 My name is Renee Hobbs. We're offering this session called Online Video Creation by Undergraduates Consequences for Media Literacy. I'm a professor of communication at Temple University where I founded the Media Education Lab at the School of Communications and Theater. And beginning in January I'm going to be the founding director of the Harrington School for Communication and Media at the University of Rhode Island. It's a new communication school that's bringing together programs in journalism, film, media, communication, along with programs in writing and rhetoric and library and information studies. So I'm here with my colleague, Anu Vedantam. She's the director of the Weigel Information Commons at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. We're here to talk to you about the need for academic leaders to create learning environments that support student exploration of video production as an expanded conceptualization of literacy with sensitivity to gender and attention to instructional design. So today Anu and I are going to share with you two sets of experiences that we each have had at our respective institutions. Some research that Anu conducted with students at the University of Pennsylvania and some experiences that I've had working with faculty at Temple University and other places. But first we have to talk a little bit about this term media literacy. And I want to call your attention to a white paper that I wrote last year for the Aspen Institute, sponsored by the Knight Foundation on defining and conceptualizing digital and media literacy in relation both to K-12 education, to libraries, and to higher education in both formal and informal contexts. In that document I looked across the entire range of what we might call the new literacies field. Of course that goes all the way back to visual literacy which emerged in the 1960s, includes information literacy, critical literacy, media literacy, cyber literacy, news literacy, and now we're using the term digital literacy. But all of those new literacies share in common a set of practices that have to do with accessing, analyzing, composing, reflecting on, and taking action in the world in relation to the new kinds of texts, new kinds of tools, and new kinds of technologies that are how we share meaning. So the expanded conceptualization of literacy recognizes that humans share meaning through a variety of different text tools and technologies, and we try to look for the common threads rather than focus on the distinctive characteristics of each media or system. One of the reasons why we're here today is that we think it's really important to reflect on why video production or video creation experiences are so important for undergraduates. And from our point of view, a big part of faculty engagement in video production is sort of prioritizing some of these reasons. Why make time in your program? Why emphasize this? Well, we've identified six reasons why that seems to be important. The first one that everybody's talking about is engagement. Well, yesterday we heard a really interesting thesis around the role of intellectual vitality and promoting intellectual curiosity in learners. And so this idea of using video production experiences to increase students' motivation and engagement with new subject matter, pretty important. We're also quite keen on helping faculty and students appreciate the sort of energy around something that's called transmediation. It's really the practice of translating ideas and information from one medium to another, right? So you encounter an idea, say, in your biology class, and you need to sort of translate that idea from a piece of written text to an image to a piece of video. So transmediation turns out to be a powerful tool to promote learning. It requires a lot of active engagement and involvement on the part of the learner and requires them to think really carefully about how different symbol systems can be used to share and represent ideas. Another important reason why video production is so useful to those of us who are trying to develop the knowledge and skills of undergraduates is that it promotes collaboration. It is, in fact, a way that undergraduates get the experience of encountering students who are on their own learning path, who are discovering their own way of understanding these ideas and discovering some of their talents and strengths through that collaborative process. Of course, from my point of view, the most interesting thing about online video creation projects for my students has to do with this skill of synthesis, because video production experiences require you to synthesize ideas from a bunch of different places and pull them together. And for undergraduates, that's a challenge because they're just beginning, many undergraduates are just beginning to figure out how to pull ideas together and how to develop a coherent line of inquiry using lots of different ideas. So synthesis is a skill we think gets activated through the process of video production. And of course, students tell us that one of the reasons why they like engaging in the process of video production as a learning experience in their undergraduate coursework is that they get to exercise their creativity. They get to sort of think of themselves as authors and think about the audiences they're trying to reach and they get to use their imagination to represent their knowledge in the field. So we'd like you, with the person sitting next to you, to identify if... think of the faculty and colleagues that you work with, think about the context in which you work. Why is online video production of interest to you and how do you think it benefits students? Introduce yourself to the person sitting next to you and talk it over. You have about two minutes, three minutes. Why is online video production important to you and your students and your faculty? That's your question. Okay, I think we will press on. One of the things that Anu and I talked about when we shared our thoughts was this idea that one of the reasons why student motivation and engagement is increased is because video is a highly familiar medium to them. It's a discourse that for them is baked in to their