Workshop 2015 Session Notes: Student-Created Video

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One of our first two sessions this past weekend was on student-created video: digital stories, video essays, remixes and other motion-picture media students create as an assignment or exercise in a course.  Since that is an area of expertise for me and I was facilitating the session, it probably turned into more of a Q and A than we intended. But to be fair, there are a number of issues, some conceptual, some logistical and technical, that are important to address, so I completely understand the desire to mold it in that way.

We started by talking about what brought each of the participants to the session, and out of that introductory conversation came some useful comments.  Some participants felt that student-created video assignments are valuable because students feel the process of creating a video is more fun than writing an essay.  One question to consider in response to this suggestion is whether this sense among students will be a lasting one, especially as faculty become more comfortable with assigning video projects and genres of scholarly video production like the documentary and the video essay become more established.  Others felt this could also be a detriment, in that the “cute” factor as one participant put it can be more of a driver of the video quality than the intellectual ideas the assignment was supposed to encourage.

We moved from there to a range of concerns participants had with these kinds of assignments.  There were three core issues we discussed during the session:

  • How much tutorial time and effort is necessary with students today to ensure they have the tools available to make a competent video?
  • What about evaluation of video work? Rubrics or other methods of assessment?
  • What is the legality of posting student work online, both in terms of the fair use of copyrighted material and of their own rights to protect their work?

Regarding the first set of questions, I shared that I’ve written a piece for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Teaching Dossier called “Production as Plug-in” in which I lay out a number of ways to approach the issue, depending on what your pedagogical goals are. We talked about my argument there in broad strokes, but briefly, my experience is that how much tutorial you build into your course schedule depends both on what your objectives are for your video production assignment and what your comfort level is with guiding your students through that work.  Though you by no means must be an expert, there is probably a minimum amount of assistance you should at least know where to point them to for most projects.

Regarding the second set of issues, we discussed that the key is keeping the focus always on what it is you want your students to practice or develop through the assignment, and crafting your criteria around that.  I did do a little research after the session, and there are some tools out there that are pre-built – edtechteacher.org and EdTech Central both have some good links to others’ rubrics for video projects – and some good advice on engaging the rubric-creation process in more depth so as to create your own if you’re interested.  I don’t use rubrics but I give my students a list of “evaluation criteria” phrased as questions that, if answered in the affirmative, constitute successful completion of the assignment.

Finally, regarding the last set, we talked about how the legality of posting work online is a contentious one, as I’m sure most readers will be aware.  As we discussed in the session, the issue of copyright goes “both ways” so to speak: concerns arise both about the use of others’ material in student projects, and about how free others will be to use student-produced material in their projects.  The latter question is actually easier to address because copyright law stands clearly on the side of the creator.  So assuming the student produced the material entirely on their own, they retain the right to decide who can copy it and who cannot. Enforcing that right is the harder part of that battle, but the volume of new material being produced every day is so great (even just to one sharing site) that students’ projects are adrift in it, so the likelihood of another finding and using a student’s work illegally is also quite low.

Most thorny is the question of whether and when a student is legally allowed to use another’s material in a project for a course.  Such “fair use,” and the nuances of the federal act and the case law that surround it, are both too voluminous for this post and not fully in my area of expertise.  In my field of media studies, we are lucky to be able to build on the work of several scholars who do have that expertise, and who have been working for the last few years to develop a set of “best practices” for working with copyrighted content in video production.  The best statement of those practices currently is a document also produced by SCMS, and while it is oriented toward media studies faculty and courses, it can be generally useful to others as well.

Given the brevity of the session and the scope and depth of these topics, we really only were able to touch on them at the workshop.  But we’re likely to have additional lunch or Saturday morning workshop sessions in the future, so if you’d like to see something like this topic discussed in the future, let us know here in the comments below. 🙂

DP Activity: Wikipedia Assignment

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Here’s a potentially useful activity using Wikipedia, from a post over on The Conversation by Ellis Jones.

What I like about this “adopt-a-theorist’s-Wikipedia-page” assignment is that it gets students thinking about the way scholarly work often both is produced and managed: collaboratively and as a process over time, as opposed to solitarily and all at once in a moment of inspiration.

In addition, through engagement with existing pages on Wikipedia over time, students also get to engage with “others who share their interest in improving the quality of information available on a subject they care about.”  Since this happens within the Wikipedia interface, students have the opportunity to enter into dialogue both with the received wisdom Ellis refers to regarding the limited nature of the site’s usefulness, and with their own potentially ingrained notions about the site’s accuracy and efficacy at a given moment in time.

