the movies, I captured the onscreen action with Snapz Pro X, a popular screencapturing tool for Mac OS X. Snapz Pro also captures audio from both the computer and me, so it’s an all-in-one solution.

I also accessed Google Maps in satellite mode to show where Amsterdam and Egypt are.

Story-telling
I wanted to craft something that gave viewers (and potential students) not just an impression of the trip, but also some historical and cultural takeaways. Plus, I wanted to plant seeds for further exploration.

I chose a narrative format, mostly sequential, to give a sense of motion and pace, and also to approximate the flow of a trip: leaving, traveling, arriving, seeing, doing, experiencing, and returning.

Why these tools
These tools made sense because I could bring different media in …

In the case of Google Maps, I could help viewers orient spatially … and when coupled with screencasting, i could do it in a way that did not interrupt the flow of the narrative, but actually enhanced it (IMHO).

That’s the key value that screencasting brought: the ability to stream any images, video, and audio that I could display and create at my computer. Plus, it allowed me to stream that in one simple video file.

I was tempted to do a minisite format: a small website with multiple pages and posts. This is a great way to allow learners/viewers/visitors/learners to experience the content at their own pace, according to their own interests, and to the depth that they wish.

However, rather than a destination for learners to explore, I wanted a springboard to launch … to launch inquiry, investigation, verification, and so forth.

The screencasting format also allowed me to accompany the video easily with an relaxed, comfortable, unscripted audio track in which I could just be natural, normal, and unstilted … and offer up as much of the flavor of my trip and the things that I learned as possible.

Students
Giving students access to tools like these allows for very simple creation of surprising good media, in fairly short order. However, movies created with these tools can also be imported into more sophisticated applications to create more heavily produced movies with titles, subtitles, a music track … the possibilities are endless.

Note, however, that doing this requires significantly more time.

The problem
The main problem I had was that Snapz Pro creates movie files with multiple audio tracks … and online video hosting services such as YouTube and Vimeo can only read one audio track when they convert videos into their own formats for viewing online.

So, when I first uploaded the video, it had no sound. I had to save and export the video in a number of different ways to try to find a way to upload it in a format that would preserve the essential audio track.

As I write this, I’ve tried a different export, have re-uploaded the video, and am now waiting for Vimeo to convert it to see if I’ve been successful – this third time!

Integrating story-telling into education
I’ve published a separate post on integrating story-telling into school, which includes some pedagogical rational for this educational practice, and some ideas on what can make this an effective technique.

Rules of Engagement: Wiki or Forum?

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I’m wondering about what kinds of engagement communities develop when using wikis versus forums. (I’m always tempted to say fora!)

Perhaps the better question is: what kind of engagement do wikis privilege, and what kind of engagement do forums privilege?

Off the top of my mind, and based on my experience in social media, forums privilege ephemera … quick posts, many posts, and topical material. Most posts are created, read, responded to, and buried in the ongoing flow in a matter of days. Wikis, on the other hand privilege organized information and a slower, longer creation process. Wiki entries might evolve over months or years – in fact, they may never cease evolving, as long as there are people with an interest in the topic.

One would think, therefore, that forums are more community-centric because they are more like conversations. Wikis are more like magazine articles. They are definitely social artifacts, but the process of creating them is not as intensely social. This does not mean, however, that close-knit communities do not develop around wikis – witness the Wikipedia authors’ and curators’ community. But the community seems to happen in a sense beside or around the wiki, whereas forums are the locus of the communities that use them.

The challenge is to go into the world and find out … to observe behavior and test the hypothesis!

Sample assessment activity

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I’ve posted a sample of an e-learning assessment activity to my WebCT account.

I’ve chosen to do a self-assessed quiz that incorporates a number of different question-and-answer strategies: multiple choice, matching, short answer, and short essay. I’ve also incorporated feedback for the student whenever possible.

The set-up for the quiz includes the following options:

  • Deliver questions one at a time
  • Timed (30 minutes)
  • Unlimited attempts allowed (questions randomized for each attempt; minimum attempt time of 10 minutes)
  • Student score released
  • Statistics released

The goals here are fairly simple. Gibbs and Simpson (2004) indicate that student learning behavior is heavily drive by assessment (p 4). Hence, the first goal is to assess the most critical learning components. Furthermore, they state that high-quality feedback is strongly and positively correlated with learning. So the goal is to incorporate as much feedback as possible. This includes the very basic feedback of students seeing what they answered correctly and what they answered incorrectly, and a more advanced level of providing feedback on each answer to selected questions.

Also, Gibbs and Simpson make it clear that formative assessment is a very powerful means of ensuring that learning is occurring … so I’ve set this up during the course as a formative assessment exercise, not at the end of the course as a summative test at the end of a unit.

A benefit of using ICT technology for assessment like this, provided it is set up properly, is that every student can receive feedback on their performance … something that would be more difficult to achieve with in-person or non-ICT forms of assessment. Note however that this increase in scale of assessment comes with a concomitant decrease in the personalization of assessment, a negative that must be taken into account and compensated for elsewhere in the course.

