Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 25
Digital Video Tools in the Classroom: How
to Support Meaningful Collaboration and
Critical Advanced Thinking of Students?
Carmen Zahn
1
, Karsten Krauskopf
1
, Friedrich W. Hesse
1
, and Roy Pea
2
1
Knowledge Media Research Center, Konrad-Adenauer-Strasse 40, D-72072, Tuebingen,
Germany
2
Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning, 450 Serra Mall, Wallenberg Hall, Stanford, CA
94305, USA
Introduction
Whether in the arts, at home, or in the workplace—digital video and web-based
video systems have brought about a large variety of filmic expression in many areas.
For example, in entertainment we use DVD movies that are partitioned into chapters
or scenes (including additional scenes that were not shown in the original movie),
which enable the viewer to systematically access specific contents of interest. In the
workplaces, digital video technology is used for professional video analyses (e.g., in
the area of professional sports Cassidy, Stanley, & Bartlett, 2006; Eckrich, Widule,
Shrader, & Maver, 1994, or teacher education, e.g., Moreno & Ortegano-Layne,
2008; Petrosino & Koehler, 2007), as well as computer-supported collaborative
work (e.g., in medicine, Sutter, 2002). Additionally, in the realm of Web 2.0 and the
Semantic Web, users can actively participate by creating and broadcasting their own
digital videos (Alby, 2007) and by designing complex information structures based
on video. The annotation feature of YouTube constitutes a very recent example for
this development. It enables users to add audiovisual or text-based commentaries,
or to add hotspots to videos and then publish the results. In sum, in our everyday
life we find many examples of video tools that include the selection of single scenes
or objects from existing video information, and even the direct integration of video
scenes with e-communication tools, so that the “constructive” use of video (in a
constructionist sense, e.g., Papert, 1993) has become widely available.
As a result, the ways in which people “watch” video today are in the process
of being reshaped (Cha, Kwak, Rodriguez, Ahn, & Moon, 2007). Concurrently
new specific
skills
grow more important for people, so that they can use the
new (audio)visual media to participate in societal communication processes, and
