Bill Wolff

6 recommendations for teaching with the flip video camera

by Bill Posted on June 10, 2009

In June 2008 I received a grant for 20 Flip Video Cameras (.pdf) to be used in one of the required courses in the Writing Arts undergraduate major at Rowan, “Writing, Research, and Technology.” The general goal of the course was to extend traditional conceptions of composition by applying it to the medium of video. To accomplish this goal, students competed three primary assignments: 1) a semester-long vlog on their own YouTube channels; 2) a 3 – 5 minute video on the subject, “What Does YouTube Mean to You?“; and 3) an 8 – 10 minute oral history video project grounded in oral history research methodologies. I have discussed the YouTube project on this blog and will discuss the oral history video project at a later date (all videos can be found at the Oral History Video Archive YouTube channel).

This post, however, is going to be specifically about how I integrated the Flip Video camera and related software applications into the course. I have broken the post into 6 primary recommendations.

Recommendation 1: Use the Flip Video Camera and get students to play with it right away
The Flip is designed with a specific purpose: to make video recording, editing, and uploading to the Web as easy as possible. It is light, portable, and durable. It is perfect for a student to take into the field, conduct interviews, and video variety of landscapes. Its wide angle lens helps make it excellent in low-light situations, though zooming in the Ultra series (which we used) is not recommended. If your goal is to create professional quality video productions, the Flip may not be for you. But, if it is perfect for introducing students to video composition, editing techniques, and the rhetorical issues surrounding both.

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Posted in academia, IT, pedagogy, rowan, teaching | Tagged best practices, creative commons, final cut pro, flip, flip ultra, flip video camera, grant, iMovie, interview, music, oral history, photo story, rowan, students, studs turkel, video, video editing, windows movie maker, wrt, youtube, zamzar | 14 Comments

using twitter in the graduate classroom

by Bill Posted on June 10, 2009

There has been much discussion lately about how Twitter is being used in the undergraduate classroom. Daisy Pignetti describes how she used Twitter in 3 sections (2 online, 1 in person) of English 102 at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. Monica Rankin discusses how she implemented what she has described as the “Twitter Experiment” into a 90-student U.S. History II survey course at U.T. Dallas. Kim Smith, a graduate student in emerging technologies at UT-Dallas advised Monica on Twitter and composed an excellent documentary of the Twitter Experiment. (David Silver and Brian Croxall share Twitter assignments and I would be quite interested in reading their reactions to its use.)

Daisy’s and Monica’s discussions are excellent because they provide insight into how faculty have been able to use Twitter to compliment and enhance existing pedagogy in three different kinds of undergraduate classes: the discussion-based writing course, an online version of that course, and a lecture-based history course. Daisy “highly recommend[s] Twitter to those instructors wanting 1) to establish greater classroom community, 2) to have students journal their work, and 3) are eager for the opportunity to explore forums outside of the D2L course management software.” The goal of this post is to add to these excellent assignments and posts by sharing how I used and what I learned using Twitter in Information Architecture, a graduate level course with 7 students I taught in spring 2009. The course met Mondays, 7:00 – 9:15pm. Twittering was a major component of the course (both inside and out) accounting for 20% of the final grade.

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Posted in academia, IT, pedagogy, teaching | Tagged AlertThingy, apps, Big Tweet, brian croxall, chat, daisy pignetti, david silver, Friend Bar, graduate classes, iaoc, information architecture, kim smith, micro-blogging, monica rankin, photography, students, Tweetdeck, twitter, twitterfall, Twitterfon, Twitterlicious, Twitty Tunes | 3 Comments

concerns about newsweek’s oprah cover photo

by Bill Posted on June 4, 2009

The June 8, 2009, issue of the “new” Newsweek has a cover article called “Crazy Talk: Oprah, Wacky Cures, & You” by Weston Kosova and Pat Wingert. The print version of the US edition has this cover photo Oprah:

My scan of the image does not fully capture the problem, but compare this image with the image of Oprah, first, accompanying the online version of the article, and, second, on the cover of Newsweek from October 24, 2005:

Here I have put the print and online photos of Oprah’s face side-by-side:

I am concerned about this image for several reasons, including perpetuating a stereotype of black (and all) women as hysterical. Mostly, however, I am concerned about the kind of editing that might have taken place on this image to darken Oprah’s skin and highlight shadows, just as we saw with images of OJ on Time and Newsweek (which I also discussed in relation to the images on Obama Waffles):

Without seeing the original image that Newsweek used we cannot be completely sure that malinipulative Photoshopping took place, but the evidence before us certainly points to it. What are your thoughts?

