Learning with audiovisible and invisible authors Lessons learnt from a Political science course at U

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Learning with audio-visible and invisible
authorsLessons learnt from a Political science
course at USI University of Lugano, Switzerland

• Terry Inglese
• UCSB, 14th November 2006

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My background

• TV program designer and archivist at the Swiss
  public TV
• Indipendent documentary filmmaker
• PhD student
• Multimedia
• instructional designer
• Combination of
• academic and professional
• skills

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The memory institutions and the digital
revolution

• Archives - from storing objects to the management
  of the life cycle of digital and digitized
  products
• Libraries - from the reading room to the digital
  information service centre
• Museums - from collections to narrative
  connections and new experiences.
• from a static into a dynamic change

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Database and Narrative (Manovich 2001)
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• The emergence of new media coincides with
  accessing and reusing existing media objects as
  with creating new ones.
• (Manovich, 2001, pp. 35, 36)

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TV archive and new media

• New media tend to repackage old media through
  reproduction, manipulation, convergence.
• Benjamin (1977) and Baudrillard (1996)
• the loss of aura that the original work of art
  would lose if inserted into the age of mechanical
  reproduction.
• In our case studies, besides an apparent feeling
  of loss, there is a sense of gain that new media
  are providing, a gain that is not material, but
  cognitive and affective.

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The auratic value of new media

• New media are not just invented to meet the needs
  that already exist, but also new ones.
• Kress and Van Leeuwen, what is lost may return,
  and what is gained many yet turn out to be loss.
  The new technologies emphasis on multimodality,
  three dimensionality and interactivity can be
  seen as a return of many of the things that were
  lost in the transition from orality to literacy,
  as a second orality, in other words. (Kress, Van
  Leeuwen, 2001, p. 92).
• New media possess an auratic value, as the one of
  the medieval manuscripts, because these media
  become manuscript media, stored, transmitted,
  encoded and re-encoded in a digital form.

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The conceptual orality

• From this perspective, archives provide a return
  to a conceptual orality, that is to say, a
  return to the medieval framework wherein words or
  documents gained meaning only as they were
  closely related to their context and to actions
  arising from that context. In that oral
  tradition, meaning lies not in the records
  themselves, but (in) the transactions and customs
  to which they borrow witness as evidences.
  (...).
• (Taylor, in Cook, Dodds, 2003, p. 23).

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Taylor

• a catalogue remains a catalogue, but pattern
  recognition is the chef-doeuvre of human
  intelligence.
• The added value
• Discovering patterns of knowledge
• Extracting more from less
• (Taylor, in Cook, Dodds, 2003 )

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My work

• Goal
• to recognize the pedagogical as well as
  instructional benefits of studying with TV
  multimedia archives as learning tools, taking
  into account the students perspective.
• The genre TV interviews with Social Science
  scholars usually read and studied only through
  texts.

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RTSI Swiss public TV and radio

• Radio RSI - 30ies
• TV RTSI - 60ies
• because of the lack of the higher education
  institution like a university, the RTSI produced
  highly cultural programs (TV and radio) enhancing
  education and culture (Inglese, 1998)
• Genre of TV program the interview

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Availability and Affordances concepts

• availability concept archival content, produced
  in the past with analogue technologies, is easily
  transformed into digital support. This
  technological shift increases the potential
  availability of multimedia contents
• affordance concept students learn more deeply
  when they feel a personal relationship with the
  author to be studied, if the author (hypothesis)
  is offered beside the text - through a
  multimedia multimodal format such as a TV
  interview.
• (Inglese, Mayer, Rigotti (2007, in press))

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Media for learning

• Media can be defined by
• 1. the technology
• 2. the symbol systems
• 3. the processing capabilities

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media attributes and instructional methods

• it is not possible to separate the media
  attributes from the instructional methods
• What we have learned from all the media
  comparison research is that its not the medium,
  but rather the instructional methods that cause
  learning. (Mayer, Clark, 2003, p. 21)
• Learning depends on the quality of instructional
  messages and instructional methods rather than
  the medium per se.

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Multimedia learning - Mayer

• The cognitive theory of multimedia learning.
  (2001, 2003, 2005, etc.)
• Multimedia
• presentation of material using both words and
  pictures.
• Multimedia learning is a sense-making activity
  in which the learner seeks to build a coherent
  mental representation from the presented
  material.
• the learners job is to make sense of the
  presented material thus, the learner is an
  active sense maker who experiences a multimedia
  presentation and tries to organize and integrate
  the presented material into a coherent mental
  representation. (Mayer, 2001, p. 13-15)
• The cognitive theory of multimedia learning is
  consistent with empirical research results based
  on how people learn and the understanding of the
  main cognitive processes in learning.

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Multimedia learning
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Social agency theory - Mayer

• assumptions that social cues in multimedia
  instructional messages prime a social response in
  learners
• the learner can interpret a multimedia
  instructional message as
• an instance of information delivery or/and
• a social communication event.
• Influencing
• the type of schemas activated in the learner
• the type of cognitive processing, and
• the quality of the learning outcomes
• Multimedia principle (Mayer, 2001)
• Personalization principle (Mayer, 2003) I-you
  vs. 3rd person
• Sound cues voice and the concept of persona
  (Mayer, 2005, 2006)

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the media equation paradigm.