Of critical importance to me as the instructor is not just that students are able to assess their own level of learning but that I can get a good picture of how well students are progressing – both individually and as a whole. Fortunately, WebCT has build capabilities into the system to enable me to review student performance in Assessment Manager. I can view student’s responses individually or as a group, and I can track performance across all students for a single question fairly easily. I can also review reports that give me a visual snapshot of student performance. All of these can be used to refocus teaching to compensate for any systemic deficiencies, or provide personal and more extensive feedback on an individual basis where students may require.

A few final notes: I set up the quiz to deliver questions one at a time so that students can focus on each question individually. Timing is set up to encourage some level of pre-knowledge of the subject matter before taking the quiz. Unlimited attempts are allowed, and the final grade is an average of all attempts, because I do not want to penalize poor test takers. And finally, both the student score and statistics are released so that students can self-assess their performance.

References:

Gibbs, G., & Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Retrieved June 23, 2009, from The Open University: http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf

Intel Learning Series Alliance Summit

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For the past three days I’ve been in Cairo, Egypt, at the Intel Learning Series Alliance Summit.

The summit is a forum for Intel to bring together an entire ecosystem of companies providing pieces of the solution pie for its education initiatives. Those revolve primarily but not exclusively around the Classmate PC, a purpose-built hardware platform for education.

The ecosystem includes a wide range of companies:

  • local OEMs (tech industry jargon for original equipment manufacturers) from many of the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) countries
  • ODMs (original design manufacturers: companies that create hardware specifications or recipes for the OEMs to follow)
  • Education service providers (companies that present a unified and more or less complete solution to a local education agency in the form of hardware, software, and services that they usually aggregate from multiple providers)
  • Software companies with education-specific solutions (and a few here that have generic solutions they are applying to the education world)
  • Intel personnel from around the world

It’s been an amazing conference, not least because of the chance to see the pyramids or because I had the opportunity to address the entire group on the first day … but also to see the immense range of companies and individuals who are part of providing educational technology solutions.

I think it’s a part of the educational technology spectrum that many educators have only a shadowy knowledge of. There are huge product, implementation, and support needs for any significant school technology effort, and most of these are multi-national and complex project-based collaborations and partnerships between easily 10 or 15 companies.

To simplify the world a little for educators, Intel is promoting the idea of the ESP: Educational Service Provider. This company brings together many custom components of a solution for a school, district, or educational region, after consulting with the school to understand their needs. After meeting with a number of these, it’s clear there’s a lot of expertise here!

It’s gratifying to see the effort that Intel has put into ensuring a secure pedagogical foundation for their products, training, and implementation resources. They’ve also spent heavily on ethnography to understand local needs in regions all over the world. And some members of their teams, like Sabine Huber in Intel Germany, have advanced degrees in educational technology (Huber’s is in 1:1 computing).

Much more going on here … too much to say! Hopefully I’ll have more chance to blog it on the flight home.

Twittpedia

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This is a cross-post from the course discussion forum. For the past couple of days I’ve been reflecting on what the below experiences of learning signify for the larger context of K12 educational technology.

Anderson talks about learning being learner-, knowledge-, assessment- and community-centred.

The most learner-centered environments I’ve experienced have at one and the same time been the most solipsistic (or at least solitary), and the most social environments. They’ve both been within the wild, undisciplined, unplanned, decentralized, haphazard environment of the web itself.

Besides my MET courses, one of my primary learning experiences is just-in-time learning for just about anything, online. Wikipedia, online forums, help sites, you name it: they all have a place in learning. This is intensely self-directed, intensely focused, and requires strong information searching, retrieval, and processing skills. This is learner-centred, but it’s also knowledge-centred. Assessment is binary: did I find the information I needed to solve my problem. Community is involved, but only in the abstract sense that those who care to share their knowledge online build the overall repository that all of us can then access.

But another of my primary learning experiences is Twitter … connecting with smart, creative people who see and share interesting facts, theories, experiences, and resources. This is intensely social, usually very undirected and unfocused (unless you search or ask questions), and requires an ability to ignore irrelevancies and treat knowledge as a stream into which you will dip the occasional toe rather than a body of work that must be surveyed and mapped and conquered. This is a very community-centred learning.

Twitter and other social networking tools like it are potentially prototypes of learning sites that school districts and regions could create (easy to do with open source components) that would allow everyone in a school environment with expertise in anything share it with others – and benefit from others’ knowledge … all in real-time or near real time. It makes me wonder about a potential marriage of a Twitter with a Wikipedia … the ephemera of what knowledge individuals need now coupled with the relative longevity of increasingly accurate and better units of knowledge.

In fact, now that I think about it … I’m tempted to try to build such an animal!

Anderson, T. (2008). Towards a theory of online learning. In T. Anderson & F. Elloumi, Theory and Practice of Online Learning. Athabasca University Press. Accessed June 11, 2009, from http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/02_Anderson_2008_Anderson-Online_Learning.pdf