understanding of how ideas get exchanged. So they have a lot of comfort in sort of manipulating different stances and positions in expressing themselves through video production. So I want to turn it over to Anu who's going to talk to you a little bit about the kinds of video production projects that have been happening at the University of Pennsylvania and then a little bit about her own research looking at undergraduate video creation. Thank you. I'm very grateful to you for taking time to be interactive in this room that makes it really hard to be interactive. So we do appreciate it. So for me, the story behind today's talk actually starts in 2007 with the first mash-up contest that we did at the University of Pennsylvania. We decided to build on Laurence Lessig's book, Free Culture, which was the required freshman text that year. We designed a contest to give away a video camera as a prize for a mash-up video. And the idea behind a mash-up video is you take video that is at least partially made by somebody else and you reinterpret it in some creative way. That December, Peter D'Cerny and I were here at CNI and we did a project briefing about the mash-up contest. Four years later at UPenn, we have several hundred undergraduates that each semester are making videos for graded class assignments. It's been very interesting to watch their progress. Every year some of them show up as entries to our annual mash-up contest. ARL began a video contest at the Sparky Video Awards and several other campuses have begun holding their own mash-up contests and other types of video contests. At the Weigel Information Commons at Penn, we help faculty and students to learn how to make and edit videos and also to think about how video can get integrated into different disciplines. We've had pretty interesting results in some of the disciplines where we've seen video projects used include writing, law, urban studies, anthropology, etc. I'm going to mention just one mash-up video today. There are several winners that you might want to browse on our student work showcase on our website. I'm not going to play the video that you see on the screen and it's for a good reason. This particular video was created by William Strasser. It won first prize in our mash-up contest in 2009. Our panel of faculty and student judges they felt they had not seen anything like it. They really felt it was the best item to come out of the Weigel Information Commons and for those of you who've seen our viral music video you'll know that this is really high praise. It's really a work of art this particular video and as a work of art it makes me uncomfortable. It pains me to watch it and it forces me to confront social issues that I might prefer to just look away from. This is why I don't show it in public but I encourage you to watch it by yourself for yourself. I'll describe what it's about. It's the poem Musée de Beaux Arts written by W. H. Auden. It's read in the poet's own voice. The name of the mash-up is video plus poem plus painting and that is the poem part of the mash-up. The painting is Broigel's Icarus. It's from the 1500s and the video is Jay-Z's 99 Problems from the late 90s and the result is really a mash-up across centuries. It's quite remarkable to see. And the second video that's on our website the creator William Strasser explains the creative process that he embarked on to create the mash-up video. Along this way of watching students make video projects we've also begun to interview faculty who share in their words why video projects make sense in different disciplines. And on our website are links to the videos that I'm not showing just in the interests of time. This particular video has an urban studies professor Andy Lamas. He makes a powerful argument. He uses a metaphor of growing tomatoes in his backyard garden and he compares having his students make videos to the process of gardening, the process of growing your own tomato. And he compares that to going to a supermarket to buying a tomato would be like watching a video. So the process of creation results in something quite different. The next video that I am going to play for you is an interview with three undergraduates. What they're going to be talking about is how they found the process of making a video for an anthropology class and none of these three students had made videos before. So this was actually their first introduction to the process. In their remarks, I think you will hear some of the comments that Renee made about engagement, about motivation, and about creativity. The video is two minutes long. I'll start it now. It allowed for so much more creativity. It was a lot more fun. It was this new outlet to explore these ideas and it created sort of a visual effect that you just can't get from writing a paper. In the end, I enjoyed it so much more. It was something to be really proud of, I think. It was an accomplishment I hadn't achieved before. I've written countless papers, but I've never done something like this. The visual aspect, really, I think that's part of what makes you take so much pride in it because people can, with an essay, you'd have to read through it, but a video project is quicker and you also absorb all the images and text. Yeah, it's happening. It's in the now. So we basically are familiar with writing papers for every single class, but we're not always familiar with creating a video and I think that I was really proud of what I did and I would spend more time creating a video than I would actually writing a paper and I would put everything else off. If only two put it off. It was more interesting to spend more time on it and I put it on websites like YouTube to broadcast and showcase my work and be like, leave comments. Exactly that. Yeah, and I would go around parading it telling my friends, asking them to give feedback and sort of comment on it and they love the idea because, you know, normally your friends wouldn't read your papers. They're actually, they're not if you want to keep them as your friends. It's a labor of love, but the fact that it can be so one collaborative because people share their projects but also interactive with your friends outside of the class made it a really