AUC Academic Conference 'From Virtual to Reality' The University of
Queensland 1996AUC Academic Conference 'From Virtual to Reality' The University of
Queensland 1996
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Paper Title:
Can multimedia bridge the divide
between computing and the arts ?The Playbuilding CD, a case study.
Presenter:
Leonie Ramondt, Edith Cowan University, Perth
Authors:
Leonie Ramondt, lecturing in Multimedia Learning Technologies
Alan Hancock, lecturing in Drama Education
Faculty of Education
Edith Cowan University
Keywords: Drama, Multimedia
Faculty area: Education
Introduction
Many arts students are still computer shy, finding few reasons to overcome the challenge of becoming computer literate, especially if this requires learning databases and spreadsheets.
The Playbuilding CD Rom aims to motivate Drama Education students to use computers within the context of their course, even if simply as a lively reference work but hopefully also as adjunct to their own document creation. Multimedia provides a more effective and dynamic representation of drama topics than conventional media. An AUDF grant provided us with much of the hardware and software we required and a Quality Assurance grant provided by our university, gave us money.
Drama education students were invited to participate in the design process, so that a more useful piece of software would eventuate. A small group responded and have helped to clarify the content areas, logged video footage and contributed to the design of the interface. After a very basic introduction to a number of software packages, they began work and reported great satisfaction at seeing the products of their work. These products included some simple and delightful animations, the printout of the video logs and the programming of selectable text boxes onscreen. One student even preferred to type the text for various topics painstakingly onto the actual interface in preference to using a wordprocessor because it looked more important. There is no doubt that Arts students can gain great satisfaction from using computers in areas relevant to their interest. We also found however, that there is nothing quite like a partly unclad Brad Pitt for motivating two self professed computer illiterate young women to find his home pages within minutes of being introduced to Netscape!
What is the Playbuilding CD-Rom?
Playbuilding - the process of devising original pieces of theatre collaboratively in expressive non-naturalistic styles - is a curriculum subject that is little documented and so is often avoided by the novice teacher. The Playbuilding CD Rom provides a simple multimedia compendium or how-to-guide for Tertiary Drama Education students. It provides them with theory, illustrative video and printable exercises. It is highly likely that the CD will also be useful for inservicing current secondary teachers.
Why do we need it?
The limitations of books as tools for instruction in Drama education are obvious. The printed page fails to capture the qualities of voice , movement and image that convey the processes of this art form. Video although much more effective is difficult to integrate with written texts. A tool which can effectively juxtapose instructions for an exercise with commentary on its performance, with video footage of the drama work in action and is linked to text which explores and extends the various theoretical underpinning's of the work, is surely a powerful tool for teaching drama.
The CD-Rom can be used in class or in the student's own time and used collaboratively or individually. It can provide introductory materials for study or be used to reinforce or revise concepts dealt with in class or as background preparatory reading for tutorials and workshops. The teacher can also pre-select a number of videos and quickly show the class some illustrative examples.
The characteristics of hypermedia appear to be particularly well suited to arts education. The theatre devising process is non-linear, developing more as a web of connections and resonances, the structure emerging from the process rather than from the preconceived notions of the director or playwright. Although the contents of the CD-Rom are by necessity finite, serendipitous "jumps" can trigger multitudes of possibilities.
Ask a group of first year student teachers or arts students "who doesn't use a computer?" and frequently still a majority of hands rise. Moreover, computers have a "bad rep". They are associated with dull tasks such as accounting and data processing. At best, a minority of students have skills in word processing and game playing.
Many Drama education students spurn computers, and are heading to teach in classrooms without any computing skills. Little motivation exists for them to use computers; for them to become computer literate they have to elect to do a computing unit. With most of these units offering the three applications; database, word processing and spreadsheets, or requiring some established technical competence, few are inspired to enrol.
Also, as classes grow larger and pressure to reduce lecturer contact hours grows, the CD-Rom may provide an opportunity for students to spend time on tutorless study.
Secondary teachers we have consulted have a variety of needs. Some want to give the CD Rom to students to explore as they would library books, others want to use it to prepare before classes or to have clear generalisable examples about how to build plays around the prescribed texts. One teacher suggested that the Playbuilding CD Rom would be useful with her year nine boys as motivation to co-operate in return for having access to a computer with the status of chief navigator. She also thought that it would help these boys to see positive male role models.
The Process
Students as designers
As our last project showed us some of the strengths and weaknesses of collaboration, we wanted to explore this area further in our design process. Both to promote a sense of student ownership and also as formative evaluation to ensure "fit". To this end, the programmer/interface designer and the instructional designer met over a number of dinners with a small group of interested students to brainstorm ideas. We ranged far and wide in the brainstorming, and spent time usefully clarifying the objectives and the content of the software as well as dreaming up wonderful interfaces.
