Multimedia Literacy - A New Paradigm for Education

Multimedia Literacy

Multimedia literacy is a new aspect of literacy that is being recognized as technology expands the way people communicate. 'Multimedia' is the use of several different media to convey information (text, audio, graphics, animation, video, and interactivity). This is a concept of great importance to our teacher education program at the University of Southern California.

As personal computers and their software become more powerful they have the capacity to record and edit sound, still images and video and manage interactivity. This places multimedia creation in the hands of any computer. As multimedia becomes a more prevalent form of communication it becomes important to understand the literacies of “reading” and “writing” using multimedia, and for these skills to be taught in schools and other education institutions. This is one of the major objectives of the Rossier School of Education's Teacher Edcuation Program.

To better understand this concept I have provided an excerpt from Wikipedia, the free web encyclopedia, with a few edits, additions and explanations of my own. Please feel free to comment at the end of the BLOG.

The related study of mass media has long been part of the school program in many school systems either as a separate subject option in secondary schools or more often as a part of general literacy learning. Film Study has also been a school subject for some time using relatively expensive and complicated equipment to make film or video. The rapid development of multimedia via personal computing means that it is becoming a routine form of communication for a widening group of people. The line between mass media and personal media is becoming much more blurred. Non professional authors of multimedia products on the web or via podcasts can have large audiences.

Constructivist learning and multimedia

Multimedia literacy is a subset of the wider issue of the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in schools. There is a widespread recognition that the rapid growth in the use of ICT in schooling is occuring in conjunction with the adoption of the constructivist learning theory. This theory supports active, hands-on learning. It is related to Cognitive Apprenticeship and the work of Jerome Bruner.

Some educators see ICT as being a major driver of school reform. This reform is towards a more constructivist approach, using related terms such as: student-centred learning, Problem-based learning and experiential education. Others point to the slow pace of such reform and suggest that ICT may support reform but it is by no means inevitable that it will do so.

Supporters of ICT as a powerful tool for constructivist learning point to its capacity to provide:

- active and highly motivating engagement with students
- powerful tools to create text, art, music, sound, models, presentations, movies etc. that produce high quality products and - remove much of the tedium normally associated with such creation
- an error-forgiving environment in which editing of a product fosters learning by trial and error
- easy communication in text, voice, video
- quick access to information and resources

Educators are finding, however, that while ICT can provide a technical environment for constructivist learning to occur, there needs to be high quality teaching to develop and sustain a human environment that will challenge and inspire students to learn.

Multimedia Literacy in Schools

Teaching literacy has always been the central business of schools. School literacy teaching had tended to focus on written literacy rather than on oral literacy, which is mainly learned outside of school. Literacy has never been a fixed body of skills but has evolved with the development of technology, such as pens and paper, and the needs of society as in the Industrial Revolution. For example, handwriting was a major focus of schooling during the 19th Century as the demand for clerks grew rapidly. Then the invention of the typewriter made neat handwriting a less important business skill. However, important literacy technologies such as the newspaper, the typewriter and the telegraph took decades to spread throughout society, giving schools time to adapt. Schools today are struggling to cope with the teaching of new literacies that are often less than five years old but are widespread in society.

Today the Internet is a major medium of communication and it is increasingly rich in multimedia. Children are regular users of the Internet and educators are recognising the importance of them being 'literate' in its navigation, searching, authentication and other skills. Most school systems in the developed world are including computer literacy or similarly named programs, into the curriculum.

Children learn much of their mass media literacy, as recipients, quite intuitively from film, television and radio. However, until recently, few have had the opportunity to experience being multimedia authors. Now, with relatively cheap digital cameras, free software and access to powerful multimedia computers, there is both the opportunity and the need, for quite young students to become authors as well as consumers in the new media.

The following sections provide information on skills that students of various ages may learn in order to be multimedia literate and information on software and hardware suitable for use in schools.

Video

Film making has been a major technology and art form for over a century. Personal video making makes use of many but not all of the techniques of professional film making. Student movie makers need to be familiar with the basic tools and techniques of the art, including familiarity with:

- camera shots: close up, medium, long shot, pan, fade etc in order to achieve different effects
- story-boarding: a pictorial frame view of the story line, showing camera views, times and shot sequence which provides the Director with a simple shooting script for a video.
- editing software replaces tedious and expensive film splicing with digital editing which is quick and forgiving of errors, and allows the insertion of audio tracks in sequence with the video track.
- sound tracks allow music, sound effects and voice tracks to be added to an existing film (see Sound).
- the so called Ken Burns Effect, in which the camera pans across a still image allows still images accompanied by a sound track to create quite powerful presentations.

The domination of photography by digital technology and the falling cost of storage has led to the collection of hundreds if not thousands of digital images on home computers. The development of free software (eg: Apple's iPhoto and Microsoft's Photo Story) that allows very simple editing of movies made up of still images, enhanced with the 'Ken Burns effect', sound, text and music, means that the world of movie making is likely to grow very rapidly into the home and school.
Hardware and Software

Digital video cameras are quite powerful and increasingly sophisticated. Many still digital cameras can take short movie clips. Readily available software such as Windows MovieMaker, Apple's iMovie and Microsoft Photo Story 3 (still images), provide free editing software.

This software can be used with still images from a digital cameral to make a still-frame movie with an audio track. Movies made with editing software are generally saved in one or more of the common web video formats such as Windows Media or QuickTime in a variety of file sizes. High quality, large files for storage on a computer or CD-ROM and small fles that can be emailed or placed on the web.

Sound

Three track recording:
Schools have used tape recorders for decades, but these have proved to be rather difficulty to use flexibly because of difficulty in editing sound and in cataloging sound bites for later use. Digital recording and software allows easy editing and manipulation of sound. Also, extensive files of sound effects and music can be integrated into voice recordings. Easy transfer of digital files across the Internet makes the use of sound much more flexible.

Learning: Most people are very familiar with the use of sound as a powerful tool in television, radio and film, but have little experience in using it themselves. Digital recording allows the user to experiment with the effect of sound features such as:
voice tone, pace, pitch, and of course music as an influence on mood and atmosphere. Sound effects can provide enrichment and context to a story.

Hardware and Software There are numerous applications for editing sound. The graphic display allows the user to select and edit very small sound segments. The multi-track display allows each track to be placed precisely where it is required on a time scale. This flexibility provides much greater editing freedom that was the case with traditional audio editing where tapes were spliced to achieve edits.

The free open source application Audacity provides quite powerful sound editing of multi-track recordings. Editing of sounds is very simple and a wide range of 'effects' can be applied to sound files.

Most personal computers include simple sound recording software that allows sound files to be attached to common office applications along with the provision for microphones to be connected. There are many portable digital recorders available that connect directly to computers. There are many sound recording formats of which MP3 is the most prevalent.

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Further discussions of this topic and related topics will follow on this BLOG, stay tuned.

Dr. G