Video clips:  As compelling illustration and/or as projective test stimuli.

In my current work building a multimedia website that shows the teaching of science with young children my colleagues and I keep revisiting three main worries:  (1) how to present minimally edited video footage in video clips in such ways as to "teach" website users who are experienced teachers (or novice teachers) how to see in the clips the substantive "points" that we as developers see in them,  (2) how to integrate with the video clips "scaffolding" material in the written text-based portions of the website so that video supports insights to be gained from written text and vice versa, and (3) how to design the whole website to discourage superficial "tourist" visits by users and encourage deeper,  more thorough,  and more respectful visiting and revisiting as if one were an ethnographer. 

Each of these three worries connects with my previous experience in showing minimally edited video clips of teaching practice to live audiences over the years--in professional development workshops for teachers,  at academic society meetings of scholars,  and in university classes with undergraduate and graduate students.    In those showings I had two big advantages.  First,  I could stop the clip,  or replay it,  and do  the equivalent of voice-over commentary so as to "scaffold" the viewing by the audience.   Second,  during the real time course of the showing and during my uttering of commentary I could watch for facial reactions and elicit spoken comments from the audience that enabled me to judge whether the audience was "getting it,"  from my point of view,  or whether I needed to re-play the clip and provide additional commentary.  (Often I would be pointing at the video screen and saying such things as "See how Mary reacts to what the teacher is saying!")   In other words,  in those presentations the audience saw the video clip together with me as a presenter, never just by itself.  In a website we can't overtly direct each user's viewing  and provide framing in real time. We can't "teach" the clips in firsthand interaction with clip viewers,  as one can do in presentations to live audiences.  I think that puts our clips at a disadvantage, pedagogically.

Worry #1.   At first viewing,  an unedited video clip of approximately two minutes duration,  consisting of a continuous camera "take" or two,  in which the camera moves relatively little,  is a very different stimulus for a viewer from that of  a piece of edited documentary film.   In the latter,  through editing,  various "cues" are provided that communicate the framing perspectives the editor wants to reinforce (whether lightly or heavy-handedly).  In other words, implicit cues to the substantive point of the video strip are built in through editing within the strip itself.  This is also true for what we see in art cinema and on broadcast television--lots of camera editing and subsequent bench editing to underscore the "point" of the clip--and today's viewers have become accustomed to relying on such cues,  intuitively,  as they watch audiovisual footage.  In minimally edited footage, however,  few of those cues are present.  There is the overall visual frame--where the camera is pointed.   And there is the boundary of when the clip starts and when it ends.  But otherwise the clip,  albeit rich in potential information,  is a relatively reticent and enigmatic visual "text" as it is experienced phenomenologically by the viewer.   In other words, in the eye of the beholder  the video clip upon first viewing can function more as a projective test stimulus than as a clear window on the world of pedagogical practice. As learners we all bring our prior experience to the site of new learning;  thus for viewers of video clips there are no immaculate perceptions.

Viewers can and do "read into" their initial viewings all sorts of things.  Their noticings are  based on their ontological assumptions (mostly implicit) concerning teaching practice--taken for granted assumptions of what learners,  subject matter, classroom participation structures,  and learning are "really" about.   If some kids can be seen to be making noise or moving while the teacher is talking does that mean the teacher has no "control"?  (And must "control" precede "learning"?  And is teacher talk the primary means by which "learning" is encouraged? For elaboration, see my comments in  Erickson 2007a .)  Moreover,  do users know how to see and make sense of evidence of student understanding/learning in snippets of student talk,  or in quick scans of student written work or in other ways students have of displaying their understanding?  In other words,  how adept is the website user at seeing real time evidence of students' thinking--"proximal formative assessment" of student understanding and learning?  (See Erickson 2007b.)   If the viewer is not already adept at such assessment,  even thought we as  website developers think that our video clip shows evidence of student understanding or misunderstanding,  the first time viewer may not "get it" about what we intend the tape to illustrate. How can we present video clips in a website in such ways as to "teach" the viewer how to see such things in the clip?   It is my sense that not a lot of thinking has gone into this as we have begun to develop websites that claim to illustrate concretely the "realities" of teaching and learning practice.  Rather, there has been a tendency to believe that the video clip "shows" quite directly and obviously what the person who selected it as a representational display thinks it shows.