fun undertaking. I think the best part is when people, you know, watch whatever you've created and they just marvel and say, how did you do that? Yeah. That's the best part. It's kind of a secret. So just to move from the mash-up contest at Penn to the research I'm going to talk about, working with some of these student-created videos led me to the research questions for my dissertation. My committee was headed by Laura Perna and included Joni Finney and Yasmin Kafai who are all professors at Penn and I'm going to talk very briefly about my results and I'm going to invite you to get in touch if this is of interest to you. I'm going to start with my elevator speech. So YouTube began in 2005. Today we all watch hundreds of videos every year on it. I became curious about the creation of online videos, who makes the videos that are on YouTube. So men and women are both very comfortable with Facebook. We post on Facebook with about the same amount of ease. But men and women are very different in terms of our relationship to computer programming. The STEM literature provides decades of studies that talk about imbalance in gender-related. So I became very fascinated with this idea that online video is actually a hybrid. The reason you post a video online is for some of the same reasons that you post something on Facebook. You are sharing something that's of personal importance to you. But the process of making a video can be quite different. It can be the very quick click and upload from a cell phone or it can be a long drawn out editing process that really starts to involve social decisions that are closer to computer programming than they are to Facebook. So I was very curious about whether there would be any gender differences in online video creation and I found very little published. The only published information I found was from China and from the countries in that part of the world. So this is my overall research study and I'll start with my research questions. These were the three questions I asked. The first one is just are there differences in the kinds of videos that men and women create today? If there are differences, what might be ways in which we could explain some of these differences? And the third question has to do with this issue of confidence. I'm using the concept of self-efficacy theory. So I read a lot about what had been published in other fields and I spoke with many people including Joan Lippincott here at CNI and I basically developed a conceptual framework to start to look at this question of are there differences in the kinds of videos we make? This is the conceptual framework that I'm using for my study and I'll spend just a few minutes on it. It includes theories from gender studies, from business, from technology adoption, from sociology and psychology. It has three blocks to it. The first block is just simple demographics just to look at what differences there are. The second deals with self-efficacy theory which is this idea that if you approach a new task with confidence, there's a greater probability that you will succeed at it. And the third block looks at technology acceptance which starts to ask the question of why we like certain gadgets more than other gadgets. Why is YouTube so successful whereas other video programs may not be in a sense? So this is the conceptual framework I used and I'm going to quickly go through the data and hopefully have a little bit of discussion with you about some of the results I found. Now it is very new data because YouTube itself is only five years old and online videos have really only started taking off in the last year or two. I collected data. I studied first year students at one highly selective research university. I've placed my dissertation online through scholarly comments at Penns. You can see all the details. I wanted to present at CNI this year because I feel like this type of work is highly time sensitive. Yesterday Cliff talked about the changes in tablets, the fact that our new cell phones take video and we can now edit video right on the iPad. All of these things affect online video creation very intensely. So I do feel like there's a lot going on and it's a very fast-moving field. Basic information about my studies that included a lot of quantitative analysis, but really the joy for me was the qualitative data and I will show you some of the quotes from the young men and women that I interviewed. So these are the answers I found two of my three research questions and the first is yes, there are gender differences in the kinds of videos we create. These differences are a little complicated and I will show you some graphs about them. However, the theories do explain the gender differences so once you take into account concepts of computer confidence, concepts of tool use, concepts of attitude towards technology, the gender differences really do get explained, which was also very good to find. And the relationship between confidence and video creation was the same independent of gender. So that's the very quick summary of what I have found and I will show you three graphs. I'm going to leave them up so you have a little bit of time to think them through. So this is a quick discussion of the quantitative results and here's the first one. So first actually before I do this, let me just go back one. I'm going to ask for a quick show of hands just so that you have a sense of your experience compared to the people I have been studying. Let me do a quick show of hands. How many people have personally created a video and put it either on YouTube or Facebook? Okay, so I'm looking at about 30% of the room and so I'm assuming you've done this yourself and not asked somebody else to do it. Of all the people who have actually put a video online, how many of you have done fine editing, changing the quality and the clips? So we have four people with that experience and keep that in mind as you look through the data of what our first year college students were doing a year ago. So this is some of the data overall. So basically what you can see that in terms of percentages, more men than women made online videos. One particularly disturbing result for educators is the second bar