This kind of assignment could be effectively used in a wide range of disciplines, and if even a few students in each course take it seriously and do the work diligently, we all benefit from their contributions to the site down the road.

Using Tablets for Presentations and Grading–A Biochemistry Case Study

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interactive slide

With their Mellon Digital Pedagogy grant, Austin College professors John Richardson and Jim Hebda are experimenting with new methods of teaching biochemistry. In their spring 2015 course on biochemical metabolism, John and Jim are using tablets for untethered, dynamic PowerPoint-style presentations and electronic grading. Here’s how they describe the results so far:

The rationale of our Mellon project is to recapture some of the personal hands on approach that is lost when using PowerPoint presentations.

Biochemistry is a complex topic with a significant amount of intricate structure and visual content, which makes the traditional “chalk talk” difficult for both students and instructors.  By using PowerPoint lectures, students and instructors are free to spend more time on theory and less time on drawing out structures.  However, in-class questions and additional content that ends up being written on the board becomes lost and disjointed with respect to the pre-made slides when the students begin to study the material at home.

To this end we are using tablet technology to create the presentation, project it wirelessly to a large display screen, annotate slides during class and, if need be, add additional slides to the presentation on the fly. The advantage to the student is that after lecture the presentation (including the audio narration during class) can be uploaded to Moodle for future reference. An additional advantage of using the tablet is that the instructor is free to move around the room, enhancing class engagement and student participation. Furthermore, it would be possible to incorporate student use of the tablet during lecture as a novel way for them to mark up a slide during class.

To support this approach, we assessed the hardware available and settled on the Samsung Note 12.2 for its price point, extremely usable stylus technology, and ability to wirelessly mirror the display to a projector with an inexpensive device (we are experimenting with several streaming media adapters, including the Google Chromecast and the Amazon Fire Stick). On the software side, we are using Explain Everything for slide creation and annotation. As noted above, Explain Everything has the capacity to record audio and turn the presentation into a screen-mirrored movie, which we have done for most of our lectures this semester. Here is a portion of the presentation that we gave in the workshop, which was created using the method described here:


A second major feature of using the tablet is that we can grade student work electronically, thus preserving a record of the original and graded assignment. The students upload pdfs of their assignments, and we use a program called Papyrus to open and annotate those documents. Papyrus allows us to grade the assignment with a stylus, so the student still receives the exact same handwritten comments as before, but now in a digital format. Students thus still feel the direct connection of their instructors taking the time to make thoughtful commentary on the work handed in. Papyrus also has Dropbox support to allow easy import and export of files from the tablet. After being graded, the documents are uploaded back to Moodle in such a way that students can only retrieve their own work. We find it advantageous to keep a record of all our feedback to each student. In this way we can track student progress across the semester by accessing comments made on prior assignments rather than by relying on memory alone.

 

The objective of the project was to integrate tablets into lecture and grading, using the smaller CHEM 352 class as a pilot. We have done that and are continuing to refine the apps and software that best allow us to do what we want. We are confident that this approach can be successful with a large class like CHEM 351, Introduction to Biochemistry.

Flipping Out–Organic Chemistry

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One theme prominently highlighted at the Digital Pedagogy workshop was the “flipped” model of learning. In the “traditional” course, class meeting periods are predominantly designed for information transfer via lecture, and students process the content outside of class via homework, problem sets, exercises, etc. A flipped approach inverts this design; information and content transmission takes place mostly outside of the classroom, and meeting time is then devoted to more interactive forms of learning and processing of content, such as guided problem solving, question and answer, discussion, and peer instruction. Often (though not always) the flipped model involves the production of short video presentations by the instructor, which replace the in-class lectures. Students watch and rewatch the videos prior to classtime, in addition to doing assigned reading, and hopefully come to class better prepared to engage the material.

Several grantee projects incorporate elements of the flipped model. In this post, we feature the work of AC chemistry professor Andy Carr, who flipped his fall 2014 course, CHEM 221, Organic Chemistry I. Here are the slides to Andy’s presentation, followed by his narrative description of the project:

 

I have successfully completed my first run of CHEM 221 with the flipped model. Over the course of the Fall 2014 semester I learned how to edit videos and compress them so that the files could be placed directly in Moodle. Overall this has been a very satisfying project for me and for my students. Over 70% of the students in my section reported that they learned much more or somewhat more than they would have in a traditional lecture. Many students have stated that they liked viewing the lectures at their own pace instead of frantically taking notes during lecture.

