Facilitating Creative Thinking

Facilitating the Creation and Evaluation of Video Projects in Education

Background

We live in a media sat­u­rat­ed soci­ety where media affects the way that we inter­act with and under­stand the world around us. While the con­cept of media lit­er­a­cy has been around since the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, its only in the past 10 years that it has gained momen­tum and wide recog­ni­tion in acad­e­mia. Media Lit­er­a­cy is a two-fold process. First, one must posess the abil­i­ty to under­stand, dis­sect, and crit­i­cal­ly ana­lyze the infor­ma­tion that is being pre­sent­ed. Sec­ond, one must be able to take that under­stand­ing and use it to cre­ate an effec­tive and mean­ing­ful pro­duc­tion. Oral and writ­ten com­mu­ni­ca­tions are nec­es­sary skills in today’s world and are appro­pri­ate­ly empha­sized in our edu­ca­tion sys­tem.

Media-based projects rep­re­sent a way to com­mu­ni­cate com­plex ideas to broad­er audi­ences. These types of projects have recent­ly been infil­trat­ing the aca­d­e­m­ic world as accept­ed schol­ar­ly com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools. How­ev­er, a dis­con­nect is present between the expec­ta­tions of the pro­fes­sors that are assign­ing and eval­u­at­ing the projects and the stu­dents who are asked to cre­ate them.

Scope

The main goal of this project was to facil­i­tate cre­ative think­ing with a group in order to devel­op a rubric sys­tem for the design and eval­u­a­tion of video projects. The com­po­nents that made up the rubric sys­tem were tak­en direct­ly from the results of the cre­ative exer­cis­es. The sec­ondary goal was to teach stu­dents the basics of videog­ra­phy so they would be more pre­pared to exe­cute media projects in their class­es.

We cre­at­ed an online pre-sur­vey to assess the par­tic­i­pants’ skills and expe­ri­ence with videog­ra­phy. This sur­vey act­ed as reg­is­tra­tion for the work­shop. After the work­shop, we cre­at­ed a post-sur­vey to gain feed­back and insights on the work­shop itself, and whether student’s per­cep­tions and skills relat­ed to video have changed. Unlike the pre-sur­vey, this sur­vey was anony­mous because we want­ed to encour­age hon­est respons­es.

Workshop Exercises

A Basic Videog­ra­phy web­site out­lin­ing the sem­i­nar was con­struct­ed so stu­dents could have a future ref­er­ence point. Sec­tions include The Basics, Tech­niques, Dig­i­tal Sto­ry­telling, Sto­ry­board­ing, Video Edit­ing, and Exer­cis­es. All of these com­po­nents were addressed in the work­shop and could essen­tial­ly be used as notes for the stu­dents dur­ing and fol­low­ing the ses­sion. The web­site link is: http://sites.google.com/site/basicvideography

After edu­cat­ing the stu­dents on basic ele­ments of videog­ra­phy such as light­ing, fram­ing, audio, and sto­ry­board­ing, we con­duct­ed two group exer­cis­es. The first exer­cise was expos­ing them to a video and hav­ing groups go through and dis­sect the basic ele­ments based off of knowl­edge they had just learned.

The sec­ond exer­cise involved the groups set­ting out to sto­ry­board and shoot a 1 minute video on how to tie their shoes by only edit­ing with­in the cam­era (no post pro­duc­tion video edit­ing soft­ware was used). The stu­dents worked in groups of 4 and had 30 min­utes to car­ry out this task.

Outcomes

Based on feed­back from the stu­dents in the work­shop and data col­lect­ed from the exer­cis­es, a rubric was devel­oped to assist fac­ul­ty in grad­ing stu­dent video projects. A group of fac­ul­ty was asked to view the short video clips cre­at­ed in class, grade the videos with the rubric and pro­vide feed­back about both the videos and the rubric itself. The grades were based on the Savan­nah Col­lege of Art and Design (SCAD) grad­ing scale. Fac­ul­ty were allowed to deter­mine the weight of each cat­e­go­ry in the rubrics and asked to explain their deci­sions. We would like to fur­ther test the rubric before we make any adjust­ments and final­ize it.

The rubric we cre­at­ed can be adapt­ed to fit projects in any class, becom­ing an inte­gral part of the edu­ca­tion sys­tem. Pro­fes­sors will be able to address form and con­tent and weigh dif­fer­ent ele­ments based on spe­cif­ic project goals. Our rubric can serve as the basic frame­work that can be tai­lored and fur­ther devel­oped.

A skill-build­ing work­shop series for stu­dents is absolute­ly some­thing that can have a life beyond this quar­ter. The work­shops can essen­tial­ly take on any top­ic stu­dents wish to excel in that are not taught direct­ly in cours­es. Work­shops top­ics could include both hard and soft skills with top­ics such as inter­me­di­ate videog­ra­phy, blog­ging, port­fo­lio cre­ation, poster pre­sen­ta­tion, pub­lic speak­ing tips, and inter­view­ing skills. We are hop­ing this is the first of many work­shops devel­oped and deliv­ered by stu­dents for their fel­low class­mates.

Check out the process book below to learn more: