Weeks 13 and 14 Activities 2b, 2c – audio/video evidence

I watched a narrated slide show of the results of the JISC LXP study by Grainne Conole (you need to download and save the presentation to get the narration to work)

[slideshare id=121445&doc=conole-jisc-lxp4304]

This followed on from the paper we read in Activity 2a which provided a report of the same project.

The slide show helped to reinforce and scaffold (dare I use a term like that when I don’t fully understand it, have I used it correctly) the learning from the paper.  Watching the slideshow having read the paper made it easier to understand. Just listening and watching the very BUSY slides would have been confusing if I’d done that first.  I found the slides really messy and hard to read it all while listening. The downside I found about the slide show was that having already read the report twice, I wanted to skip some of the slide show but whereas with reading you can skim read and leap frog bits, this is difficult with audio as you may miss something important or  new. I chose not to use the transcript by the way, as I wanted to experience just slides and audio narration.

The media used for this message the author to emphasise points in a much more informal way as it isn’t bound by research publication standards, enabling the author to emphaise key messages to the audience without having to stick to academic writing standards – the author can be more personal and refer to the first person and their findings which, for me, made it more interesting.

For me the video clips added some level of reality to the study. The things the student was saying complimented the studies findings, however, the video of her working at home and in the learning labs at University made the prose in the study come to life. I could now picture, for real, what it was like to be a student today and not just imagine what the study means. However young I like to think I am, it is wrong to assume that you can put yourself in the shoes of those 15 years younger than you in this completely different environment to myUG experience where you were lucky to get access to a PC and all PC’s did then was enable you to present your work in Word, Excel and PowerPoint – well, at least that’s what I found. With the videos you are not just taking someones word for it, you can see the claims in action.

Keith wrote this in the forums: “For the LXP project, Conole(2008) finds that “that students are using a range of different types of e-learning strategies, appropriating the tools to meet their own needs” What does this imply for us educators or designers? Should different types of technologies be made accessible for particular learning outcomes so that all possible types of learners can be accomodated? I think that the research we have been reviewing is putting us in this direction, but I doubt that this is practical in a real context.” (Keith Aquilina, 14 May 2009 22:49:45
Subject: Re: A2d: Forum discussion To:  H800 les6 09 W13-14 A2d)

I responded: “If you think that  Conole’s statement refers to e-resources (eg podcasts, multimedia resources, online tests etc) then the answer to how to accommodate all types of learners means that yes we would have to create these resources in all type of media which would not happen due to cost. So how do we ensure, with these types of resources, that different learning styles and the need for learner choice (as Conole puts it – voting with their feet if they don’t see value in it) will suffer.

However, I think she is actually referring to dialogue tools to encourage participatory learning. eg  Web 2.0 tools like forums, SNSs, MSN, blogs, etc (i include VLE forums here) then the implication is that we need to design the learning content to enable communication and then let the students choose how they communicate. But the implications of this is: should we make participation a requirement, if so, I like the idea of the eportfolio self assessment of participation that we touched on several weeks ago for this. The other implication is how to we ensure students are discussing the right things and not leading each other down the wrong paths. I wonder if Emma and Jenny’s course in the videos for LXP made the eportfolio a requirement or optional…and wonder what the opinions of the the less “comfortable with technology” students were…”

Week 5 Activity 6 – The spread of social networks (wesch)

We then watched a presentation made by Wesch to the “library of congress” about web 2.0 and he talks about what happened with the “is the machine us/ing us” video we watched earlier.

He states that because of all the web 2.0 tools such as You Tube, Delicious, Digg it, etc, the viral spread of the word to watch his video was exponential.

He highlights the issues of
web 2.0 building community – people emulating each other and sharing experiences
People wanting to share something with others – not caring what they think – being oneself
A celebration of a new form of empowerment, a new form of community and types of community not seen before, global connections, transcending space and time.

About the Machine video he says
I started with text on paper and thinking about what it meant to move to digital text and what that move really means
what I was trying to get at was when you unpack the impacts of the – digital text and you think about the separation of form and content blogs, Wiki’s, tagging; all of these things leads to a necessity to really think what the web is all about.
it is actually about linking people and it’s about linking people in ways that we’ve never been linked before

User control (link to McLuhan perhaps)
This is like user generated filtering where the users can get together and they can they can give it the thumbs up if they like it.
is user-generated organisation eg Delicious and Digg It
user-generated distribution eg RSS
user-generated commentary eg blogging

really interesting integrated mediascape that we now live in. And at the centre of this mediascape is us.

Basically he was saying that through the web 2.0 tools of organisation, distribution and commentary, people (us) are controlling the sharing of knowledge around the networked world.