Besides student opinion, I had other markers of success. I had the lowest DFW (a grade of D, F, or withdrawal) rate in my career. Only two students did not complete the course, and only two students did not earn a C- or better. I started with 27 students; 23 moved on to second semester organic chemistry. Typically, organic chemistry has had a DFW rate of around 30%, and it has been as high as 56%. Overall, grades were slightly higher than they have been in the past.

Not only were students in my own classes benefiting from the videos; they also began to share them with their friends in other sections of organic chemistry. I then decided to make the videos available to the other sections of CHEM 221. So in total my videos were watched by approximately 80 students last semester. At the end of the semester students wanted to know which section of CHEM 222 I was teaching so they could make sure to stay in the sections with the videos. I told them that there may not be videos. This statement actually caused several students to beg and plead for me to continue making videos for CHEM 222. I was inundated by requests from students that were not even in my current section for me to continue the videos. I have never had students petition so strongly for anything like this (other than for a passing grade).

As part of the next iteration of the course I plan to use the quiz feature in Moodle to track student understanding of the videos/lecture material and to better link homework problems with the lectures.

Overall I think this has been a great experience for me and my students. I plan on flipping CHEM 222 and making the videos accessible to all organic chemistry students.

This is an outstanding example of the transformative possibilities for teaching and learning made possible by the smart application of technology to pedagogy. In upcoming posts we’ll present other projects embracing aspects of the flipped model, include Jennifer Johnson-Cooper‘s Beginning Chinese I (CHIN 101) and the team-taught course by John Richardson and Jim Hebda, Biochemical Metabolism (CHEM 352).

Scenes from a Workshop

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The 2015 Mellon Digital Pedagogy Workshop was held this past Saturday, and the participants enjoyed stimulating presentations and conversations about their projects. Fourteen grantees attended; there were four showcase demonstrations of completed (or nearly completed) projects, and six breakout sessions for attendees to choose from. We’ll be blogging a lot more of the specifics in the days to come, but for now, here are a few pictures from the proceedings.

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Gathering in the Library Digital Commons prior to getting started.

 

AndyCarrACDP

Andy Carr describes how he “flipped” his organic chemistry class to improve student learning outcomes.

 

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Jim Hebda explains how he and John Richardson have transformed their Biochemistry class by using tablets to create presentations, then projecting and annotating them during class and saving the files with voice narration for students to watch and listen to again later.

 

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Discussing textual and video annotations during a breakout session in Abell 104

 

ACDPCollaboratory

A breakout session on collaborative student learning spaces

ACDPlunch

We continue the conversation with a working lunch.

“Nota Bene”–Collaborative Digital Annotation

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At tomorrow’s Mellon Digital Pedagogy Workshop there will be several breakout sessions on themes shared among grantee projects. We’ll be blogging about those over the coming days and sharing insights and perspectives.

One of the shared themes is “collaborative digital annotation.” Several grantees, including Dan Dominick, Elena Olive’, and Kirk Everist, have projects in which students mark up and comment upon digital documents, including texts, images, audio, and video. What is that and why might you be interested? Actually, we did a presentation on this topic last fall at a Johnson Center luncheon, so I’ll reprise those remarks here to provide some background on the subject of annotation.

You are no doubt familiar with marking up things that we read in print form…underlining, highlighting, writing notes and comments in the margins of books and papers, or special symbols and doodles that signify something important about what we’ve read. This is nothing new…readers have been marking up texts ever since, well, there have been texts. For example, in this brief video classicist Gregory Nagy describes the annotation of manuscripts in the ancient era with notes (scholion) and marginal references (hypomnema):

 

After the emergence of print and the explosion of books in Europe in the early modern period, the practice of marginalia flourished as an art form. Literary historians tell us that the golden age of marginalia lasted from roughly 1700 to 1820, and that it was not unusual for people to mark up books for one another as gifts. The English poet and literary figure Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) even published several volumes of his marginalia (and apparently coined the term itself).

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More recently, the American author David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) was renowned for marking up books in his library. For example, here is an image from his copy of Don Delillo’s Ratner’s Star (click on image to make it larger):

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Today, of course, more and more of our (formerly print) documents are in digitized formats…narratives, essays, electronics books and journals, lab reports, legal briefs, play scripts, musical scores, computer code, diagrams, drawings, sketches, photographs, maps, etc. And of course there are increasing amounts of digitized audio and video material.

