Teaching with Media
Technology and Education Conference, Ekpedeftiria Doukas
S.A., Athens, Greece, 1991.
Copyright, 1991.
Is it necessary, really, to learn how to read a film?
Obviously, anyone of minimal intelligence over the age of four can - more or
less - grasp the basic content of a film, record, radio, or television program
without any special training. Yet precisely because the media so very closely
mimic reality, we apprehend them much more easily than we comprehend them.
James Monaco, How to Read a
Film. J. Monaco, New York: Oxford University Press, 1977, p. vii.
The traditional blackboard is really very much like a
computer screen. It can be used to explain ideas graphically, with text and
numbers, and can be used by the students like an interactive interface in a
computer. Use of films, videotapes, audiotapes, records, and even performance
can enhance the learning process in the classroom - without the computer. This
technique of "multiple media" requires creativity and planning. What
media are available? How much of it should be used? What happens if it doesn't
work? What is the proper role for teaching with media? When is it just a
distraction?
Media in the classroom are appropriate for triggering ideas, making
difficult subjects more understandable, and for holding attention on important
ideas. It should lead students to remember ideas by becoming more involved with
them. What is not always obvious is that students should first know what media
is and ways to think about it. Critical skills in understanding media are
extremely important; without them the film, video, record or slide presented in
relation to a subject is only one dimensional.
My own experiences in teaching and using various media in the classroom are
somewhat skewed in that I was teaching art or media or some combination. The
nature of the classes dictated that I demonstrate most of the expressive media
that we use to communicate with - print, books, drawing, slides, film, video,
audio, computer screens. What I gained from these experiences was both a
knowledge of what these media are and how they can be used (or not used) in the
classroom. Although I was not teaching math or science (although technically
television is a wonderful way to teach physics and I did have a physicist come
to my video classes to explain how images got from reality to the screen) I
have since employed what I learned to help teachers from a variety of subjects
at MIT visualize their subjects with multimedia computing technology. This
technology "models" what is done in the classroom to some degree but
has the added feature of being able to connect this model to electronic
libraries.
Generally when instructors came to the Visual Computing Group (the Visual
Computing Group at MIT's Project Athena was a team of specialists that worked
with faculty to develop multimedia computing applications in a variety of
disciplines. It is now in the MIT Center for Educational Computing Initiatives)
with an idea for translating or extending their class with multimedia
computing, we asked them "How do you usually teach this? How do you
present the material? By lecture? How do you work with the blackboard? Do you
use overhead slides? Do you use video or films? Do you lecture and then take
questions? Which concepts in the course are hardest to get across? What
questions are always asked? Are students playing active roles in the class or
are they taking notes? What kind of examples do you use? What classes, or TV
shows, or performances have you seen that you thought were possibly relevant to
your subject? If you had any means at your disposal what is your dream method for
teaching this course?
Before becoming involved with multimedia computing I taught for ten years in
a small fine arts college in Atlanta. I also taught at the Center for Advanced
Visual Studies at MIT, at the Visible Language Workshop in the MIT Media Laboratory,
in the Department of Communications, Computing, and Technology at Teachers
College, Columbia University, and most recently in the Visual Arts Program in
the MIT Department of Architecture and Urban Planning. These experiences all
focused on using various media in the classroom with varying amounts of
success. They are worth reviewing.
When I was an art teacher I was confronted with the problem of grading
students who brought a creative work to me. An art work in the academic context
can be considered like any other "problem" solved in a discipline
except that in solving it a tangible visual (except in the case of a musical
work) object results. When the creative problem is solved it is said to
"work". Literally taken, to make "artwork" means that the
object communicates on a multimodal level. It satisfies abstract needs for the
maker and the viewer. In terms of "grading" this process, essentially
I graded what I conceived to be the "quality of their interest" in
what they were doing and the mastery of the medium or technique they had chosen
to represent their ideas. I had no problem, except in the case of a student who
had done a poor job and knew it. Part of being a teacher is to confront the
student with what he/she is doing. In the case of a student who was interested
and showed a degree of mastery of his/her interest, my role consisted of
finding the best means of learning for the student.
