posted by Sidnee
Although the Chronicle of Higher Education article doesn’t mention the Flip specifically, some instructors (mostly early adopter technology geeks) are making use of social media to make difficult concepts easier for their students to understand. “Film School” highlights some intriguing uses for video technologies in college coursework that instructors are using to provide learning support outside the regular classroom / textbook learning format. Some of them are quite fun, and show how instructors can reach today’s visually oriented learners by taking advantage of current technology.
At the CITE IT Futures Education Summit: “Next Generation Technology for Next Generation Students” at Microsoft last Friday, presenter Bob Backstrand, a media instructor at Bellevue Community College, showed how his students were using the Flip camera to do pretty much the same thing MCDM students are doing… He also showed a short film, created by a 4-year-old using a Flip camera, that showed a fair grasp of the basic storytelling essentials. His message that ANYONE can do it (and is) was pretty clear. But to echo Shirky and the Chronicle of Higher Ed, most ‘publish then filter’ efforts continue to be ‘for fun’ and produce flotsam that only a mother could love (and even they would find less than durable). It takes a learning community–and generally agreed-upon rules–to get beyond the flotsam and find a way to make use of the failures and successes.