Videoing
Concurrently, over a period of several months, class playbuilding workshops were recorded on video. Documenting live action presents a number of difficulties. How do you light an area effectively if the class roves into every corner of a room? How do you know which part to shoot when you don't know clearly what will develop from the improvisation?
The workshop time coincided with teaching time for Leonie, and Alan although the subject matter expert, was in the role of teacher, so directorial decisions were frequently left to the two videographers. This meant inevitably that footage was not optimal. For example, a room full of students are discussing and writing. Interesting conversations abound but the camera roves, immersed in the visual. Not one conversation remains intact. Or, how do you know beforehand that the bit of footage you want is the transition between those two scenes. The scenes themselves are covered well, but the individual is followed out of scene, the group action lost. Or, the one school visit that isn't covered is the one with the really productive discussion about both the content and style. A litany of little losses - and a lesson in the sheer volume of documentation needed in this kind of project.
As any documentary producer knows, a lot of footage tends to be shot to capture the right moment. One in forty is a ratio that is commonly bandied about, ie one hour of edited film to forty hours of raw footage. Due to its structure, Drama is able to reduce this ratio significantly, say to 6:1. When it is considered how much time is required viewing, logging and selecting footage, the issue of whether to construct a rehearsed workshop event or faithfully document the spontaneous process, is highlighted. The former is less exciting, but it is certainly significantly more economical. Initially we planned a studio shoot to fill the gaps of the documentation but in fact much of the illustrative footage has come from this shoot.
Another unplanned source of footage was Shadowplay, a playbuilt piece that was being workshopped and performed by Alan and a number of students just as the playbuilding CD Rom project was getting started. It shows some of the excitement of a polished, live, non-naturalistic performance.
The design workshop
At the end of semester a small dedicated group of five students met for eight days in total over a two and a half week period to assist with the implementation of some of the ideas that were emerging. Together, we mapped the topics on a white board, discussing links and rearranging categories. We logged the video and established where the various sequences might be used. One student spent a morning lying belly on the floor totally absorbed in storyboarding the screens. Two students planned one of the submenu interfaces and implemented pop up text, whilst two others wrote text onscreen on the interface after Leonie had implemented their ideas into a working prototype. Clearly, seeing the product of their work was very motivating.
Finally, in the studio, this intrepid group enacted the playbuilding process for the cameras so that the footage which we were still missing could be shot.
During the design process, a number of things became very clear. In a conducive environment with the right motivators, drama education students can become very absorbed in using computers to design software. So what factors detracted from absorption? A number of gripes were reported like; not being able to smoke, the institutional environment, sitting still in front of a computer screen for long periods, lack of skills with software, having to wait for someone to implement an idea or rescue them from mystery problems eg the image disappearing off the screen. It also became clear that the optimum number for focused group work was two or three and there was some grumbling if larger groups were suggested. Little rivalries occurred as well, assertive young women and touchy young men. There were also a number of high points over the period. One young woman became totally enthralled in animating images in Director 4. "It's like playing a computer game!" she crowed with delight whilst her peers had discarded Brad Pitt for the "oestrogen pages". One young man reported complete absorption on a number of occasions when he was designing interface ideas and later implementing them with Director.
At the end of this design period, students drifted off to celebrate the Christmas holidays. Fine tuning the interface and video selection consumed much more time than anticipated and the next semester began with progress slowing to a crawl.
Continuation of work
As we began to link Alan's hypertext, we realised that the text was far more usefully implemented in Interactive media format, ie as well as having longer more indepth text pieces, there were many places where these pieces are best read aloud as guided exercises or narrated onto illustrative video. This again slowed the design process as slivers of time had to be found for rewriting the text, recording the sound and for the necessary video editing. It is clear however, that narrated video is often significantly more effective than video that is not narrated. Another reminder of how labour intensive this kind of IMM project is.
We are currently also experimenting with guided instruction such as a visualisation to inspire movement exploration or writing. These can be printed up as text for use by the teacher or played to a class. The dilemma is whether to illustrate these pieces, which might be four or five minutes long. Ideally they would be illustrated with purpose shot video or photographs, anything else distracts from the meaning. This would immediately demand large file sizes and an extra unbudgetted shoot. Instead we will use a small Quicktime animated loop, hoping to satisfy the gaze of the casual user sufficiently without detracting from the meaning of narration.
A project such as this needs a room set up for exclusive IMM production use, at least in intensive bouts. As is, the various resources such as SVHS VCR and 1 gig drive are spread widely and are often booked for other purposes. Quick progress is difficult especially as the three people working on the project have full academic work loads. The interface shell is complete, and as the content becomes available, the videos are digitised ready for narration. Progress although slow remains steady.
Implementation issues and questions
Without the benefit of hindsight, numbers of questions arise about how the software might best be used. William Cates (1992) states that for a piece of software to be readily used in the classroom it needs to apply a number of principles. One of these is to be directly relevant to the curriculum and another is to provide an editable database. Clearly, adding content to the compendium would promote a sense of ownership of the content and purpose of the software. At the same time several challenges present themselves. Which authoring software allows ready student addition? Hypercard is the only environment designed as a database, but few people are attracted to learning the scripting required to use hypercard effectively. And besides, without being able to write to a CD-Rom, the additional data could soon dominate a hard drive. In fact how many drama departments have the time and resources to accommodate student software authoring?
Certainly, persuasive arguments are presented by educators and instructional design professionals to promote learning through active participation in design activities (Jonassen, 1994, Heppell, 1994, Perkins, 1986). We have seen for ourselves that our students have the aptitude. We therefore aim to provide a userfriendly piece of shareware, such as Arachnid, so that students can create their own standalone hyperlinked documents with video, text, graphics and sound. These documents will have the added bonus of being web publishable. But what will motivate students to undertake to learn the necessary skills to create such documents? We can postulate web sites where students can compare and discuss their dramatic efforts. Is this realistic? Likely even? Perhaps it is more realistic to ask students to insert text, voice annotations and graphics into a word processed document as part of their assignments. Quicktime tutorials teaching the necessary skills can be readily created with tools such as cameraman. Watching new student learners, it is apparent that the largest cognitive (over)load is in navigating the student network and developing a mental model of the operating system and file saving functions during the first weeks of computer use.
The Playbuilding software
After much debate about appropriate metaphors it was decided to use a rather loose scattering of symbols that have some symbolic connection to their topics but little connection to each other.
Figure 1: The main menu.
The main menu provides a loose metaphor for the various subject areas they represent, the hands applauding in the foreground for example represents Audience , the statue represents Style and Form and the Spider web represents Structure.
Figure 2: Close up of rolls-over text.
As the cursor rolls-over each symbol, Alan's voice states the subject area, which also appears as text accompanied by background ambient sounds.
Figure 3: the movement and space main screen.
The number of subject categories that were distilled from group discussion were too numerous to represent as individual icons. Therefore they were frequently grouped in submenus. Alan's voice-over gives a brief introduction to each subject as it is selected.
Figure 4: the main menu return icon.
The icon at the bottom of the screen returns the user to the main menu. It is anticipated that in future, the individual "balls" will allow the user to navigate through the related topics in each branch.
Figure 5: the movement submenu.
Where possible, text has been minimised to fit on one screen. In the event that a topic is chosen that has several branching options, these options are also available. Hypertext links call up a full text document in Acrobat reader form so that it may be printed up for further use. The debate continues on whether this document should be editable but currently the position has been taken that students benefit more from paraphrasing text than cutting and pasting it. Author copyright issues also warrant further clarification.
Figure 6: the tableaux screen.
Just as strong efforts are made to narrate the video's appropriately, we are also attempting to optimise the text to complement the video. The icon in the lower left corner of this screen is linked to the activity sound narration.
Conclusion
Arts education students bring a vitality and vision that the multimedia industry and the managers of tertiary education ignore at their peril. Yet currently these students face the prospect of being left behind as media/computer technologies evolve ever more rapidly beyond the grasp of their abilities. Some answers might come from collaboration between arts educators on the one hand, and multimedia and IT departments on the other. They need to work closely together to provide courses that change students' perceptions of computing.
CD Roms such as ours can give students a reason for using computers within the context of their drama education course. But for students to become pro-active users of IMM technology, not just passive or partial users, we need to provide accessible software tools and courses which utilise a little more of the "the Brad Pitt" factor.
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References
Cates, W.M. (1992) Fifteen principles for designing more effective instructional hypermedia/multimedia products. Educational technology 5, 11
Heppell, S. (1994) Learning and the children of the information age. In Second Interactive Multimedia Symposium. pp 200-203 Perth, Australia
Jonassen, D. H. (1995) Supporting communities of learners with technology. A vision for integrating technology with learning in schools. Educational technology July-August pp 60-63
Perkins, D. N. (1986) Knowledge as design Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Leonie Ramondt
Multimedia Learning Technologies
Edith Cowan University
2 Bradford St
Mt Lawley Perth 6050phone: 09 370 6107
email: l.ramondt@cowan.edu.au
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