I mention this process because, as I pursued other teaching, I used this art
school technique as a way of understanding how to present information in a
multimodal way. As a teacher of film, video, photography, and then drawing, I
discovered that I could co-teach my classes with a variety of mechanical
assistants. These assistants could help me make the impact of a statement like
"The invention of film was thought to be a scientific indication that
immortality was achievable" by actually showing the first moving images of
animal locomotion by Edweard Muybridge that elicited that comment from an
amazed newspaper critic at the turn of the century. The slide projector, the
indispensible assistant of the art history teacher, was the basic tool of the
visual lecture. As a photographer it was natural for me to take pictures and
make slides for my classes much the same way someone else would jot down
lecture notes. It did't really matter if the slides were museum artworks as
long as they held up a point I could make while speaking. They could easily be
characterized as "snap shots" that by themselves had no common
meaning but in the context of a lecture gave a student a visual reminder, an
index for the idea I had presented.
On a fellowship at MIT in 1984 at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies I
conceived and taught a course on art and communications called
"Transmission" which consisted of lectures and an improvised live
cable television program once a week. Admittedly this is something that might
only be done at a place like MIT where such technological resources are the expected
rather than the exception. Each week we would explore some concept in the realm
of "public art vs. private art" or "mass communication vs.
personal expression". Much like the traditional art courses I had taught,
the students would experience classroom lectures with mechanical assistants
like tape players, video cassettes, slides, films. There would also be the
occasional human assistant, a guest speaker who would usually require some
mechanical device as well. But during the cable program they would demonstrate
what they had learned in class by actually producing live video and audio
imagery that would be telecast to the MIT campus. Unlike a student who makes a
painting or photograph as a requirement for an art class, these students were
making electronic images meant to be seen immediately by a large audience.
The lessons from this class were many. First, students developed hands-on
critical skills in regard to media. They knew how something like video was made
and how it could manipulate a message. They also learned how to match an idea
to an image-making technique and they learned that they could evolve that idea
by applying subsequent media to it. They learned how to say no to the
technology as well. One of the most moving experiences from the class involved
understanding what "live" television actually meant. We had a custom
of taping each show so that we could look at it afterword and discuss what was
successful and what had failed. Remember, the program was live on MIT cable
which meant that what they improvised was immediately seen and reacted to. We
never telecast a pre-recorded program. One evening after an especially
well-done telecast we were anxious to see the tape. Someone had forgotten to
turn on the video tape recorder. There was no synthetic memory of the events of
the evening. There was an immediate depression. Who was guilty for not
recording the program? Then it occurred to all of them that this was the best
lesson of the class - we were live!
The images were transitory. Like actors in a one-performance play, we had
committed ourselves to being totally spontaneous for thirty minutes and the
record was lost, never to be reconstructed. Art had imitated life. It was
easily the best show. There was a totally emotional understanding of the
difference between live and recorded television. Their critical understanding
of the medium was complete. As they approached the content of other shows, they
began experimenting with using pre-recorded and live imagery, answering the
phone and telecasting the calls on the air while shifting imagery to relate to
the caller's question or comment. They were now in complete control of the
medium.
Now when I used video in class lectures with them they had a completely
different atttitude about it. They would first critique the quality of the
tape, the production values, how carefully it was made, and how well it
communicated the ideas it was supposed to convey. They knew this medium just
the way they knew different teachers and friends who attempted to give them
messages.
