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Media rich, resource poor: practical work in an impractical environment
Emma van der Vliet and Andrew Deacon Emma van der Vliet (
[email protected]), previously with the Multimedia Education Group (MEG) at the University of Cape Town (UCT) but now at the Centre for Film and Media Studies, and Andrew Deacon (
[email protected]), from MEG, support curriculum and courseware development in UCT’s film and media programmes.
Abstract Film and media courses appear well placed to exploit technology convergence in exposing students both to practical skills and to theoretical concepts. For the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) large film and media studies courses, it is impractical simply to use the technology of professionals as this would typically be too expensive to purchase and time-consuming to run. Our approach has been to develop activities that can run with large classes in generic computer laboratories and which simulate environments and tools of the real world. Two illustrative examples, emphasising writing skills in context, involve the production of a TV news story and the development of a proposal for an educational soap opera. Using these, we reflect on our experience of integrating practical skills into the curriculum of a traditional academic institution, where these skills have a lower status and must be sufficiently flexible to accommodate changes in the higher-status academic components. This suggests that such flexibility has to be part of the design of practical interventions and that they should additionally aim to provide a challenge to some of the more theoretical aspects of these courses. While developing one’s own interventions allows for some of this flexibility to be incorporated into the design, it remains difficult for academic departments to adopt these solutions as their own, thus requiring continued involvement of the original developers to adapt to changes.
Introduction The establishment of the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) new Centre for Film and Media Studies (CFMS) in 2003 was the culmination of many changes to the structuring of film and media courses previously offered by various departments. The impetus for some of these changes was a new government policy, which has encouraged more © British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, 2004. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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career-oriented degree programmes that cut across traditional academic disciplines and prepare graduates for the workplace (Department of Education, 1997; Moore, 2002). Recently UCT’s film and media courses have been attracting large numbers of students, partly because they promise to develop skills that are perceived to be in demand by the ‘new economy’. CFMS’s interdisciplinary origins and the staff ’s enthusiasm about new media and technology have opened up opportunities to develop educational activities, conduct research, and establish links with the film and media industries that have promoted these courses. In 1999 the Multimedia Education Group (MEG) initiated collaborative development of computer-based educational activities for students taking film and media courses that now form part of the CFMS curriculum. The Centre’s interest in using technology was based on their need for more practical skills to be included in their courses in response to pressures from students, the University and external agencies. The many difficulties in developing and implementing activities that will meet these often ill-defined expectations are widely acknowledged (see Holland, 2000; Tomaselli, 1986; Winter and Maisch, 1996). High student numbers, lack of appropriately skilled staff, the high cost of equipment, timetabling constraints, lack of incentives for staff and negative attitudes towards practical work from some traditional academic disciplines are all significant barriers (Holland, 2000; Tomaselli, 1986; Tomaselli and Shepperson, 2003). For conventional humanities courses, during which students typically produce two essays per semester, resource planning is comparatively straightforward and equitable. The equipment and resources required for film and media courses complicate this planning, and as Tomaselli and Shepperson (2003) observe, often create tensions between academics and university administrators seeking to apply standard, but sometime inappropriate, business practices across the institution. We considered two broad approaches. The first was to invest in industry-standard technology with which to teach practical skills for film and media studies. The second was to use computers to simulate media workplace environments and to focus on more generic skills that could be taught without industry-standard technology. Of course, these approaches are not mutually exclusive and are used to varying degrees (and in combination) in different course contexts. Typically, the high cost of the first approach meant that only senior and smaller classes could be given opportunities to use, for example, the video editing suites, digital video cameras and graphic design software. For larger classes the only feasible approach was to simulate practical activities rather than provide access to professional equipment. As the fledgling CFMS programme evolved, MEG participated in analysing and interpreting the need for skills in the large film and media classes. We were well aware that the CFMS lecturers would need support from MEG staff, as considerable effort and specific skills are needed to design and implement activities that use, for example, computers to edit video and create multimedia texts. The response from staff and students to what we did has encouraged us to reflect on the implications of using the approach we adopted.
