Information Technology Reference
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design, construct, or edit films. The educational value was limited to simply having
students watch a film and derive information from what they saw. Alternative peda-
gogies for using audio-visual recordings emerged with interactive video technology
(see Wetzel et al., 1994) or interactive DVDs—and more recently with constructive
video technologies. These new developments add to the cognitive functions of film
(Salomon, 1994) and enable new forms of active video-based learning. In interactive
video, the learner is interacting with videos that others have captured, structured, and
sequenced (e.g., as in an instructional video designed to learn challenging nautical
knots: Schwan & Riempp, 2004). Interactive video activities are supported by vari-
ous technologies, including digital video players (such as Adobe Flash Player, Apple
Quicktime
TM
, RealPlayer
TM
, Windows MediaPlayer
TM
), DVD-menus, embedded
hotspots and dynamic hyperlinks). Research has shown that people learn from inter-
active videos when video-related actions (such as the use of video player functions
or dynamic hyperlinks) accompany effective usage strategies. For example, in the
Schwan and Riempp (2004) study, the participants learned to tie nautical knots from
video clips by using the stop or slow motion functions to adapt the speed and flow
of video information to their individual cognitive needs while they were working
out the knot-tying procedure. Likewise, in a study of Zahn et al. (2004), participants
interacted with dynamic hyperlinks plus stop, rewind, and fast forward functions
in a hypervideo and used them strategically to structure and monitor their informa-
tion input according to their cognitive capacities while processing the information
on “lakes as ecological systems.” In both studies, the learning outcome was shown
to be closely related to individual usage patterns. As Schwan and Riempp summa-
rize, the video-related usage strategies of learners can be thought of as “epistemic
actions” in the sense that they support cognitive activities during the learning pro-
cess and are of central importance for learning. Similar arguments are made by
Spiro, Collins, and Ramchandran (2007) in their comprehensive reflections on video
usage based on cognitive flexibility theory. The authors focus on the learning of
complex problems in ill-structured domains and they sketch out how (nonlinear)
digital video can be used to avoid oversimplifications and to support the understand-
ing of complexity and multidimensionality, for example, in the domain of history.
Taken together, these findings indicate that effective learning with digital videos
actually may depend on new media skills (here: “the ability to interact meaningfully
with tools that expand mental capacities,” Jenkins et al., 2006, p. 4).
For constructive video, learners are not only interacting with video, they are
creating “their own” video materials by either capturing video themselves and/or
selecting from pre-captured video assets in order to edit and re-sequence them
for purposes of critical reflection or communicating to an audience. By creating
a video and sharing it with others, learners engage in the processes of collab-
orative problem-solving (de-composition, selection, evaluation of information in
teams). The conjecture is that people can learn from constructive video because they
“design” them with audience needs in mind thereby being supported by a given
video tool. Examples include tools for de-composing and annotating video, (e.g.,
Smith & Reiser, 2005); creating video hyperlinks, (e.g., Zahn & Finke, 2003); or
“diving” into video in order to create new points of view onto a source video and