So the question is, are there ways to annotate these digitized documents in a way analogous to the marking up of books and manuscripts in the past? Can we make digital annotations in the context of the original document, using multiple forms of media, to which other readers, listeners. or viewers can respond, thus creating a dialogue or conversation? What we want is an arrangement in which the original content remains in the center of the online space, and comments, notes, and questions are connected to it at specific points…particular words, phrases, or sentences in a text, regions of an image, and timelines and frames of audio and video files. And this space should be a collaborative space in which scholars and students interact with one another’s annotations in the context of the original document.

The concept of collaborative annotation was actually part of the origin of the World Wide Web. Marc Andreessen, co-developer of Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, recently recalled what he was thinking back in the early ’90s:

Only a handful of people know that the big missing feature from the web browser – the feature that was supposed to be in from the start but didn’t make it – is the ability to annotate any page on the Internet with commentary and additional information.

Back in 1993, when Eric Bina and I were first building Mosaic, it seemed obvious to us that users would want to annotate all text on the web – our idea was that each web page would be a launchpad for insight and debate about its own contents. So we built a feature called “group annotations” right into the browser – and it worked great – all users could comment on any page and discussions quickly ensued. Unfortunately, our implementation at that time required a server to host all the annotations, and we didn’t have the time to properly build that server, which would obviously have had to scale to enormous size. And so we dropped the entire feature.

I often wonder how the Internet would have turned out differently if users had been able to annotate everything – to add new layers of knowledge to all knowledge, on and on, ad infinitum.

And Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, reflected back on the origin of the PageRank algorithm, the heart of Google’s search engine:

It wasn’t that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web – build a system so that after you’d viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank.

Only later did we realize that PageRank was much more useful for search than for annotation…

Over the last two decades, any number of annotation tools and platforms have been developed to try to realize this earlier vision of Andreessen and Page, with somewhat limited success. Projects such as Annotations at Harvard and the Hyperstudio Digital Humanities Lab at MIT are working to develop tools and standards for use in scholarly annotation projects. Some of the tools we have recommended and/or are looking at include:

Several faculty, including the grantees mentioned above, are experimenting with Classroom Salon, with promising results so far. They will be sharing their experiences here so that we can all learn from them. In addition, Brett and Mo are both users of Diigo to collect and annotate web-based content, so we’ll probably do a post on that at some point.

Finally, the W3C, the international body responsible for determine the protocols that make the Web work, has just established the W3C Web Annotation Working Group. Their goal is to develop a common set of standards for annotating on the web. According to the group,

Traditional annotations are marginalia, errata, and highlights in printed books, maps, picture, and other physical media. Web annotations are an attempt to recreate and extend that functionality as a new layer of interactivity and linking on top of the Web. It will allow anyone to annotate anything anywhere, be it a web page, an ebook, a video, an image, an audio stream, or data in raw or visualized form. Web annotations can be linked, shared between services, tracked back to their origins, searched and discovered, and stored wherever the author wishes; the vision is for a decentralized and open annotation infrastructure.

So we look forward to ongoing developments and improvements that will become available for us to enhance scholarship and the engagement of students with content of every kind.

Webinar–Teaching and Researching with Scalar

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We’ve recently been providing information on the digital publishing tool Scalar here on the blog and at Johnson Center luncheons. Now comes word that HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory) will host a free (registration required) webinar introducing Scalar on Wednesday, April 8, from 2:00 to 3:15 pm Austin College time. From the website:

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This workshop will serve as an introduction to Scalar, a free, open-source authoring and publishing platform designed for scholars writing media-rich, long-form, born-digital scholarship. Developed by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture at the University of Southern California, Scalar allows scholars to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose that media with their own writing in a variety of ways; to annotate video, audio, images, source code, and text using the platform’s build-in media annotation tools; and to structure essay- and book-length works in ways that take advantage of the unique capabilities of digital writing, including nested, recursive, and non-linear formats.

This workshop will cover basic features of the platform, including a review of existing Scalar books and a hands-on introduction to paths, tags, annotations, and importing media, and then move on to more advanced topics including the effective use of visualizations, annotating with media, and a primer on customizing appearances in Scalar.

Tell Me a (Digital) Story

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DigstoryProcessAt yesterday’s Johnson Center luncheon we discussed digital storytelling and also took a look at Scalar, a “free, open source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online.” More specifically, we thought about how digital stories could be further enriched by being situated in an interactive context such Scalar.

