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Photovideo file sharing

Page history last edited by Jenny Waycott 14 years, 4 months ago

Small Group Discussion: Photo/video file sharing

 

This wiki page is provided for recording small group discussions about issues relating to the assessment of photo and video file sharing activities.

 

Participants

Matthew Allen

Tracey Bretag

Kaz Ross

Lynette Zeeng

Scribe: Jenny Waycott

 

Discussion question:

When university students are asked to demonstrate their learning by creating, uploading, and sharing photos and videos, what academic standards, and assessment and reporting practices are essential or desirable?

 

Scribe notes...

 

Lynette Zeeng - uses Flickr totally for her subject; teaches photography, students have embraced this form of learning; students can actually come in and use in their own time; private group; 260 students, 10 tutorial groups; all groups can communicate beyond the tutorial groups; tutorial discussions (studio) involve 'how to', technical info, problems address, peer review... Now sharing work is done online. Everything gets posted on Flickr on a weekly assignment basis, scaffolding - each assignment builds on the past assignment; lecturers mark the folder of the work students choose to submit; each student has to critique other students - they have to review three students' work each week (different students each week); this is moderated...

 

Matthew Allen - what makes Web 2 unique is the tagging, grouping according to unique tags

 

Kaz Ross - you can take a well designed task and move it into the technological tool and do it well

General discussion - this is only possible if there is a good alignment between the technology and the task; not using the tool because it's 'cool' - "let's use Flickr because it's fun". In this case Flickr was used because it provided an opportunity to extend the task; good fit with the pedagogy.

- Chemistry example - students don't always know what they need to learn, lecturers need to be able to make students understand relevance of the task; Tracey gave an example of teaching students appropriate referencing - students may not understand the relevance of this but they need to understand that it is important to learn this.

- Transformative power of new technologies

- Tracey: many students are instrumental learners, happy to get a pass; want to push students to get the best but need to understand that there are some students who don't want to strive to get the best mark... some students don't want to be engaged or need to be strategic in their use of time... And teachers should not be afraid to fail people if they don't engage.

- Matthew - the Internet reevaluated the still image; reproduced the idea that you can create video; sharing of still images is still deeply a part of popular culture; the Net brought back the idea of sharing images (e.g., slide night of 60s...); the potential of the internet to allow the easy production/reproduction of still images; learning value of reviewing other images...

- bringing an humanities perspective to science discipline in chemistry example - students may have resisted using images, doing a more art-focused assignment.

- what about people who don't immediately see the fit between the visual world and more text-based learning; the fit is there and it is about explaining to students why they need to do the task, why it's relevant, important, etc.

- moving learning away students' comfort zone in stages...

- Kaz Ross - looking at combining Asian students and Journalism students - have them collaborate

- universities reconfigure themselves around new modes of communication, study, etc

- hard to organise collaboration when you have to have criteria pre-set, given to students prior to course. Web 2 challenges us to acknowledge that we can't say at the start of semester exactly what we are going to do; need the flexibility to make it up as we go along...

 

Back to questions:

 

When university students are asked to demonstrate their learning.... what are the issues?

 

From an integrity point of view what are the issues:

- can see all the edits that students make so it is valuable for academic integrity, transparency in contributions to group work - this facilitates integrity.

- Flickr date stamps all contributions; can see that students are doing the work as they go, not at last minute...

- Integrity not so much about monitoring students but about the integrity of the learning process...

- students liked that whatever they did was available for the rest of the class to use later on; that gave them a sense of responsibility, students are producers rather than consumers, taking responsibility for their knowledge, accountability...

- the idea that you can produce integrity through rules and systems is fascist. Integrity is more about rules that students need to learn; make individual students ... the more motivated you are the less likely you are to cheat; intrinsically motivated - does web 2 enable that motivation

- yes: they are not just writing for the assessor; they are writing for the rest of the world; web 2 facilitates public sharing of knowledge and students' work.

- people theorise what they are experiencing; you don't need to be a researcher to theorise this. Students have a strong sense of what it means to produce for an audience because they have been an audience member all their lives.

- traditionally students think of assessment as a one-on-one thing; public assessment is important...

- "integrity is never a problem if you make the task authentic" - copying happened when a task was deeply personal - about their own goals in life...

- this could be because these students didn't want to share their personal experiences etc; instrumental students who just want to get the task done.

- ESL students can use web 2 to contribute more fully to the group; don't communicate so much in class.

- is there something unique and specific to web 2? Ants building the colony; wisdom of the crowd; what can we do to get the students to reflect on their place in that crowd? Tagging in flickr could enable this; tagging is a complete free for all; constraining people to one tag makes it possible to keep track of contributions (e.g., conference #tags in flickr); e.g., give students five tags to choose from...

 

what academic standards, and assessment and reporting practices are essential?

- trust the committed, well-resourced academic.... why talk about two students who are going to cheat (the horror stories) when the rest of the course will do the task well ... to maintain academic standards.

- finding ways to sustain quality outcomes in the chaos of the internet.

- recognise that it is a partnership between students and teachers

- some students aren't going to engage; but you can't give up on them, nor get bogged down trying to get minority engaged...

- some disciplines don't engage in web 2 - these are the faculties that are obsessed with standards...

- creativity is a challenging area; creativity is a way to generate that sense of partnership between students and teachers.

- do students identify as being creative?

- asian studies students; don't have empathy - make them do a creative writing assignment, putting them in the subject's place...

- assuming that we have a well-designed task

- what is video/file-sharing - could be anything .... each person will use the technology in a different way

- need an underlying pedagogically-sound philosophy, if you work from that philosophy you will achieve partnership between students and teachers, building trust, idea that knowledge is socially produced, students are engaged in their own learning, set things up in a way to get the best out of students, intrinsically motivating students - if that's the underlying philosophy it will work.

 

 

 

Comments (2)

Matthew Allen said

at 12:20 pm on Nov 23, 2009

Great group discussion - thanks, learned a lot! Highlights include Lynette's utterly compelling use of flickr in photography unit of study; Kaz's use of online videos to be shared and commented in Asian Studies unit; Tracey's use of pebblepad in professional development course. All these show that web 2.0 is alive and well and being used successfully where there is a link between the use of a particular form of social media / online knowledge work and the subject matter being learned.

a.t.kirkwood@open.ac.uk said

at 1:33 am on Nov 26, 2009

I took the UK Open University's wholly online Digital Photography course (a good way for OU staff to develop a student's perspective) which tried to achieve 2 main aims: 1. Learning the technical skills necessary for effective editing of digital images, and 2. developing a creative and critical 'eye' in relation to the subject, composition, etc. The course used a version of Flickr - each week you could upload up to 10 photographs relating to the previous week's task and were encouraged to comment constructively upon the pictures submitted by other members of your group. As a learner, I found this particularly helpful - much more so than the associated discussion Forum. With only limited time available for studying the course, I chose to engage with my fellow students by commenting (and receiving comments) on our work. This was good presparation for the end-of-course assignment which was to submit a sequence of 10 photos and to write several short accounts e.g. contrasting 2 images in relation to specified criteria. The tasks were VERY authentic!

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