Creating and Using Film Clips--Erin Smith

October 20, 2006
People in attendance: Erin, Diane S., Karen, Heather, Shannon, Ethan, Diane K., Moe, Becky, Laurance

MEETING NOTES

Erin showed us several different ways to use film clips for teaching purposes, and the effects this can have on students' learning. We focused primarily on using networked Macintosh computers, but the things we learned can be extended to laptops (like the ones on the carts that teachers can check out through Kim Puuri.) Erin explained how much time in involved in creating film clips, and noted that we might want to choose clips we can use more than once. Using film clips also requires a fair bit of technical preparation on the teacher's end. I left this TWIT with a great appreciation for how dedicated Erin is to teaching.

Ways to Use Film Clips

1. Mac's built in DVD player allows you to capture clips from a film by pushing the "+" button while the film is playing. You then push the "set" button when you want the clip to end. The final step is to push "add" to add the clip to your library.

• The clips are stored in the preferences folder in your home directory. (home>library>preferences) As long as you are operating in the network, and your home directory has not been wiped out for some reason, the clips should show up. However, it's a good idea to back them up.



• You can name your clips and they are ordered alphabetically in a dialog box that appears as you play the film. You can show and hide the dialog box.

2. Mac's built in DVD player also allows you to use something called "Bookmarks." This function is located in one of the drop down menus at the top of the screen. It lets you "bookmark" a particular point in a film so that when you are teaching you can jump to that spot and the film will play from that spot forward. This saves you having to fastforward for five minutes while everybodys sits there waiting.

3. Do you want to capture still frames from a film? Mac's DVD player doesn't let you do that. But VLC, which is in the lab, does. You can play a film in VLC and take a screen capture by pushing the key combination Apple-Option-S while the film is playing. Your screen capture will show up on your desktop as a little snapshop.

4. An added bonus of VLC is that it has a horizontal time bar, so instead of fastforwarding we can just move the toggle along the time bar to get to different points in a film.

• In presentations students have sometimes noted the time when certain scenes start, and used to time bar to jump to that point. However, different computers register different times, so this practice does not always work out and is not recommended. Instead, have them capture clips, use bookmarks, or capture still frames.



• Erin shared a useful handout with us on VLC, which I hope to link here.

5. Erin also talked about Fair Use practices and how she handles making sure students get access to films so that they can turn in thorough, detailed assignments. It is my understanding that it is not enough to show a film once in class; students need to get their hands on the material in order to engage it repeatedly, closely and carefully. For Erin, this kind of a teaching situation most often happens in the CCLI setting, with careful preparation of materials.

If you are interested in any of the items listed above, please contact Karen, Jim, or Erin. Thanks.

Using Sound in a Visual Communication Class

To structure this TWIT, I would like to ask you to help me think through using audio in my upcoming Visual Media Analysis class.

Here are the course goals:

1. Gain fluency with a range of analytic vocabulary and ways of talking about visual media

2. Use social construction theory to attend to historical, contextual, and rhetorical dimensions of visual media analysis

3. Apply theory to examples and use examples to question, extend, and problematize theory


I would like to assign a final project that will demonstrate how well the students have achieved these goals. Here's what I came up with so far. It's the assignment sheet I am working on.

AUDIO ANALYSIS (3-5 minutes)
(Draft--throughout TWIT, let's talk about how might we change/improve this?)

The purpose of this assignment is to test how well you are able to achieve the three major goals of this course.

Step One:
Choose an image or set of images that you feel are controversial and/or historically important. Feel free to use any images we have covered in class, or choose images that we have not covered.

Step Two:
Interview two people about their impressions of the image(s). Be sure that the people you choose to interview are significantly different from one another in terms of age, gender, and cultural background. We will work on desiging questions and carrying out interviewing practices during some of our class time together.

• Before you interview your subjects you will have to first obtain their informed consent by sharing the scope and purpose of your assignment and inviting them to read and sign an informed consent form.
• Once your interviewees understand and agree to what you are trying to do, you may then record your interview digitally, using a laptop's built-in mike or an MP3 recorder. (Both technologies are available through the CCLI.)

Step Three:
Compose your audio analysis using Audacity--a free sound editing software. Since I do not assume that you are familiar with Audacity, we will have Audacity training and support during class time. If you are already familiar with the software, we will discuss how to best use the in-class training to meet your ability level.