is when they were assigned a video for a school project, more men than women made videos and this is something I will come back to because I feel like this is one of the places where policy and practice can make a difference. Furthermore, women perceived themselves as beginners much more than men when it came to video editing skills. No women thought of themselves as advanced video editing in terms of their skills. So this graph gets you back to my elevator speech in terms of confidence and how that might affect the ability to make videos. The next graph I'm going to show you takes the first set of bars just creating online videos and starts to break it down in a little bit more detail. So this is where it starts to get more interesting. I basically divided online video creation into specific tasks. So the very simple tasks are on the left side and as you move to the right hand side you're getting to more complicated tasks. So if I point my camera at you, I click record and then I click upload. That will be in the category of the cell phone webcam and you can see there were no differences between men and women. They were both very comfortable with simple clicking, simple uploading, simple moving on. As you get closer to the right hand side of the graph you get to things like fixing audio video quality, editing multiple clips, being the producer, the director, the manager of the video and there you do get significant gender differences and across the board in all cases men were more engaged than women. So it was kind of interesting to look at this as something more subtle. So basically it wasn't a simple answer about whether there were differences or there were not. These are specific tasks and I think the details will change over time as the software gets easier to use but the general differentiation between simple and complicated tasks I think will have some staying power. After I did this analysis which was basically looking at exactly what people were doing when they were making the online videos I did break down the identity of students and that was also quite interesting. So I'll show one quick graph here. So this is how the results broke down in terms of ethnicity, in terms of immigrant status and it was quite interesting. The Asian students really stood out in the study. Asian men, you could see 70% had made online videos and they were making much more complicated online videos than the rest of the sample. It reminded me of Ryan Leonard, the Asian student who won our first mash-up contest and who went on to become the creator of our music video that you will see on our site. But the more important part of the study is to look at why some of these differences exist. And what I basically found is that as long as we build in some understanding for things like computer confidence things like a positive attitude towards technology and having some time to explore technologies that the differences fall away and there are no demographic factors that stay once the conceptual framework is brought into the picture. So adding in the conceptual framework really removed the significance of gender completely for all the nine roles that I studied it was successful at explaining differences by gender and by ethnicity with these simple concepts and just a little bit about these concepts basically the attitude towards computers really made a difference. Confidence using computers made a difference and the ease of use made a difference. It was very interesting to look at the comments about the Mac Apple platform. You know there's a general sense that Apple makes it easier to make videos and it really stood out. People who had Mac experience were much more likely to make and publish videos and the ease of use in the user interface design is probably a big part of the reason why that is how it is. In a nutshell, addressing attitudes towards computers and technology acceptance could potentially help us reduce gender inequalities. The gender gap was especially huge on computer confidence and on this idea of learned helplessness. Helplessness is the idea that once people do things for you enough you stop even trying and you just kind of hand over control. So I'm going to talk very briefly about things that we have control over. I'm going to start with the required school projects. So there was a pretty big difference in male and female participation in required school projects and there's no logical reason for this. If we assign a video project as a school activity there's no reason why the men in the classes are doing the video editing more than the women. Assuming that our high schools are evenly distributed by gender. If video literacy matters then it should matter for both men and women and that was something that really stood out for me. Some aspects of video creation were gender neutral. These are the tasks that both men and women were very comfortable doing. There was no particular difference to be seen. However there were other roles that were not and these were the roles that came out again and again as being male. They were basically adding music, images, titles, improving the quality of the video and then the video production piece. I'm going to step back now from the study and I'm going to share just five quotes from the students that I interviewed. I think you'll find these interesting. They put a human face on some of the numbers that I've been showing. They were struck by how much video creation has really been integrated into the lives of our students. Students made videos to show their high school friends how their dorm rooms looked. They made videos as they walked around campus. They recorded birthday greetings as videos. Videos were part and parcel of their everyday lives more so actually than in their school lives. They recorded and shared the minutia of their lives. They recorded videos about political opinions, their favorite sports cars, their music. Video was just on a daily basis something they lived and the contrast between that and the show of hands we did earlier starts to point out some of the differences that we see just generationally. I've selected five quotes that echo for me some of the significant concepts from the quantitative