In 1987, while managing the Visual Computing Group at Project Athena I
continued my classroom teaching at the Visible Language Workshop in the MIT
Media Laboratory with colleagues from Athena Dorothy Shamonsky, former VLW
graduate and graphics designer and Matthew Hodges, Visiting Scientist from
Digital Equipment Corporation. We conceived two courses, HyperVision and
HyperSense. HyperVision was concerned with the design and construction of
visual databases using recordable videodisc as the medium. It required students
not only to understand the technical aspects of laser read/recorded optical
media but to understand the way images could be assembled for many different
uses by a computer. HyperSense was involved with programming these visual
databases using the first modules of Athena Muse, the multimedia software under
development at Athena.
The lecture situation for these classes was very simple. I would generally
use a slide projector and talk. The topic of "HyperVision" was how
images could be linked in interesting ways to make statements, ask questions,
create moods, leave impressions, or tell a story. I went through a history of
how images and technologies for sequencing them evolved from cave painting to
modern film. I collected the slide images from books, magazines, TV programs,
and by photographing things in my own experience that I thought might be fun to
work into the lectures. The medium the students would be working with,
recordable videodisc, allowed for the recording of still images, moving images,
and sound. They were asked to bring in images in any or all of these formats to
class every time we met in order to talk about their visual scheme for a
section of the videodisc. At mid-semester, when their own ideas were well
formed, we asked them to now think about how their pieces would work together,
as a unified, group-generated videodisc. They had to especially think about
what transitions needed to be made to get from one set of concerns to another.
The resulting videodisc was quite successful and could be viewed as a single
vision or broken into individual works. Subjects ranged from a first person
surrogate travel on the Boston Subway to psychcological commentary on feminist
concerns to collecting insects. The process of putting it together was much
more to the point of the class.
By working with a specific a media, in this case videodisc, which was unique
to the MIT environment, they brought interests to bear on what they initially
viewed as learning a new media technology. The end result, however, was that
they collected information and organized it, thereby intensifying their
interests. They became researchers using imagery to understand particular
ideas. This, of course, is really a high tech version of "show and
tell" but with the added dimension of attempting to coherently sequence
each person's "show and tell" into a unified work. That attempt
raised many questions about each topic and led to each person teaching the
other in depth - with media - about what they were trying to express and why. As
instructors, we would encourage them to "present" their contemporary
ideas while we presented some historical structures that would give them a
basis for creating a group structure. Topics like illuminated manuscript, panel
painting, early printing, newspaper layout, book design, photo essays, film
sequences, and advertising design were discussed with slides. The use of single
slide images to discuss moving imagery was also interesting in that the dialog
would usually "animate" them.
The strategy of using only the slide projector in this case worked well
because the students had to think about their visual ideas in discrete parts
and only saw them move when we put them on the videodisc.
The second class, HyperSense, involved programming interactive videodiscs.
The class made use of the videodisc and by mid-semester had made a new one
based on things they were learning about computer-assisted image technology.
This class focused more on computer utilities for making the imagery function.
They investigated Apple's HyperCard system which is modeled after a stack of
note cards that can be shuffled and linked in a variety of ways. They also
worked with Project Athena's first modules of Athena Muse which is a more
advanced system modeled on the concept of documents in spatial arrangements.
This concept in a sense allows for information to be correlated in any form you
may need, not just in a "stack" as the Apple software dictates. You
could create "rooms" of information with Muse and then proceed to
walk through the room choosing to look at multimedia documents made of video,
audio, graphics, and text which were strategically placed in the space. Each
document could act as a door to another space with another set of documents and
so on: a very dynamic and conceptually intricate paradigm for learning.
In this class we simply used the blackboard and some simple illustrations
with an overhead projector or a slide projector. Often the images were of
earlier "hyper" structures like the Talmud, Vedic networks, neural
diagrams, roots of trees, maps of communications systems, river systems, etc.
that would convey the variety of interconnected information systems both
natural and man-made. The other mechanical assistant was, of course, the Athena
Visual Workstation which was a fully interactive multimedia platform complete
with cable TV, videodisc, and stereo sound with a high resolution screen.
Students used Muse to construct various interfaces for their video segments.
