Teaching in the new vernacular

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Teaching in the new vernacular

• Video as a participatory medium

Mark Phillipson, Columbia University Columbia
Center for New Media Teaching Learning CNI, 5
December 2006
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Teaching in the new vernacular
f. L. vern-a-cul-us domestic, native, indigenous,
f. verna a home-born slave, a native.
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Teaching in the new vernacular
To whom or to what belongs this expiring century?
Is it the American Century? Perhaps. The century
of world wars and holocaust? Certainly. The
science century? Undoubtedly. But I nominate
celluloid and its baby cousin videotape for more
than anything else this has been the Movie
Century, an epoch in which film and video and the
images they mediate have replaced print and books
and the words they once brokered as the chief
instrumentalities of human communication, persuasi
on, and entertainment. - Benjamin Barber, Jihad
vs. McWorld, 1996
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Teaching in the new vernacular

• Video as a participatory medium

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Participatory?
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Knowledge-based community

• A knowledge-based community views its work as one
  move in
• a process of continual change to a common,
  external, codified
• knowledge base around the practice.
• Margaret Riel and Linda Polin, Online Learning
  Communities,
• In Designing for Virtual Communities in the
  Service of Learning, 2004

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Participatory culture

• Participatory culture is emerging as the culture
  absorbs and responds to the explosion of new
  media technologies that make it possible for
  average consumers to archive, annotate,
  appropriate, and recirculate media content in
  powerful new ways.
• - Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of
  Participatory Culture, 2006

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archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate
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Old wine, new skin

• Participatory culture is emerging as the culture
  absorbs and responds to the explosion of new
  media technologies that make it possible for
  average consumers to archive, annotate,
  appropriate, and recirculate media content in
  powerful new ways.
• - Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of
  Participatory Culture, 2006

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The ubiquitous YouTube
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Veotag
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Mojiti
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Participatory video tools at CCNMTL
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VITAL
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Ginsberg pre-VITAL
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Design research
http//ccnmtl.columbia.edu/dr/index.html
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Development of VITAL

• Further improvement of UI, workflow
• More collaborative functionality feedback on
  others work, group work spaces
• User uploading of clips
• Fine-tuned control of videos (frame-by-frame)
• Ability to write on video screen of a video frame

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VITAL student survey

• ? Watched every video in the Digital Library
  (80)
• ? Watched the videos more than once (92)
• ? Felt that the videos helped them to understand
  the course content (96)
• ? Helped them to remember the concepts (89)
• ? Helped them relate the concepts to their own
  practice (80)

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VITAL student survey

• Agree or strongly agree that the videos...
• Illustrate the concepts I read about (100)
• Teach me how to observe children (100)
• Model techniques for interacting with children
  (92)
• Open my mind about what children can do (88)
• Give me new ideas for teaching (77)

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VITAL student survey

• Selection of specific clips within each assigned
  video helped me to focus on the content of the
  videos (66)
• Naming of my clips also contributed in this
  regard (77)
• Knowing that I would be using these clips in my
  essays changed how I watched the videos (73)

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VITAL now used in

• Dentistry
• Developmental psychology
• Early childhood mathematics
• Film studies
• Foreign language instruction
• History of modern dance
• Jazz studies
• Motor learning
• Oral History
• Social work

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http//havel.columbia.edu