Maaike van Leijen University of Amsterdam Back to Homepage	Frozen moments Maaike van Leijen University of Amsterdam
	Sometimes there is a rare occasion in education and research. You wish you could just freeze the moment, to keep it alive to be able to reuse the things that are said and done. When you defrost the material, new insights could occur. Some time ago a collegue of mine organized a small conference. The topic of the conference was an article he wrote. Invited scientists from different disciplines formulated their point of view about the subject of the article. Because the occasion was quite rare (we don't have the opportunity to invite those scientists every year) we decided to registrate the talks. The university's Audiovisual Centre made the registrations, wich made the material look very professional. They alsp digitized and decoded the material and placed it at the university's streaming server. This makes it possible for us to reuse it in different (educational) situations. My collegue would like to ask our Honours students to watch the streaming material and learn from- and with it. Therefore he placed the links to the streams in our VLE Blackboard. The PowerPoints the scientists used during their comment talks, are made available in pdf format. The assignment for the students will be to read the article, watch and listen to the comments and formulate their own unique final comment based on the existing comments. We realize this it not an easy task for students. In fact, they are asked to have an overview and to do the job of my collegue, namely to integrate the feedback and formulate new insights based on the comments. This means that the students not only have to understand the contains of the article and understand the comments. They also have to integrate the different insights into a new, personal point of view and be critical. Wich means they have to criticise authorities' arguments, give an accurate account of it and their critique must be well argued. For this type of assignment the streaming technology is necessary. Not only for the students to be able to use the material in a flexilble, time-independant way, but also for the teachers and developers to be able to evaluate the assignment and improve it for every following cohort of (Honours) students. The streaming technology has educational advances because of the relative controllability, making it adaptive by the student. But the video can't give feedback to the student. Feedback is an important element for learning. So the teacher has to organize a way to make the process interactive. The Discussion Board of the VLE Blackboard offers possibilities. The teacher can also refer to the process during the class meetings. It is clear that additional instructions and assignments increase the level of pedagogic use of this sort of streaming video application. Wether we really are able to finally defrost the moments, depends on the sort of assingments and the accompanying discussions we're able to produce. Back to Homepage
	This document was prepared for the DIVERSE newsletter November 2004 - ref: www.diverse-net.org/diversenl0305mvl1.htm