Outset

1
Whats Going On? A transferable video
interpretation tool
Outset Outputs
One of the aims of the DART (Digital Anthropology
Resources for Teaching) project is to develop
digital learning tools for undergraduate
anthropology, with a focus on pedagogy. Since the
start of the project in October 2003, two digital
tools have been developed and used in teaching.
One of these is a video tool that has been used
to produce an ethnographic exercise that we call
Whats Going On?. The video tool is designed to
be reusable, so it can be adapted to illustrate a
variety of anthropological issues using different
content and combinations of the tools features,
and indeed transfer into other subject
areas. The pedagogical aim of Whats Going On?
was to help students understand the way
anthropological knowledge builds over time, and
to enrich their understanding of the society
being studied. In the exercise, the student
watches a short piece of ethnographic film
featuring members of the society they are
studying in class, and attempts to interpret what
is happening. They are aided in this process by
supplementary information that appears on-screen
when required. This information may be subtitles
or links to other resources such as related
ethnographic texts. However, the information
provided is limited, so that it reflects the
level of knowledge that an ethnographer might
have after a specific period in the field. In the
case of the subtitles, for instance, translation
is incomplete to start with, only becoming more
accurate in later stages of the tool. In level 1,
the information available corresponds roughly to
two or three months experience in the field.
Figure 1 opposite shows an example. After
completing level 1, the students must write a
short (150 words) analysis of the film before
proceeding to the next level. At level 2 (figure
2), the information provided represents about 9
months experience, and at level 3 (figure 3),
about 18 months experience. Students write
progressively longer analyses of these later
stages, and are able to see the analyses of their
peers after they have been assessed. In this way,
students experience the way that understanding
builds over time, discover that there are many
ways of interpreting the same events, and
appreciate the facility with which an
ethnographer can be misled.
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
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2
Whats Going On? A transferable video
interpretation tool
Its like being a detective. The curiosity it
arouses has helped me get into the readings and
made me want to know more. Even with the
background cultural knowledge of the thesis, I
still jumped to conclusions about what was going
on based on my ideas of rationalism. It
helped to make us think about not judging by
first appearances
Outcomes Outreach
The tool is built in Flash, so it runs on most
Internet-enabled desktops. The subtitles, links
and the video clip itself are all imported by the
tool at runtime, so the tool can be used to
provide an interpretation exercise for any video
clip. Whats Going On? was used during the
spring term of a first-year undergraduate course
called Reading Other Cultures that aims to
introduce students to the process of ethnography.
The tool was used over the course of a 3-week
cycle' during which the students studied the
Mbendjele, a Pygmy people of Congo. The students
completed the three-stage process described
above, with a new level becoming available each
week. In the meantime, the students attended
lectures and classes, and had background readings
which provided them with the knowledge needed to
complete the exercise. The analyses submitted by
students were made available via a VLE after the
end of the third level, so they could compare the
progress of their understanding with that of
their peers, and the results were discussed in
class in the final seminar of the
cycle. Post-course evaluation of student opinion
revealed that the students enjoyed the exercise,
found that it helped them to engage with the
required course readings, and regarded the
exercise as educationally valuable. A
representative selection of students quotes are
listed in the box in figure 4. Some of the
advantages of the tool are summarised in the box
in figure 5. In addition to supporting
anthropology courses, we will be promoting the
use of the tool within other departments of the
LSE. This will involve disseminating information
about the tool, identifying enthusiastic
teachers, and providing support to users. To this
end, we are employing a dedicated research
officer to liaise with academics in the LSE and
collaborate with them in developing alternative
content for the tool. The tool also boasts a
hotspot' feature which was not used in the
Mbendjele example described above. This allows
the teacher to synchronise the appearance of
translucent, clickable areas over the video
image, so that students can get
spatially-specific background information about
what they are seeing (see figure 6). We hope that
future users of the tool will be able to make
good pedagogical use of this facility. Contact
Steve Bond (s.bond1_at_lse.ac.uk) Project website
http//www.columbia.edu/dlc/dart/
Figure 4
Advantages Enables re-examination of a piece of
ethnographic film under different sets of
constraints Allows synchronised annotation of
film Easy to create and modify content, via a
system of templates (an authoring tool will be
developed)
Figure 5
Figure 6
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