In your audio analysis make sure you:

• offer your own reading of the image(s) using the analytic/theoretical vocabulary we have covered in class


• incorporate clips from your interviews as a way to support, question, and/or problematize your reading of the image(s)


• attend to the historical, contextual and rhetorical dimensions of your image-analysis. These dimensions should come out when you do the two items listed above, but if necessary you might further emphasize these dimensions with music, readings from documents, clips from speeches, sound effect, voice-over, and so on.

Are you wondering how in the world you are going to create such a thing? If so, I want to reassure you that in class we will listen to and discuss examples of how people have done different kinds of sound composition and generate strategies for you to use in your projects.

Examples of Student Work
This links come from students in Jenn Garrison's Convergent Media class at UT-Austin. Their assignment was to "pair up with a classmate for this first project and create a 1-2 minute soundscape that represents them to you. You can do this utilizing any style you wish." I am not placing these links here because I think all these examples are "good" ones. Rather, I want to examine these examples in terms of the strategies the students used--this is part of brainstorming for the audio analyses students will be creating in the visual media class.

This Guy Rene
Brooke
It's nice to be broken
I can't cook
Kendra
Manny
Just a Nerd

Places to Listen/Download Sound
Radio Diaries
Talking History
Sound Portraits
StoryCorps
99 Ways to Tell a Story
Famous Speeches
NPR's Lost and Found Sound
Audio Poetry
Acoustic Ecology
Quiet American


Why Audio?

This is a very important question, especially considering that I may have members of the class who are hearing impaired. This makes me aware of my assumptions about who students will be, what they can do, and how they will respond to my assignments.

Going into planning this class, I often wondered how to make it not just a writing class where all of our points of departure are visual. For this reason I had resisted having them write a big final paper.

In my experience, writing a big final paper is not something that usually gets students very excited, and I did not want to smother the kind of excitement that is often generated by visual media with too many academic papers. Besides, I am already having them do six written responses to assigned readings.

But, still, why audio?
I need a reason that is deeper than: it's not a paper.

To try to articulate such a reason, I could say that audio has quite a bit of cultural capital these days--think about the importance of ipods, music-sharing, NPR, MTV, books on "tape", and radio streaming over the internet.

The cultural capital line of thinking seems reasonable, but it still doesn't make an explicit connection to why AUDIO is valuable for VISUAL media analysis.

Here is what I see to be that connection:

Images and other kinds of visual media permeate our lives and we analyze them all the time. Yet the majority of that analysis does not happen in writing. We more often talk about what we see and ask questions of others about what we see. Images are more often the focus of conversation and dialogue than the focus of academic writing. Therefore an audio analysis, particularly one in which students interview others about images, can capture the spoken language of analysis that surrounds visual media.

This is not to say that spoken analysis is an off-the-top-of-the-head or informal activity. A spoken analysis can be very robust. For example, in the assignment I am hoping to get your feedback on students have to use theoretical vocabulary to articulate their ideas, test out the theories with outside sources (the interviewees) and pay explicit attention to deep features of history, context and rhetoric.

This kind of robustness is not necessarily all that different from what students do when they write papers, so we need not completely divorce sound and writing. While the forms may be somewhat different, both can point toward similar kinds of course content.

But what the element of sound in this assignment does is simultaneously replicate and complicate the form of analysis that most often accompanies images in real life: speech.


Issues & Questions

1. Rachel noted that I might need to be even more specific in my assignment sheet. This reinforced my belief that assignment design is very important and that technology alone does not a good assignment make.

2. Nate suggested that if I used i-movie, the students could lay their audio tracks down and place images on the screen in particular ways while their audio plays.

3. Re: #2 above, how much technnology stuff do I want to get into? With multimodality and multimedia it feels like one thing leads to another leads to another. How do I draw the parameters around what I am asking people to do?

4. Don't you think it's kind of odd that I am teaching a visual media analysis class in which the students are doing virtually no visual media production. I consider this an especially important issue because I consider production a form of analysis. Hmmmmm.....

5. How much time is this assignment going to take? If I hand out the assignment at the mid-term, so they can plan ahead, then how much time should I build into the class for this project in the final weeks? Is three weeks enough?