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Responding to needs The gulf between skills taught at university and those in demand by industry is a persistent source of tension (Winter and Maisch, 1996). Our film and media students frequently refer to their interest in developing the practical skills they perceive as being in demand in the workplace. Most courses, however, emphasise analysis and deconstructive skills, the traditional academic skills that continue to be highly valued and have been offered to generations of students. Prof Ian Glenn of the CFMS observed that while ‘students actually want to learn to work in the media... media theoreticians in academia want to do pretty abstract critical analysis. So you get a kind of schizophrenia... Of course one wants sophisticated ideological students but one also wants someone who can engage... hands on... [and] find a critical academic rebuttal’ (quoted in van der Vliet, 2002). While academics accept the need to allow students both to construct and deconstruct the media, they do not agree on the specific skills that should be taught, particularly for the purposes of media construction. In addition, practical issues such as availability of computer laboratories, tutor support and timetabling have often constrained what can be taught. Recently, Prof Glenn interviewed senior people within the South African film and media industries and asked them what skills they value in graduates. Typically, they replied that they were interested in both generic skills, such as ‘people who can show... they’ve done things’ (ibid., 2002), and specific skills that are currently in demand, such as the ability to use a particular camera model or software package. Teaching the latter skills poses many challenges for universities as the demands change continually and they often involve large capital investments (eg, Tomaselli and Shepperson, 2003). A more realistic starting point is to provide students with the analytical and theoretical foundation along with opportunities to build appropriate portfolios. The creation of portfolios gives students a chance to demonstrate practical as well as analytical skills which can, for example, demonstrate their ability to write appropriately for different purposes and to communicate multimodally. Introductory activities simulating a workplace environment provide a context and the motivation for creating portfolio material but do not overburden those students who do not want to follow such careers. Portfolios are important when considering students for admission to the senior courses that have access to professional equipment, as well as when students begin seeking employment. Integrating skills development Our pedagogic design is informed by constructivist principles such as the encouragement of active ‘learning through doing’ and the creation of a simulated ‘real world’ environment with ‘authentic’ tasks and activities. We agree with Resnick (1994, 23) who states that ‘people construct new knowledge with particular effectiveness when they are engaged in constructing products that are personally meaningful’. The process of translating our broad approach of developing interventions for the larger classes into actual activities has been lengthy and ongoing. Close collaboration was needed to better understand the constraints and exploit opportunities available in
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this context. Our interventions have ranged from lecturer support materials to interactive tutorials and online teaching and learning tools. This developmental process has helped us in identifying the types of practical skills within the film and media studies curriculum which we feel merit being the foundation of a computer-based activity. We focused, for example, on the specific skills required for TV news script writing, such as writing to picture and to a strict time constraint. This activity was relatively easy to fit into an online environment. We began by investigating the possibilities, aiming to: • Develop activities for large introductory classes working in computer laboratories. It is generally impractical for large classes to use professional equipment or software. Such equipment is often unnecessarily complex and sometime difficult to use with existing generic computers facilities. We aimed instead to create simplified real-world work environments that introduce generic skills. For short writing tasks, for instance, we developed activities such as ‘sub-editing’ an online newspaper and writing a TV news script to accompany existing visuals. Technology allows such simple activities to be run with large groups in a single timetabled session. • Expose large classes to interactive multimodal texts and effective uses of technology. Given the diversity of UCT’s student body, it is important that all students are exposed to the different types of multimodal texts under discussion and, where appropriate, have opportunities to create their own texts (Hart, 1998). We have used connect (the MEG online learning environment) to support the weaving of online discussions with photos, web sites and other objects that lecturers and students have found interesting (as described by Horwitz and Eden in this volume). • Involve students in constructing, not only analysing or deconstructing, a physical artefact. Computers make it relatively easy to create artefacts such as web sites or digital storyboards. We aimed to simplify the procedures or provide support so that technical difficulties would not inhibit students’ engagement with introductory exercises. • Integrate across the curriculum to ensure that skills complement and build on the analytical components. Our activities generally cannot run in isolation from the courses as there are dependencies. For example, terminology has to be defined and the importance of skills established. It is important for links to be established between activities and what is covered in the course; otherwise the burden on activity design is significantly heavier. These aims have been important in shaping our design of activities. The two examples below are used in the third-year Media in South Africa course. They involve storytelling while introducing students to how news is manufactured and how TV shows are developed. Example 1: NewsBreaks NewsBreaks is concerned with manufacturing the news. The activity involves students creating their sequence from a collection of video clips provided and writing a script to accompany their sequence. This is introduced in a 45-minute computer laboratory © British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, 2004.
