Teaching and Learning with Video Annotations As the means of accessing and using video for education rapidly expand, we want to reinforce the notion that pedagogy matters. The mere availability of video alone is not sufficient to improve educational outcomes; pedagogical approaches to video that encourage close reading through annotation and composition may help do so. These methods encourage students to treat video sources critically as raw material for discourse and analysis. In our world, complexity is inherent, and one goal of educating students should be to help them embrace this complexity and develop a propensity to examine it more closely and to interpret it with appropriate intellectual rigor.
The pedagogical strategies suggested in this chapter have the added benefit of making video that is available on the open Web more relevant to education. They provide students with a way to bridge their media experiences outside the classroom with serious scholarship and research. The practices of participatory education and research extend beyond the classroom into activism, advocacy, journalism and government. Recent advances in video production, editing, and communication technology make once technically challenging activities into a fairly commonplace enterprise, and students who learn to think critically about video can also learn to use that video as a medium for persuasive expression and dialogue with others. In this chapter, we have purposely avoided focusing on our own tools in favor of a more generalized approach to using video for teaching and learning. While our tools do facilitate smoother workflows and group permissions, the pedagogical principles and examples we have provided are not necessarily dependent on specific tools. We hope that readers will conclude this chapter with ideas for how they might purposefully utilize video in their own teaching and adopt new methods for engaging their students. |