analysis. This first one really spoke to me. This female student described a school video project saying, I just watched from the sidelines. That doesn't really sound like active participation in class activities. The second quote describes the general sense of who makes videos. I've never really met a girl that was very good at all those things. Some people who are good at these, most people who are good at these type of things are males. Just a perception of who does editing and who does not do editing. I've included three quotes from male students. The first one talks about the pride of creation. This is a male student talking about a video that he has made that he talks about on a regular basis. The second one just has the assumption that people should be able to do fine editing. The assumption that anybody who wanted to make a better video would be able to. The self-efficacy came through on that one. And the last one I'm going to show is this idea of confidence. It was so simple. Very user-friendly. I did it on my own, which was something I heard again and again from the men that I interviewed. There are many more quotes in the research write-up. I found this part of the study fascinating, and I'm very curious about whether it's a common experience or just this one institution that I've looked at. So I'm going to quickly finish with recommendations, hand it back over to Renee. I'm going to conclude with eight recommendations for practitioners. My dissertation includes recommendations for research and for replication. My selfish goal for asking to be here at CNI is that I'm hoping that I will contact other people interested in this topic. I would love to see something like this replicated on another campus to see if the conceptual framework has any value to it beyond this particular study. But the recommendations I'm giving are just on a practitioner basis. So just for eight thoughts for you to consider. What I found is that once somebody makes their first video, there are no longer differences that affect how many videos people make after that, which raises this issue of a threshold, that if we as educators can help women to make that first video, maybe that breaks the ice and makes it a little easier to get started. Building on the conceptual framework, I recommend activities that build computer confidence. And that focus on school projects that are designed carefully. And Renee is going to talk a little bit more about instructional design and how it can affect the experience that students have in the classroom. The reason that it's so important with school projects, just very quickly, we would not expect if we assign a group presentation that only the men would do the public speaking. If we assign a group report, we would not expect that only the men would do the writing. So why is it that we are comfortable assigning a video project and not in any way setting up a structure that makes sure that men don't hog the keyboard, hog the mouse, hog the video camera, and you might see this as you observe the way students work in groups on video projects. Media literacy is important for all our students, so the way we structure the school project becomes quite important. YouTube videos are watched by millions of people. Do we want one group of people making them and another group watching on the sidelines, going back to the quote that I gave earlier? My fourth recommendation builds on this idea of ease of use. If you make something look easy, it's much easier for people to get started with it. So just a couple of suggestions. You know, use a flip camera instead of the really expensive multifunction one that makes people intimidated. Use iMovie or use Jing instead of using something that is professional grade like Final Cut Pro or Premiere. Simple projects that really build confidence can help people to make that first video, which might then get them interested in the other aspects of learning about video production. I'm almost done. My last four recommendations. Both men and women need to believe that video creation is valuable before they're going to put the time in to do any good editing. And number six is really important. The theoretical constructs of self-efficacy, stereotype threat, and learned helplessness, they do explain the gender differences in online video creation, so I think we need to address them explicitly. We need to do something to tackle them with care and sensitivity. One aspect perhaps unique to video creation, especially performance, is this idea of social risk. Students need to feel comfortable being funny, to be the class clown, to make a joke, to just be more casual on camera. Again and again, what I heard from both men and women in my interviews is both men and women feel that men make funnier videos, that they're just more entertaining, they're willing to take risks on camera, which comes back to this idea of social risk. How can we make a safe space for people to feel comfortable taking social risks? And lastly, perhaps as a minor point, I found that international students are really just getting started with video creation, and a little bit of additional help might help them. To summarize, before I hand the microphone back over to Renee, easy to use technologies in video creation are gender neutral. The more complicated aspects of video creation, people will need help with, and they may need some scaffolding to get there. Class projects really show gender imbalances, and those we should be able to address explicitly. In the question and answer session, I hope you will share with me your impressions about how men and women on your campus are making videos and are there differences you observe. I'm going to go ahead and hand things over back to Renee. So, Anu has helped us understand a little bit about some patterns that happen among undergraduates, and one of the things you noticed was undergraduates are experimenting with making online videos outside of school for their own informal social relationship purposes, and they have some experience making videos in school. Working at a school of communication and theater, we experience this tension quite a lot, and I want to talk now a little bit about those faculty who are not