An
important part of studying them is watching and
discussion video footage. For example, early childhood
educators are trained in making observations on
children with pertinent videos. This paper presents
a tool called Conversant Media for the use of synchronous
and asynchronous discussion of videos and reports
preliminary results of an evaluative comparison
of using this tool versus using an off-the-shelf
threaded discussion tool.
The
Conversant Media tool allows participants to engage
in discussions of video footage by attaching comments
to video frames. A timeline shows the frames to
which comments were attached. The comments themselves
start a threaded discussion. Users can navigate
the video by clicking on the comments, which brings
the video to the corresponding frame. Over time,
users see “hot spots” where higher densities
of comments are located.
An
evaluative study was conducted with 27 participants
with one half using the Conversant Media (CM) tool
and the other half using a threaded discussion forum.
The results show that CM users averaged more posts
and more ideas than users of the threaded discussion
forum. During follow-up interviews, CM users were
able to recite the video scenes that were discussed
in greater detail. 90% of CM users would prefer
using CM for the next video discussion. Of course,
as the authors caution, this may be due to the Hawthorne
novelty effect.
The
discussion of the limitations of the CM tool version
used in the study is particularly interesting. It
clearly demonstrates that the value of an evaluative
study lies in observing how users in a real-world
setting work with the tool.for example, the interface
design interfered with the users’ desire to
develop threads of greater depth; as it were, most
threads only stretched to a second level. Another
example is that a group of users were not contributing
any comments of their own, instead waited for comments
to second or rebut. Both observations lead to insights
that should result in improvements in the user interface
design of the tool.
The
tool presented is interesting because it is quite
novel. Also, it shows that there are many instances
where off-the-shelf tools are too restrictive and
do not meet the pedagogical requirements. As there
is an increasing educational use of computer-mediated
communication, it would be interesting to see more
tools which explicitly satisfy a particular educational
need.