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session. In their own time, students must develop a sequence and 350-word script. This follows NewsScripts, a web-based exercise used in a second-year media class, where students write the script for a pre-edited TV news story such as the 11 September attacks. Activities like these are surprisingly challenging and test a broad range of skills introduced in lectures. Professionals creating TV news make use of a variety of tools, including video editing suites and word processors. It would be unfair to expect novice scriptwriters to work in such an environment, so we aimed to create the illusion of a production process through the construction of visuals and script at the same time. A basic script-writing programme suitable for teaching is conceptually simple, and little of the functionality in commercial or research applications is required (eg, Baecker et al, 1996). We used standard technology (Windows Media Player) to play the video clips. The script-writing programme, developed in Macromedia Authorware, enables users to organise clips into a sequence and associate script segments with these clips. Students view the individual clips in the top viewer, and drag and drop clips into the sequence on a timeline. Complete sequences and scripts, along with feedback, are viewed in the bottom viewer. A database is used to maintain the various options and setups, allowing other clips to be substituted to create new exercises.
Figure 1: Screen grab from NewsBreaks showing a sequence being created © British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, 2004.
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The functionality that NewsBreaks provides is limited to that which is necessary for our educational needs. Thus, for example, a maximum of 20 clips can be used for our types of activities. The fact that the programme ‘knows’ the student’s sequence and has information about each clip means that it can generate appropriate feedback on aspects such as the length of the script or sequence, jump-cuts in the sequence, and inappropriate word usage in the script. Many students have not had enough practice to be attentive to these important details. The basic automated feedback means that the feedback cycle is shortened and students can make changes in response. To complete the task, students are required to answer several reflective questions. These require them to use the language taught in the course to explain the choices they have made, for example, why they used a particular clip as the ‘opening hook’. Our assessment criteria emphasised the use of an active voice in their writing, selection of appropriate facts, and the ability to write to picture and link elements of the story together. Student feedback on NewsBreaks has been very positive and clearly indicates that students see this as preparation for the workplace as well as realise how challenging it is to write good scripts. Example 2: EduSoap project The EduSoap project requires students, working in groups, to prepare a proposal for an educational soap opera in response to a ‘tender’ that we provide. The educational soap opera genre includes some of the more significant and highly rated local TV productions (Kruger, 1999). Our constructionist ‘student-as-author’ intervention emphasises generic skills required in the film and media industries and assesses how well students have internalised theoretical aspects taught in the course. The process of collecting information, organising it, and finally incorporating it into a multimedia presentation ‘allows the student to be an active agent in learning while physically building an artefact’ (Nicaise, 1999, 30). In a weekly tutorial session we discuss the format of a soap opera, proposal, storyboard and pitch, while providing the student groups with the opportunity to discuss and develop their proposals. The skills we emphasise include accessing library and web resources, creating Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, taking pictures with digital cameras, using a scanner, video capture, photo editing and using music. We draw on experienced users who understand issues such as the implications of image manipulation. For example, they can show how cropping an image can change its meaning. We think it is better to teach these skills rather than provide exhaustive explanations of the technical features of a photo-editing package. Each group, comprising four or five students, has to devise a concept for their proposed series and finally produce three items: • A proposal document with a description, synopsis and motivation for their series. Students are expected to have internalised theoretical aspects from the lectures and incorporate knowledge gained through independent research.
