...
One type of project that is emerging through the work of Ted Kahn, formerly
of Institute of Research on Learning (not sure of prepositions there...), is
a suped-up version of electronic pen pals -- online collaborative multimedia
authoring. Right now, Kahn is working with an Israel-based group to develop
global cross-cultural collaborations. I hope to be doing a newspaper
article on this soon. Kids from different countries create Web pages
together by sharing their ideas and information in text, video, audio, and
graphics. They weave it together online, going back and forth.
One of the issues that I think is interesting with respect to multimedia
projects and collaboration is how much these sorts of activities open up the
toolbox of forms that people use to represent their ideas. It's really
interesting to see how this tool -- multimedia -- has so many entry points
for literate thinking -- video, text, graphics, sound. This variety,
however, also makes it problematic for teachers. How do you assess it?
Which forms and which aspects of these forms do you emphasize? Why? What
measureable skills are being learned?
Coming up with assessment procedures is such a strong practice in K-12
schools and in the politicized culture we live in. People want to know --
"Yeah, but are they learning?" To get at this question, I've been comparing
how the various media forms in a multimedia stack get appropriated when kids
make and evaluate multimedia stacks about American politics. In particular,
I've been comparing how kids and teachers in one classroom interpret and
evaluate these stacks. I have found some predictable differences
(graphics,text) and some surprising similarities (video, audio).
One interesting similarity is that text loses its privileged status quite
quickly in the multimedia context. Both students and teachers view text
highly critically. They want this form to do more, to be more
communicatively muscular. I think this phenomenon poses an interesting
challenge to educators. If the predictable (and highly limited) measures of
textual proficiency no longer serve as the sole guidelines for scholastic
assessment, then a whole new (more realistic) multiple representational
world opens up.
I suspect that online cross-cultural multimedia collaboration is just one
(high-priced) way to encourage this sort of thoughtfulness about
representational forms. I'm sure there are many low-tech ways to pull it
off too, but I think it took the arrival of the technology to raise the
right questions.
Louise Yarnall
UCLA GSE&IS
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