Tag Archives: video

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.