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• A PowerPoint-based storyboard for the trailer of their series, incorporating text, graphics and photos. Students must use the film codes and conventions they have learnt through lectures and reading. • A PowerPoint-based pitch presentation. Each group has five minutes to ‘sell’ its series to the audience. This exercise is intended to familiarise students with the kind of presentation they may have to offer in real life. It facilitates the learning of presentation skills and gives them an opportunity to ‘showcase’ their work. Assessment rewards students’ analytical and creative capabilities and their ability to acquire the technical skills to put the presentation together. The group work aspect of the exercise, which requires negotiation and delegation, has for some students proved to be the most challenging part of the activity. Feedback from students indicates that although they were highly enthusiastic, they found the activity very time-consuming. Students responded positively to the pitching sessions, which were given an added sense of authenticity and excitement by inviting ‘celebrity judges’ from the television industry to join the audience of staff and students. The celebrity judges commented positively on the students’ imagination, but some suggested we should make the experience more realistic by giving students a “budget” within which to work. While media professionals may consider that the exercise should take into account such real-world concerns, it would be a significant departure from traditional academic activities if this were to become a dominant concern. Students seemed to appreciate that this activity was not ‘merely writing an essay’ for their teacher’s eyes alone, and they invested much effort in it. One student, in a group where one member had walked out, wrote that she had ‘a great time, despite everything that went wrong. I learnt so much about the topic, technology, group work and myself! I loved doing practical things for the first time. So much better than just writing an essay’. The pitch, in particular, was singled out as being important specifically because it prepared students for their envisaged ‘real world’ workplaces.
Impact of our activities The CFMS professor is adamant that ‘people in academe get into media through writing... they need writing and narrative skills’ (Glenn, as quoted in van der Vliet, 2002). He suggests that perhaps the most essential skill for university graduates, and one which certainly gives them the edge over graduates with purely technical training, is the ability to write. We think it is crucial that practical assignments on university media courses incorporate significant writing elements, which help students to learn to write well for a variety of media and platforms. Prof Glenn stresses that no matter how much one tells students ‘you’re going to be writing to picture, your writing ought to be shorter, more functional, use the active voice’, it is when they have to put these guidelines into practice in an authentic-seeming context that they acquire the skills being taught (ibid., 2002). Activities that offer students opportunities to construct multi-modal texts, including combining visuals and written or spoken language, challenge students and provide material for their portfolios.
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Lecturers have been enthusiastic about integrating activities such as NewsBreaks and the EduSoap project into their courses and have proposed their own changes as the courses have evolved. The technology-based activities have also been important in attracting students to these courses and delivering on student expectations. This suggests that these activities have had an active role in evolving the curriculum and in assisting with learning and teaching in the CFMS. However, there have been unanticipated consequences in creating these custom-made technological solutions: (1) teachers can become dependent on the creators of the intervention to assist with delivery; (2) the amount of time, effort and expertise required can limit the possibility of changes to the intervention; and (3) a sense of ownership may also be lacking among some of our colleagues. The ways in which activities such as ours are integrated into the academic curriculum are closely linked to their role and sustainability. NewsBreaks is intended to be integrated in a cross-curricular manner, where practical activities build on skills introduced earlier in the lectures. As Bragg (1999) observes in her review of vocational integration models, cross-curricular integration, while beneficial to learning, requires sustained effort if it is to be effective. Within-programme integration allows students to make selections between various independent optional course modules. The film, print and new media modules offered in the senior CFMS courses are examples of withinprogramme integration. These can run largely independently of one another. The EduSoap project and the third-year senior research project that involves the production by small groups of short films or similar artefacts are examples of capstone integration. These projects aim to strengthen the connection between prior academic and practical work, and require students to demonstrate mastery through project work. Largely outside the curriculum, opportunities regularly arise allowing students to attend short workshops by film and media specialists or to attend work-shadow and apprenticeship programmes in which practical skills are developed. University administrators, and increasingly academics too, must consider costs and time involved in offering an intervention, whether it is a custom-built solution or bought in. Measuring, comparing and justifying costs and time are very problematic. It is generally more difficult to gauge the opportunity costs or predict the time someone will need than it is to determine the procurement costs. Development time, support requirements and integration effort are difficult to forecast. MEG’s custom-built interventions are usually the work of one or two individuals, with contributions from others. Typically we estimated that the effort in developing, delivering and evaluating this kind of intervention is roughly the same as in offering a semester-long seminar class. MEG’s involvement cannot just stop after the initial delivery of the intervention, as these facilitating roles cannot easily be passed on to someone else. Some support is required each year in updating and delivery as part of an ongoing, collaborative association. Justifying this long-term investment implies being confident about how it is going to be used and what level of subsequent support will be needed, particularly in terms of time. This apparent inflexibility is frustrating for administrators and further © British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, 2004.