These classes were conducted in a cluster of these machines and lectures were
usually delivered while students were at the machines.
In 1988-89 I began teaching classes at Teachers College, Columbia
University. Still managing the group at Athena and commuting by train and plane
to New York City, I taught a class in Formal Analysis of Media and later
co-taught one called Aspects of Visualization.
The lecture room at Columbia was equipped with a video projector, a computer
screen projector, a slide projector, a film projector, an audio cassette
player, VHS and 3/4 video cassette players, videodisc player, full stereo sound
system, a microphone if you wanted it, and plenty of extra inputs if you wanted
two or more of anything. In short, it was a full multimedia classroom and came
with a media engineer who, although sometimes irritable, would set up the room
any way you wanted. This situation was ideal for Formal Analysis of Media which
was a fundamental course in understanding both technically and conceptually how
media works. One of the most interesting experiments in this class was to ask
students to write a paper on what they expected to learn in the class. After
they turned in the papers I photographed them (the papers) with 35MM slides and
during the next class I projected them eight feet high. The papers ranged from
hand written to neatly typed to badly typed, to inexpensive computer printer to
laser printed and were all formatted in different ways. The students were asked
to evaluate the papers based on appearance. Handwritten papers were immediately
dismissed as "rush jobs", badly typed papers were
"amateur", expensive laser printed papers were "published"
and fancy formating with word processor software was "fluff". The
mediums definitely had collegiate messages. This exercise made the point quite
nicely that to understand a media it is helpful to put it inside another media.
Slides of paper documents revealed their formal natures and the cultural values
we place on them.
I used the room very much as it was designed - as a media theater. I could
easily move from lecture to lecture with slides, to audio tape to videodisc or
videotape or film. I began composing lectures mentally a week before each
class. I would tape imagery off my home television, cue up audio tapes, take
photographs, rent films or tapes, print out computer-composed notes and essays
for each class. I could show slides of video, video of film, film of video,
videodisc of photography, project slides over videotapes, project computer text
or graphics, virtually any combination I could think of to make a point.
Students were encouraged to bring imagery to class in any format and if they
wanted to raise an issue or make a point they could use the equipment as well.
It was a very popular course in large part because I was using familiar media
to teach things most everyone already knew but did not know how to articulate.
Things like "why I hate commercials" or "why television drama is
so bad", or "why the news is not the truth" or "why
Kurosawa is a great filmmaker". The class was usually on Friday afternoons
and I told them that it was the prelude to a weekend in New York City, the most
media-intensive place in North America.
The class produced some very exciting work and I still hear from students
from time to time and they send me articles and papers about media as well. I
did discover some disturbing things about this ideal media classroom. One was
that we were almost always in total darkness even on the nicest spring days.
Another was that when all the media was shut off my voice had incredible
authority. And the most disturbing thing of all was that students started
writing emotional papers about disillusionment with reality. I think the
availability of media in the classroom made it quite easy to saturate the
students. This experience, though, was quite useful in understanding the
difference between the "ideal" media classroom and the reality.
Currently I am teaching sections of the foundations courses in the MIT
Visual Arts Program on "Time and Identity".
This new program at MIT in the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning
is developing a curriculum in the visual arts aimed at giving students a sense
of artistic thought by helping them to understand the relationship between
thinking and making, the binding of process and product, an understanding of
history and culture in artistic activity, the role of media in the inquiry
process, and developing a critical vocabulary. A traditional fine arts format
involving painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography is being augmented by
multimedia and graphic computing capabilities. This combined approach of old
and new technologies is aimed at giving students a sense of the "work of
art" both as an object and as a process. An essential conception of the
program is the notion that media are modes of thinking and methods of inquiry
that condition the type and extent of the investigation. For the artist
"work comes from work" means that new ideas are refined by generating
art works, evaluating them, and creating new pieces.
