Why not Vodcast

Wes has a post today that talks about storytelling and dual coding, this got me thinking about a meeting yesterday that I was in where part of the discussion was about vodcasts and what use they may be. I suggested that a vodcast that had the instructor “dancing around the room” was likely of little value as it would not add any value to the student, only time and space headaches for the support staff. I suggested that if they wanted to include video, it should be oriented in some manner to the audio – slide casts or recordings of the whiteboard – but warning that it was just as likely to be ignored as the audio is more than likely the most important part of the lecture for many students when they are reviewing.

Popping over to the wikipedia article myself, I found this as being potentially relevant to the discussion that I had:

Each channel also has limitations. For example, humans have difficulty simultaneously attending to multiple auditory or visual cues, depending on expertise with the task or prior knowledge with the subject area. For example, a television documentary that shows images of plant and animal life in a rain forest while also simultaneously providing narration that describes the animal life could potentially provide for improved learning using the dual-code theory because the visual and verbal information does not compete with each other.

This suggests that while some supporting visuals are certainly useful, while students are learning, it might be wise to provide review material in only one of the two pathways. When students gain the ability to handle more information on the topic, additional information can be brought in on other channels. So it seems to suggest to me, start with audio and have slides available, but if you want to vodcast, the visuals should support the audio and the visuals should also pay attention to the types of visual coding:

… mental images are analogue codes, while the verbal representation of words are symbolic codes. Analogue codes represent the physical stimuli we observe in our environment, such as trees and rivers. These codes are a form of knowledge representation that retains the main perceptual features of what is being observed. Symbolic codes, on the other hand, are a form of knowledge representation chosen to represent something arbitrarily, as opposed to perceptually.

All this is from the instructor side, but what about the storytelling tag? Well it seems to me, that the best way to see if students have “got it” is to have them put the story together and pay attention to the audio and the visuals to see if the entire package tells a consistent story.


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