Another example was a presentation I saw at a conference recently. They were illustrating the use of a case study of a student teacher and his cooperating teacher discussing how the student’s practice teaching was going.
First they illustrated it as a little piece of writing, just on one page – not much description, just a bit of dialogue. Next they did a multimedia presentation with sound and a PowerPoint presentation. Finally, they presented the case as a piece of video.
It was absolutely striking to notice how much more ‘open’ the written version was, and how more and more information offered less and less scope for interpretation, and imposed more and more limitations. The video was an almost completely ‘closed’ work, which limited the potential usefulness of the case for discussing issues in education.
It might be hard to imagine, so let me give a couple of simple examples. One was that, in the written case, the race of neither participant was mentioned, while in the video both participants were white. That means it’s not as simple for a Japanese-Canadian student, for example, to use his imagination to put himself into the role of the student teacher. The point is not about inclusion, diversity or political correctness: a video with a Japanese teacher has the exact same problem. The point is, the text is just more open and therefore more easy for a wide variety of people to identify with.
Similarly, in the video the supervising teacher gets up during the conversation and goes to top up her coffee. It’s not important, just part of making the video more realistic in some way, but the temptation is, because that information is there, to try to make some meaning of it, to try to understand what it means about their relationship and the conversation.
It was a nice reminder that more information (using more media) is not always better…