really responsible for teaching media production, but the faculty who are responsible for theory courses or writing or history courses, because one of the things that's really interesting about online video creation is to think about ways that faculty who are teaching theory or content courses can begin to experiment with video production. And as I've interviewed those teachers, and this work comes from my new book, which is called Digital and Media Literacy, Connecting Classroom and Culture, what I found was that faculty who experiment with offering video production assignments to students experience certain challenges, and so for some of those faculty, they try a video production assignment once, and then they won't try it again. For most faculty, the biggest challenge to take into consideration is time. Time's a zero-sum game. I only have so many assignments I can make. I only have so many hours of expectations that I can have for student work. If I ask them to do a video production assignment, then something else has to go in my program. And so faculty who have taken the first step to require or make possible a video production assignment often get flustered when these six things happen. And it's possible that in your own work with faculty, you have encountered a faculty who experienced these challenges. So while Anu talked a little bit about the experience from students' point of view, I'm now going to share with you from the faculty point of view some of the challenges that instructors face when they use video assignments in their theory or content classes, right? First one, non-collaboration. And this is true with lots of things that we like students to collaborate on, right? One kid does all the work, and the rest of them sit on the sidelines. And it's a very common strategy for undergraduate collaboration for the divide and conquer to fall disproportionately on the burden, on the head of the one lead kid who pulls it all together. So that's a challenge faced by instructors, especially when it comes time for assessment, right? Who gets credit for that project when it was done by the one kid and then all five students essentially come along for the ride. Another challenge that faculty tell me about is something I call imitating the worst of Hollywood, which is that one of the reasons why video production is so engaging and motivating for undergraduates is because they're so familiar with it. They know, they have a lot of cards in their card catalog about things they could do, right? And they borrow sometimes a lot of tropes and a lot of characteristics of sometimes the worst aspects of Hollywood. The most common thing that faculty tell me about is students reproducing gender or racial stereotypes in their own productions, right? So the dumb blonde will frequently appear in undergrad student video productions, right? The geeky Asian will sometimes appear in student video productions. So this represents a really interesting challenge for faculty who want to provide space for sort of moving out and beyond sort of the Hollywood representations to broader topics. But when students reproduce those stereotypes, faculty can be frustrated or annoyed. Another challenge is that I think we see not just with online video creation but with all student multimedia production is the challenge of style over substance. Those of you who've watched undergraduates work with PowerPoint or we're using today Prezi or making movies on an iMac or with Movie Maker is that students will spend a lot of time on the font and the color and the titles and like the ideas. Well, they won't really think so carefully about those. And getting students to think about the relationship between style and substance and getting them to value the substance, the content of their videos, that balance can be a challenging for faculty. Faculty tell me they're also frustrated when goofy gets transgressive. Because YouTube videos have created new social norms, students sometimes are not sensitive to the distinct arenas in which what's appropriate in one setting is not appropriate in another setting. And this blurring of boundaries is something we can't blame undergraduates for because they're growing up in a culture where, well, my sophomores and juniors have been watching YouTube videos since they were 13 or 14 years old. So for them, transgression, sort of edgy, risky, and in fact inappropriate elements are to be used in school projects and that can rattle faculty. And so a faculty who's screened a student video project like this may or may not feel completely comfortable doing that assignment again. Students have that opportunity or possibility of introducing transgressions related to bodily functions, sex, drug, and alcohol use, and just the list goes on and on. One of the challenges faculty have talked to me about is when the major production goes unfinished. Faculty have been complaining about undergraduate student time management since the dawn of history, I guess. But boy, is that a difficult lesson for undergraduates to learn when they can't complete their project by the deadline and when essentially that project goes unfinished to the faculty member experiences frustration, the students are upset, it becomes what I have called a non-optimal learning experience. From my point of view, the thing I struggle with in my own teaching, where I require students to make videos every semester in all my theory classes, is finding a way to address the opportunity to reflect and critique those videos. For many years, the only strategy I used for showcasing student performances would be the last day of class or close to the last day of class where we would watch student video productions, we would clap appreciatively and move on to the next one. Creating a celebration of sorts, but not actually providing a space for the kind of reflection and critique that is at the heart of what we do when we comment on student papers, offering feedback that helps enable and support intellectual growth. And so if we don't do that for students' video production, we're missing out on a real opportunity to facilitate students' intellectual development. And too often, the video production becomes a mere celebration