Worry #2.   The connections that we see as  a developer between the "scaffolding" written text put into the website and what we think the video clips illustrate may well not be obvious to users of the website.   I may think that the authoring of written text is seamlessly integrated with what the video clips show,  substantively,  but that may not be the case with all viewers.  And,  as noted above, when somebody visits a website I get no real time feedback from that user as he or she watches the clips and visit the various sites of written text within the website.  "Distance learning"  could easily become "Distance misconstruing" in the eyes of the beholder but I as a developer can't learn from that and make mid-course corrections in the website's "teaching" approaches,  in real time.

Worry #3.   My experience as an ethnographer and micro-analyst of minimally edited video is that one should not take things at first glance,  or at first hearing.  As a viewer one should not assume that one knows right away what is going on in a video clip;  what things mean from the points of view of those one is observing  For the professional scholarly analyst, such interpretive shooting from the hip is a "no-no" in trying to make sense of somebody else's lifeworld of daily practice.   Rather, one should entertain a stance of phenomenological skepticism while viewing.  But classroom teachers, as practical social actors,  must shoot from the hip interpretively, in the real time conduct of their teaching, and they must believe their own interpretive judgments as they are seeing or hearing what students are doing.   In other words,   armchair watching of practice,  entertaining reflective distance about one's own first impressions,  is not a habit of mind with which  experienced teachers are accustomed as viewers.   A website can encourage much deeper reflection on "virtual practice" than that which is usual in the midst of actual practice.  But that more "distanced" reflective stance toward viewing can seem alien (or trivial) to a seasoned practitioner.  Moreover,  many teachers are not accustomed to reading a lot about details of pedagogical practice--there is not a common professional language of practice, and so the potential relevance of the written material in the website may not be obvious to the viewer,  at first viewing.   This means that there are tremendous pressures for website users to skim the content of the website as a fleeting tourist rather than digging more deeply, savoring the content more fully as a  committed excavator/ethnographer.  And in addition,  the user can navigate non-linearly from site to site around the entire website.   In a documentary film the editor selects each successive strip of audiovisual recording that the viewer gets to see and, as discussed above,  through that selection builds in framing cues to guide the viewer's interpretations from moment to moment during viewing.   In an ethnographic written report the author does the same with the narrative vignettes and interview quotes that are strung together,  each piece of detailed descriptive content usually being framed by foreshadowing and aftershadowing commentary.  Yet the user of a website user can whizz around in it, from one location to the next, at whatever depth of attention and reflection he or she wishes.   Yikes!

One way to deal with this is to present very short video clips in the video,  containing close-ups and other visual cues to frame what the videographer wants the viewer to "see" in the clip.   But that makes it look as if teaching/learning interaction mainly consists of short chain-like sequences of  "moves" by teacher and students.   And keeping the written content "short and snappy" can also engage a user's attention,  but at the cost of sacrificing analytic depth in the interest of maximizing surface attractiveness.  These are all tradeoffs that worry me.  And the worries interact--worry #1 is exacerbated by worries #2 and #3.  I have been told that in the Chinese writing system the character for "danger" and "opportunity" is one and the same.  But as website developers trying to illustrate the complexities of teaching practice for viewers at a distance, not wanting to lead viewers by the nose through the website but concerned about the problems entailed in viewers' skimming within the site,  how much "opportunity" are we up for?

                                                   

REFERENCES

Erickson,  F.  (2007a)  Ways of seeing video:  Toward a phenomenology of viewing minimally edited footage.  In Goldman, R., Barron, B., Pea, R., and Derry, S.  (eds.)  Video research in the learning sciences, pp. 145-155.   Mahwah,  NJ:  Lawrence Erlbaum.

Erickson, F.  (2007b)  Some thoughts on "proximal" formative assessment of student learning.   In Moss, P. (ed.)  Evidence and decision making in education.   102nd Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, pp. 186-216.  Chicago:  NSSE.