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complicates the issues associated with equipment acquisition (Tomaselli, 1986; Tomaselli and Shepperson, 2003). Up to the present, MEG’s work has been externally funded; if it becomes internally funded, different criteria may have to be considered that are equitable across the institution. Fisher (2001) suggests that universities adopt new approaches, for example, offering income-generating refresher courses to former graduates who want to refresh or upgrade their skills. However, such approaches seem feasible only when there is a higher level of stability and capacity. Conclusion Technological convergence brings exciting opportunities to the film and media industries as well as education in these fields. We have focused our efforts on designing, and integrating into the academic curriculum, technology-based activities that assist our media students in developing the appropriate practical skills. In designing these activities our first concern has been to establish which practical skills CFMS can and should teach. The second concern is whether we should aim to simulate work contexts rather than buy industry-standard technology, or whether we should (as has happened in practice) strike a balance between the two depending on the course context. The third concern has been to ensure that our interventions are integrated into the curriculum rather than being seen as replaceable ‘add-ons’ that are secondary to the academic components of the courses. Fourthly, we are concerned with how cost, time and effectiveness are measured and considered. Striking a balance between more theoretical academic learning and options for newer practical components, and doing so in a costeffective manner, is the most important consideration for administrators, but this is difficult to gauge. Finally, we have put particular effort into keeping interventions simple, flexible, and appropriate for our specific context. The CFMS curriculum is continually changing, partly in response to external pressures and policy changes encouraging more vocationally oriented programmes, but also because the interests of the lecturers are changing. The demand for more effective practical components will always exist, but we are unlikely ever to have sufficient resources to provide students with what they may wish to have available. Our main challenge has been to think of creative, less resource-intense solutions that are sufficiently flexible to accommodate curriculum changes and resist becoming obsolete. Essentially, this is a question of design. The constraints in which we work have required us to be more innovative. Although there were many unanticipated outcomes (both positive and negative), these challenges may well have resulted in the project designs that were more interesting, in terms of student learning and educational objectives, than might have been in the case if we had been more resource rich. References Baecker R, Rosenthal A J, Friedlander N, Smith E and Cohen A (1996) A multimedia system for authoring motion pictures in Proceedings of ACM multimedia ACM Press, New York, 31–42. Bragg D D (1999) Reclaiming a lost legacy: integration of academic and vocational education in Pautler A J (ed) Workforce education: Issues for the new century Prakken Publications, Ann Arbor, Mich., 181–196. © British Educational Communications and Technology Agency, 2004.
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Department of Education (1997) Education white paper 3: a programme for the transformation of higher education South African Government, Pretoria [WWW document]. URL http://www.gov.za/whitepaper/1997/education%203.htm Fisher A (2001) Teaching and technology: promising directions for research on online learning and distance education in the selective institutions Andrew W Mellon Foundation, New York [WWW document]. URL http://www.mellon.org/programs/highered/teachingandtechnology/ Hart A (1998) Paradigms and pedagogies: watching media teaching worldwide First International Congress on Communication and Education Sao Paulo, Brazil [WWW document]. Retrieved online 20/11/02 at: http://www.soton.ac.uk/~mec/MECWEB/brazpapl.pdf Holland P (2000) The television handbook Routledge, London. Kruger L (1999) Theatre for development and TV nation: notes on an educational soap opera South Africa Research in African Literatures 30, 4, 106–126. Moore R (2002) The restructuring of higher education curricula: contrasting models of interpretation Journal of Education 27, 33–57. Nicaise M (1999) Knowledge constructing through hypermedia authoring Educational Technology Research and Development 47, 1, 28–50. Resnick M (1994) Turtles, termites and traffic jams: explorations in massively parallel microworlds Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. Tomaselli K G (1986) Communicating with the administrators: the bedevilled state of film and television courses in South African universities 1976–1984 Perspectives in Education 9, 1, 48–56. Tomaselli K G and Shepperson A (2003) Gearing up the humanities for the digital era Perspectives in Education 21, 2, 31–45. van der Vliet E (2002) Interviews with Professor Ian Glenn, Dr Jane Stadler, Rolf Behrens and various third-year film and media students in MEG Research Report, University of Cape Town. Winter R and Maisch, M (1996) Professional competence and higher education: the ASSET programme Falmer, London.
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