without providing opportunity to give students real feedback on their work. So with the person sitting next to you, I bet you may have a story or two that relates to one of the six challenges that I've identified. Why don't you share a story with the person sitting next to you and colleagues that you work with have experienced any challenges associated with video production? So take about three minutes. Okay, I think we'll press on to our conclusion and hopefully we're going to leave a little bit of time for comments and questions where we hope to hear some of your stories or the ideas that got generated by your dialogue there. So my experience in trying to design my way out of those problems, through the way I design the assignment, includes these five recommendations. Model a short, simple media production activity to inspire creative thinking and reduce technology anxiety. When students do a small, simple media production, often I do that in class so that in the hour and a half, we have completed a project, often using a flip camera. Then first of all, that helps students to understand how much time it takes to do something. It took an hour and a half to do this little thing and that helps them adjust their expectations about what's possible for them to do. But it also gets them thinking about the creativity involved in trans mediation and thinking about how to express an idea visually through linear video production. And it also helps me to identify who has tech anxiety, right? And so then that clues me in to who I need to support and how I can structure teams so that the kids who have tech anxiety don't get paired with somebody who's gonna take over the project and do it all. It's really important for me to provide time for collaboration in the classroom. And boy, is that painful for me because time's such a zero-sum game. I don't like to provide time for collaboration, but I find that when I do, especially early on in the project in pre-production, when they're developing the idea for the project, that that time pays off in enormous ways in terms of the quality of the learning experience. I think it's really important to establish clear expectations about audience, purpose, and tone. I do that through an evaluation rubric where I let students know, here's the project and here's how I'm gonna be grading it and here's how you're gonna get points and here's what it needs to accomplish. And having that set of clear expectations really helps students avoid being transgressive and avoid non-collaboration and avoid focusing on style over substance. It's important for faculty to establish those clear expectations and hold students to be accountable to that. I think it's also important to ask students to reflect on the process of collaboration. I do this by asking students to write a reflection that is part of the grade for the project where students write about their experience of collaboration because I emphasize the learning experience is really about process and product. I'm not just grading the product. It's the process by which it was created that counts for me as well. And then ensuring time for screening and critique. What that means is I have to chunk out three classes at the end of the semester to do that work. And when I did it the first semester, it was so painful for me. I was like, oh my goodness, this is so much time. This is time I could be transmitting valuable information to them. Why am I spending this much time on this? But what I found happened is that the conversation around their videos and the depth and richness and sophistication of those conversations was phenomenal and gave me plenty of opportunities to underline the big ideas that I wanted students to come away with in the course. So it was the hardest decision I made as a faculty member but the most rewarding in terms of seeing what happened in terms of the dialogue in the classroom. Okay, so I think we've shown plenty of evidence today why academic leaders should create learning environments that support student exploration of video production as an expanded conception of literacy with sensitivity to gender and attention to instructional design. Thanks so much for joining us on this adventure today. And I guess what we'll do on is let's go down and see if we have maybe only five minutes for conversation. Have you experimented with multi-channel videos like you might show PowerPoint on one channel and the speaker on the other, a lab experiment on one channel or an operation and somebody discussing it while it's going on? Wow, no, I haven't done that. That sounds really cool. Why would that be pedagogically effective or useful from your point of view? Well, you not only see the description of the process, you visually see the process itself and then you get somebody describing it as it's going on and you can control each channel separately. For example, if you wanted to go to four channels in a production or music, you could have a conductor, the first violinist, the orchestra and the audience, all four channels showing at the same time and you can see how the reactions are happening in this process. And we found it very, very useful working with one of the universities you work with. That sounds great. Thank you for sharing that. Other comments, questions, feedback, ideas that this conversation has sparked for you. Hi. I know that libraries often provide help desks for digital content, for digital production, for media, for students. And I wonder what your thoughts are about the best ways that libraries in offering these kinds of help services could support the pedagogical outcomes that you've just discussed. Great question. Anu, you take it first and I'll comment. Is this mic is fine? So this is something we actually, if you want to get in touch with us, we've been doing for a little while. What we found is really helpful is we try to meet with the professor at the very beginning of the semester, ask for a copy of the assignment and we get all of the files that the students are expected to use and we put them on the server in our media lab. And then us, the staff in the library all become familiar with the assignments that we're supporting. So when a student walks into