What Wesch was intending to do when he made the video, was not to see what people learned from the video, but to see what social action took place after it was published on You Tube.

You can watch Wesch’s presentation here on You Tube.

Week 5 Activity 5 – Comparing Video and Text for the same message

Now that you have read O’Reilly’s article explaining Web 2.0 and viewed Wesch’s video, we would like you to compare your reactions to these two different ‘texts’ – the written text and the video text – and how the two different media forms affect the way you as the audience receive the messages encoded in them.
How do you think what you have learned is affected by the form of media in which the ideas are represented?
I think what I have learned is significantly effected by how the ideas are represented. For me, reading the printed text was harder than watching the video. This reflects what Saloman found when he did research with children, in the watching a video is less challenging. But he did also state that you don’t use the brain as much as you would with the printed word so perhaps you don’t learn as much or as deeply.
I liked how Wesch used the medium he was telling us about to represent the knowledge, it does seem a bit conflictual to use print to talk about non-print concepts as O’Reilly’s article did.

However, because I read O’Reilly’s article first, you could say that Wesch’s video was being watching with the knowledge from O’Reilly already acquired and that the video was simply reinforcing or helping me to conceptualise the information in O’Reilly. It’s evident from our discussions that Saloman is correct that in what ever media you are practised in interpreting, you will learn the most from (your capacity to interpret) and for me, I know that I have become lazy at reading and do it rarely and the TV and internet take my focus most of the time when I’m not being a mum and housewife! I need things to be short and to the point.

What elements of the video are not present in the written text? The elements in the written text that were in the video including being able to move the text around and edit the text to really reinforce the message to people who are used to viewing and using computer based word processers. Using the HTML background for some of the text narration was useful as it helped you understand what HTML was. Whereas O’Reilly’s article assumed a lot of prior technical knowledge of computer technology which you had to try and comprehend yourself or through other research/ discussions as Frauke did with her husband for Activity 3.
The video not only narrated a message, but showed you what each statement meant too.

Are there aspects of the written text not available in the video? What are they?

The aspects from the written text that were missing in the video were the detail about –
· the comparisons between old web and web 2.0;
· the concept of web 2.0 being about companies with Web 2.0 characteristics;
· the concept of being a service provider and not just a “web site”;
· The strategy a company must adopt to be considered Web 2.0.

Kathy Doncastor writes: -

the video gave an experience of Web 2.0 technologies, while the O’Reilly article discussed them, ie the first *was* the message, was an exemplar of Web 2.0 technologies, and the second was *about* the message of what Web 2.0 is.

I wrote:

Me too, I have reflected on how I wonder if the message would have been different if I had not read O’Reilly first, and just watching the video and how if I’d not seen the video with the sound first, how different I would have really felt about it without the sound. Your point about how O’Reilly gives us the message and Wesch gives us the about is, you could say, the Acquisition metaphor in practice. O’Reilly – the AM and Wesch – developing our understanding of what we have acquired – the conceptualisation metaphor perhaps

. Kathy Doncastor writes

in contrast, the article used text to build a linear argument through the flow and sequentiality of one thing following another that text’s linearity allows. It backgounded text itself and foregrounded *content*.

I wrote:

I thought the video was quite linear and sequential as well. It painted a very interesting picture and linked each narration well giving the viewed a good understanding of the message by the end. But you’re right in that the print gave us more context and background.

Doncaster, K. (2009) H800 les6 09 Week 5 9 March 2009 12.94

Week 5 Activity 4 – Video about web 2.0

This activity was to watch a animation/video explaining what WEb 2.0 is. The idea being to compare in the next activity our responses to the written word from Activity 3 (O’Reilly’s article on web 2) and the video communication later in Activity 6.

The video is on You Tube here. It’s by Michael Wesch, who works at Kansas State University heading up a group which is dedicated to exploring and extending the possibilities of digital ethnography.

It’s interesting to see in the forums that there is a variety of responses to the video. Interestingly I think I was the only one who preferred the video with the sound on. It was just background music, no narration, but for me it helped me to focus my senses on the video. When I turned the music off I found I couldn’t concentrate as easily – 1. because I’d already watched it so maybe if I was watching it for the first time I’d have felt differently and 2. there was back ground noise around me so that distracted my audio senses.

The discussions just show how many different preferences there are out there.
We also talked about accessibility issues surrounding the video and came up with obvious ones just as problems for visually impaired and people without broadband internet.

Taking the quote from McLuhan that the “message is the medium” – what this video did was use the medium web 2.0 to explain what web 2.0 is. The video used images of the internet really cleverly to explain what we were being told so people could relate what they use on the internet with the definition of web2.0.

He concluded the video by saying that we are web 2.0, without individual input there would be no web 2.0.