• people apply the same dynamics from human-human
  interactions to human-computer interactions.
• Reeves and Nass (1996) define this phenomenon
  the media equation paradigm. This paradigm
  states that the media equal real life.
• All people automatically and unconsciously
  respond socially to media, and therefore also to
  computer and television, especially nowadays
  with the new and old media convergence.
• Media features closeness, size, visual and audio
  fidelity, motion, memory, and voice.

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Research questions

• Would students learn (read and write) better if
  teachers could use texts and audiovisual
  materials, such as TV archived interviews with
  scholars that are normally studied through texts
  only?
• retention and motivation (did students retain and
  enjoy more with an audio-visible author vs. an
  invisible text-based author?)
• Grade
• Number of written words
• Quote
• Does reading text of scholars offered through
  multimedia instructional messages change? If yes,
  how and why?
• the social presence of the author

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• Kamin, Intrator and Kim (2000) have shown despite
  the appeal of using multimedia documents to
  enhance reading, there are still several
  cognitive and affective processes in reading and
  processing texts that need to be investigated.

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The case study - Definitions

• Audio-visible author
• Multimedia and multimodal interview format
• I-you relationship
• Text
• Invisible author
• Only text
• No I-you relationship
• Detached, formal and academic language (strong
  text)

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1. Case study
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The final written exam texts

• 105 students took the written exam
• 73 native Italian speakers and 32 non-native
  ones.
• The non-native Italian students could write it in
  their own languages German, French, Spanish or
  English.
• 7 questions
• 2 questions related to the audio-visible authors
  and
• 1 related to the invisible author.
• 10-to-1 grading scale, with 10 as the highest
  grade and 1 as the lowest.

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• Karl Popper audio-visible author text
• Paul Feyerabend audio-visible text
• Andrea Semprini invisible author only text (a
  text that is invisible)

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grades
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words
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quotes
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2. Case study

• 108 university freshmen
• 60 native Italian speakers and 48 non-native ones
  (15 different countries and speaking a total of
  13 different languages).
• the average age in the class was from 20 to 25
  years old

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• Claude Lévi-Strauss audio-visible author text
  
• Paul Feyerabend audio-visible author text
• Andrea Semprini invisible author

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grades
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words
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quotes
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Qualitative data

• thinking and feeling aloud methodology to collect
  the ongoing cognitive and affective responses and
  processes of students while reading the texts
  aloud.
• After reading, three questions
• 1. which is the most comprehensible author and
  why?
• 2. which is the most interesting author and why?
• 3. which is the most closer author and why?
• 1. to imagine how the invisible author looks like
• 2. Bus scenario
• 3. Taxi scenario

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Measuring the authors presence in their texts
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Taxi
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In deep-interviews with students

• Authors
• Texts
• Reading act
• Context

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Students metaphors

• The invisible author realistic, precise,
  scolastic, serious, authoritative, rigorous,
  clear, scientific, vague, hostile, sterile, as an
  anchor, it does not touch
• Reading the invisible authors texts heavy,
  dense, rigid, tiring, hard, twisted, muddled,
  cold, abstract, complex, distant

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Students metaphors

• The audio-visible authors sense of movement,
  participation, feeling of nearness and
  familiarity, involvement, relationship, access,
  contact, possibility of identification with the
  author, clearity, fresh air, sympathy, an
  encountering that leaves a trace, convincing
  effect, influencing effect, openness, sense of
  freedom, an embrace, a testimony, having more
  than a weapon (to study) (italian expression), a
  breathing, an encountering that touches
• Reading the audio-visible authorss texts light,
  fluid, a flowing and pleasant experience, linear,
  untied, warm, concrete, easy, near

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3.rd case study

• M. Foucault audio-visible author
• (difficult to read and study)
• B. Constant invisible (only text) but visible
  (I-you) author
• (easy to read and study)

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grades
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words
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quotes
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Additional audio-visible authors?
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Some conclusions

• 2 language and multimedia
• (Inglese, Mayer, Rigotti, 2007, in press)
• Literacy and digital media
• Importance of authors awareness and the social
  presence of the author in expository texts
• Designing instructional messages more speech-like
  
• Reconsidering Orality in combination with Writing
  
• Importance of using archives for educational
  purposes, for example TV and radio ones

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Some interpretations

• For Brandt (1990), reading is considered as an
  involvement act, where readers try to reach
  across texts to other human beings, having to be
  more consciously aware of what is taking place on
  the other side of the communication, as is
  necessary when the discourse is oral.
• Readers read not to separate from others, but to
  reach out to them. The motive for reading is to
  find other minds.

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Some interpretations

• Literacy failures are not failures of separation
  but rather failures of involvement. They arise
  not from overdependence on context but from the
  lack of access to a context for making sense of
  print.
• Instead of viewing the oral as antagonist to the
  literature, it is necessary to understand better
  how the oral sustains the literate.
• (Brandt, 1990, p. 7)

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Looking for UCSB collaboration

• accessing US grant money and US scholars that
  would like to use these audio-visible authors
  too, for instructional purposes and for research!
• developing together the Social Science
  audio-visible authors database in collaboration
  with the RTSI Swiss public TV and USI Lugano.