the media lab, we will usually ask them, are they working on a video for a class project? If they say yes, we already have the information we need. And one of the things that's really helpful to us is to ask professors, something that Renee mentioned, what their expectations are for the assignment, in particular what they feel is an A assignment, what's a B assignment, what's a C assignment. That way we can just give students some suggestions. So if we have some professors, for example, that give no grading weight to the quality of the editing, they're really looking for content. So if we know that it's that kind of an assignment, we can guide students to not spend a lot of their time getting their soundtrack to be exactly right, because that's not going to be that important. So having that conversation in September helps us in December when the students are kind of staying up all night. I was mentioning to Renee, the one of the things she mentioned was an obstacle, was this issue of the unfinished product, and often we in the library get to witness the students who are really struggling. They've been staying up all night, and their project is not done, and we can feel the pain in a sense. So having some advanced conversations with professors really helps us to handle questions that come up. Other comments, questions? In the video, one of the students compared making videos to writing essays. And over the years, large numbers of disciplines have found ways that essays are useful parts of teaching their discipline. But not all disciplines use essays. And it seems to me with making videos can contribute to learning in some disciplines, but not all disciplines. And I wonder if you have any sort of feeling for which disciplines this is most effective in. I'll comment on that a little bit because I think I held that point of view pretty robustly. Pretty confident in working with faculty in literature and in history and in sociology that this transmediation process makes sense. You have to develop an argument, then you have to figure out a way to... It's a linear media. It uses language, language image sound. So what I was surprised to find out was that faculty in the sciences who made video production a part of their program had interesting kinds of discoveries as well. So I'll describe one that I think goes at this question of which disciplines can benefit best from this. This is a teacher who basically said to students in the biology by the third time they did an experiment, you will get extra credit if you videotape your experiment and you produce a video of the results of your experiment. And the way he introduced this assignment was by showing a very poor quality video of an experiment. Everything about that video was horrible. It was just a mess. As you watched it, you couldn't tell what was going on. You didn't know what materials were being used. You didn't know what chemical processes were being activated or whatever. And he said, what's wrong with this video? And the students generated a long list. It should have done this. It should have done this. It should have done this. You should have done that. You should have done this. And then what he found was that students who took him up on that offer did the experiment like six times. They videotaped it six times and they edited together. They had a long shot. They had a close-up. They thought about transitions. They thought about titling. He said in the end that what he thought happened was that because students had to think about representing the sequence of the experiment itself and how to communicate that to an audience, that they were way more attentive to the concepts and the practices than they might have been had they just, you know, done the experiment. So that was a surprise for me because I think I would have thought, as you pointed out, that really the humanities and social sciences might have a particular edge on this. But that faculty's experience made me think, I'm not so sure. I guess, you know, just to add on what Renee has mentioned, we have actually been very surprised that there's not too many disciplines that have not found a way. So what seems to be a big part of it is the word of mouth. So if one professor comes up with an idea for how a video assignment might work in their class and they talk with colleagues, that makes a huge difference in the way this kind of expands over time. Very, you know, basically I feel like video is just a new medium that we will start to take for granted in every discipline. The way it used to be we would all get all of our knowledge from books. And I really see now that we are getting much of our knowledge from video in one way or the other. So I don't see it as a discipline-specific issue. I do see that the class size makes a difference. If I'm teaching a 300-student class, I'm going to be much more careful in making any changes to my curriculum because it will affect so many people. The support issues are larger. And a lot of science classes are taught in large lecture. So it might be more of a structural and curriculum situation that causes obstacles. But yeah, we have seen some really interesting ways in which the same lesson idea jumps across discipline. So just one quick example. In October, we had a professor of South Asia studies who did something very simple. Her students made Jing videos, where basically you make a PowerPoint presentation and you talk over the presentation. It turns it into a very quick video. There's really no tech skills involved. So her class was about commodities. They were looking at coffee and chocolate and commodities like that that cross cultural boundaries. She did a presentation about how she used this particular assignment in her class. And a professor from the vet school is now interested in trying this with small animals. And I don't think we would have seen that discipline jump coming. But it turned out that it was something that was easy to visualize. And the technology seemed simple enough that somebody else was comfortable trying it out. I hope that answers your question. Okay, we'd like to thank you for coming to this session. And especially because you had so many other good choices. So thanks again.