The governing attitudes of the Visual Arts Program are about process being
as important as product, media as a mode of exploration, the rewarding of risks
taken during discovery, the transparency of technique, growth as a measure of
performance, the understanding of conventions as boundaries that demand
examination, and the revelation of personal styles of inquiry. Students in the
Visual Arts Program work on problems that address the dialectic between
restraint and openness, two dimensions vs. three dimensions, artistic metaphor
(ritual, expression, language, critique, cultural index), audience
consideration, art and nature, representation, temporal experience, language
and image, concept, documentation, scale, kinetics, collecting, site, and
material limitation.
The "Time and Identity" sections deal with how ideas and
information are transformed by time. Students work out problems in how private
identity is reflected and altered by using the prime tool of mass
communication: video. Teaching this course in 1990 has been an interesting
journey from 1975 when I first began my teaching career as a "video
teacher". Students now are technically very literate and have better
critical skills in dealing with mass media. At MIT these are the students who
have grown up with the video camera and the VCR. It is disturbing, however,
that there is still no basic framework for teaching media literacy in the
public schools. Students now have simply been exposed to more television and
media technology like computers, which makes them a bit less inhibited about "interacting"
with media.
For my first classes in this program I wanted to talk about the notion of a
"media landscape" as a way of approaching the "public
identity". To this end I brought an audio cassette player (the large
"boom box" type) with cassettes of American and Japanese pop music, a
short-wave radio, a small hand-held TV, a videodisc, a compact disc, a
videocassette player, monitor, small 8MM video camera, slides, videotapes of TV
commercials, and an assortment of odd props like rubber rocks, a rubber rock
with a computer chip in it that when hit makes the sound of a breaking window,
some xerox copies, a newspaper, etc. In other words, as much public and private
media as I could find. This I used as I talked, moving from one prop to the
other to finally assemble all of the objects on a table top in the form of a
miniature city which I proceeded to turn on so that there was a cacophony of
sounds and images that I could then make a video tape of - much like an aerial
photographer.
We then played the tape back on the monitor and discussed what was being
seen, the way I had videotaped it, how it might be improved with lighting or
sound effects, etc. This demonstration had the effect of "igniting"
the class into a very nearly over-excited mob. Ultimately I had to stop the
demonstration in order to let them calm down. They enthusiastically understood
what was being demonstrated because it was the familiar landscape of their own
lives over which they had little control. The class then proceeded on to
assignments that allowed them to change this condition by making "private
media" images that were quiet, had different time signatures (unlike 10 or
30 second TV commmercials), and required contemplation rather than passive
viewing. They worked in teams of five or six with one camera between them and
taught each other a good many video skills.These videotapes were quite
successful and gave them a confidence in "art-making" that most of
them could not get as quickly with drawing, painting, or sculpture because of
the length of time needed in those mediums to get something "to
work". As an introduction to the arts it was a very good match between
materials (video) and ideas. The program opted to buy more video cameras for
the next semester.
In every case I tried to explain why I was using a certain media in the
classroom. Admittedly this was actually required in most of the subjects I was
teaching. But in a larger sense it has pointed out to me that the use of media
in the classroom is not really for entertainment or to mask a poor grasp of a
subject. Rather, it is admitting that the world we live in has useful lessons
for us. Instead of avoiding the contemporary confusion that media often evokes,
we must find ways of using it coherently to complete the sense of relevancy we
desperately need in the classroom.
This balancing of using media to explain or illustrate and media discussed
for its own sake is the key to using it successfully. Above all, it should
amuse YOU to be doing this in your class. All too often we are so immersed in
our field of interest that we forget our students may only have a small
percentage of that interest when they come to class. Certainly we do not want
to merely entertain them. Rather we want to create situations where the subject
is seen freshly as often as possible not only for them but for ourselves. By
using a short videotape, a film, a recording, or even a seemingly unrelated
picture that gives students a marker for a difficult idea we can create memory
triggers that hold attention, give emphasis, or stimulate recall.
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