6. If this thing is really to test how well they can achieve the course goals, then it needs to be substantial enough for them to demonstrate that. Is it substantial enough? Is this a fair assignment? How much of the grade should this be?

7. Just in the TWIT itself, not everything went according to plan. How do we handle this, on the fly, when all the students are starting at us? How do we learn to share authority with students who might have insights into how to handle technical difficulties? How do we prepare well enough to forestall problems and be ready to react in productive ways when problems occur (and they will!)?

Presentation Technologies & Links

October 13, 2006
People in attendance: Becky, Diane, Moe, Ethan, Gowtham, Evie, Jim, Karen, Maura, Erin, Randy

MEETING NOTES (Links are posted at the bottom of these notes)

1. Document Projector

In room 134 there is a device called a "document projector" or a "digital presenter" or a "document camera." These are all different names for the same piece of equipment.

This piece of equipment has a built-in digital camera that points downward to a tablet upon which you place, say, a piece of paper to write on, or a book open to a page you want everyone to see.

Whatever you put on the surface of the tablet, with the camera pointing at it, gets projected up on the screen, so you can be writing on a piece of paper and the whole class can see it.

You can also take the remote control to this device, push the "capture" button, and this thing will take a picture of whatever you have on the tablet. (Unfortunately, you can't then download the pictures--the device does not have that capability. It's more for doing in-class comparisons.)

2. Powerpoint, Keynote, and Word, yes Word

We talked quite a bit about why we would use one presentation technology over another, and how not to pound nails with a screwdriver.

Powerpoint often seems like the default software to use, but we need not use only Powerpoint all the time. For example, if we're looking to annotate an image on the fly during class, using the things students say about that image, Microsoft Word's text boxes--or for that matter Photoshop--can work just as well.

Keynote is another possibility. It is a software that is much like Powerpoint, but has some differnt 3-D transition effects. Keynote also seems to make it easier to get around the outline form that Powerpoint often imposes. We have Keynote in the CCLI. If you want to use Keynote to create and then send presentations to students, but are teaching a class with students who don't have access to it, its good to know that Keynote allows to to export your presentation as a Powerpoint file, as a Quicktime movie, as a PDF, as a Flash file, and so on.

3. Going Naked & Moving around the Room

"Going naked" means inserting moments into your presentation when you don't rely on any screen based media at all. This idea is important to bring up because the presentation and teaching technologies we use sometimes become very dominant. But we need to remember PEDAGOGY FIRST. What are your goals?

For example, one of the TWIT participants talked about making sure she doesn't become burried behind the document projector, and about walking around the room to offer a kinetic sense to what she is teaching that helps the students remember more.

This led to a discussion of which kinds of technologies best lend themselves to what we want to make happen in class--whether that's simply more blackboard space, two projectors rather than one, or a tablet like John Madden uses to circle the quarterback in football game analysis. Let Jim know what kinds of things will support your teaching.

4. Links!

Presentation Zen
Flickr (images)
Tufte's graphic of the day (scroll down once you get to this page)
Morgue File (images)
Inexpensive photos you can buy
Interesting T-shirts
Images & Photoshop work
Stock Exchange (images)

Courseware

At this TWIT session Jim, Vicky, Diane and I talked about two kinds of course management tools:

1. WebCT (Click here for MTU's WebCT Guide)
2. Moodle (Click here to check out the Moodle that is set up on our humanities server)

How do the two compare? This question has some long answers, which you will be able to create for yourself though experiementing if you have time.

But in short:

• Both have chat functions, places to upload documents & archive online discussions, built-in email features, grading systems, and so on.



• Moodle is used more often in secondary school settings, has a "friendlier" interface, and allows the teacher/course designer to build a course up from scratch within the moodle environment.



• WebCT has much more security than Moodle and it gets set up through MTU's Sponsored Educational Programs. This means you have to contact someone like Matt Bus to set up a WebCT space for your class. This can be done over email.



• Both programs have big brother-esque features built in, such as the ability for you, the teacher, to see how long your students are spending in the online environment.



• There are multiple ways to use each kind of courseware, and each can be customized to achieve whatever kinds of pedagogical goals you have. Please talk to me or to Jim if you have questions or ideas.