The most common form of digital storytelling produces a video of three to five minutes in length (or perhaps somewhat longer), consisting of a voice-over narration of a sequence of images or slides or short motion clips, with transitions, perhaps accompanied by a musical soundtrack. Most often these stories are produced with programs such as Windows MovieMaker and Apple’s iMovie. Effective stories require careful attention to narrative arc, voice, point of view, tempo, audience, storyboarding, and other elements of vocal, textual, and visual communication.

A culture and practice for digital storytelling has developed at Austin College, particular among students participating in travel abroad programs such as the Go Fellow and JanTerm study trips. A good number of the stories produced in the last several years can be found on the AC YouTube site; look under “Playlists,” for example, to see Go Fellows digital stories for 2014, 2013, 2012, and earlier.

An excellent resource for digital storytelling ideas is the website, Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling at the University of Houston. You might check out their “7 Elements of Digital Storytelling” as well as “8 Steps to Great Digital Storytelling,” for starters. There is a helpful section on tools and software, and a gallery of digital stories covering a wide range of topics. Another helpful site for resources is the Digital Storytelling Library Guide at Mercy College.

Specific tutorials guides that I would recommend include Making a Digital Story in iMovie ’11 and Digital Story Production Using Windows Movie Maker.

Several of our Mellon Digital Pedagogy projects, such as those of Elena Olive’, Julie Hempel and Terry Hoops, and Kirk Everist, involve aspects of digital storytelling. We look forward to learning more from them about the creative uses of digital storytelling and publishing in their classes. In the meantime, if you’d like help with a project of your own, just let us know, and we’ll be happy to help.

Draftback and Writing Visualization

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FiveThirtyEight points to a neat little Chrome extension called Draftback that can “play back” any document composed in Google Docs.  As the author indicates, it does this by treating your writing as data, with each individual character entry or deletion (which are already tracked by Docs) being sequenced and played back by Draftback.

This could be a useful way to help students visualize the process of their writing.  What about a workshop session like this?

  • Students write drafts of their essays in Google Docs.
  • They share them with a partner or small group (or the professor) before class.
  • Their group watches each draftback animation and notes places where the author made specific structural, thematic, or grammatical choices that contributed significantly to the current draft, as well as speculate about other directions the draft could have taken if different choices had been made.
  • Then in class, groups conduct a mini-workshop with each essay, drawing on the specifics of the draftback animation for details in their constructive criticism.

This approach could help students understand more concretely the nature of writing as process in addition to product, which is something students often struggle with but that can help immensely in both improving their writing and increasing their confidence in their own writing ability.

Do I Really Need (to Manage My) Email? Follow-up

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Thanks to those who were able to make it in to the Google Hangout version of my talk today.  Lots of good questions and comments about what works and what concerns you about using email as a tool for communicating with students (and others).

Here is the Prezi I used in the first half of the talk.  It’s fairly basic, but if you missed the talk entirely, it can give you some of the main points.

If you’re interested in learning more about GTD, Inbox Zero, or the Trusted Trio methods of email management, hit those links where you’ll find some short explanatory videos that lay out each method and their similarities. As always, there’s also plenty more out there that a little googling can help you unearth.

I also mentioned Boomerang, Better Gmail, and Gmail Meter, so if you’re interested in any of those, by all means, check them out.  Again, they’re aimed squarely at Gmail, but I do recommend working it into your routine if you can.

Speaking of that, I said I’d share with you my own routine, but time and my laptop battery life colluded against it, so it makes sense to share it here.  I operate day-to-day on a modified version of Inbox Zero, at least in principle: I shoot to clean out my inbox every time I open it, I do right now everything I can, I tend to write much shorter responses as I showed you, and I’m fairly ruthless about archiving old things.

A couple of things I also do that aren’t related Inbox Zero but are helpful to me:

  • I use the star function in Gmail (like flagging in Outlook) as a kind of “hold” folder, sloughing off emails that will take a while to deal with OR that I know I’ll need for reference in getting other work done that I can’t do right now.
  • I have my AC email forwarded to my gmail, so the two accounts are blended together seamlessly on my end.  This means I never have to use an app other than Gmail for my email.
  • I manage a few other Gmail accounts as well – one for the Johnson Center (acjohnsoncenter@gmail.com) and one for the Media Studies program (acmediastudies@gmail.com). This allows me to move files around, post things, and send out messages to folks using those different “voices.” I do not have these forwarded to my main account, as I use them relatively infrequently, but I could very easily do that as well.

There are probably other elements of my procedure that I’m not thinking of at the moment or that I intended to share in the talk today but did not.  Feel free to drop a note, question, or idea in the comments. 🙂

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