Update 9:45am, June 5, 2009
Inspired by the below comments, in particular Christa’s discussion of the origination of visual texts, I did what I probably should have done for my original post: I investigated who photographed the Newsweek cover image in question. The photographer is Siphiwe Sibeko, who took the photo for Reuters-Corbis. Sibeko is a South African photographer from Sowento. His online portfolio reveals a gifted photographer with images that provide stunning insight into the lives of people in many places in Africa.

A Google image search for “Siphiwe Sibeko + Oprah” brings about 70 results, including what appears to be the original photo from which the Newsweek cover was cropped:

Here we have the original, cropped to match the Newsweek cover placed next to the Newsweek cover:

It does appear that some editing took place on the photo (though some shadow difference could, I guess, be due to printing on paper). What was the reason for these edits? Newsweek needs to address this.

Complicating the issue, and building on the comments that focus on the relationship between the image and the written text, it appears that the image of Oprah was taken not while she was espousing “wacky cures” on her TV show, but at a ribbon cutting ceremony for the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls on January 7, 2007. Note the ear-rings, dress, and hair in this photograph, also taken by Sibeko (which can be found at this abcnews.com story):

The photograph accompanying the article, “Winfrey Founds South African School for Girls,” also by Sibeko, also appears to be from the same event:

Readers assume a direct relationship between the image on the cover and the text in the essay. However, now it seems that the image has been taken out of context. This is especially troubling because of the hours upon hours of TV footage and thousands of photographs of Oprah from which the Newsweek cover photo could have been selected. If this were written text and the issue a written source, this would not be acceptible. We need to hold the same standards to uses of visual media, as well.

I’ll leave it up to Christa to analyze the situation more thoroughly since her work is in the area of visual texts.

Posted in generalnews, photography, viz rhet | Tagged newsweek, oj simpson, oprah, photography, racism, time | 7 Comments

wordles of obama’s cairo speech

by Bill Posted on June 4, 2009

Reading the speech Obama gave this morning in Cairo was like reading all of complex, elusive, and often conflicting ideas that I have had for quite a while about the relationships among Christians, Muslims, and Jews. How refreshing to hear them coming from a president of the United States and not only whispered by friends and colleagues. Two passages that I think inform much of Obama’s approach to the world:

For human history has often been a record of nations and tribes subjugating one another to serve their own interests. Yet in this new age, such attitudes are self-defeating. Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail. So whatever we think of the past, we must not be prisoners of it. Our problems must be dealt with through partnership; progress must be shared. That does not mean we should ignore sources of tension. Indeed, it suggests the opposite: we must face these tensions squarely.

and

It is easier to start wars than to end them. It is easier to blame others than to look inward; to see what is different about someone than to find the things we share. But we should choose the right path, not just the easy path.

But this is a post about Wordles, and I’m sure that many Wordles of Obama’s speech will emerge over the course of the next few days. I’m intrigued by Wordles and the constraints that we can place on them: color, font, inclusion of numbers, maximum words included, all lower-case letters, direction of text, and so on. I thought it would be interesting to play with one of those constraints, maximum words to include, to see what impact it has on the semantic representation of that text. So, here are Wordles of Obama’s speech with 1000 words, 100 words, 10 words, and 1 word (the constant constraints are: black text on white background, rounded edges, horizontal layout, Telephoto font, words left as spelled, English common words removed, numbers included):

Listing them like this has a kind of Name That Tune effect: how few words can relay the primary idea within a text? Listing them from 1000 to 1 has the effect of narrowing down the speech to the primary idea: we are all people. Reversing the order, however, has the effect of suggesting that the speech expands the main idea into its many (difficult) nuances:

True to the nature of nuanced, complex, difficult issues and ideas, as the Wordles expand in word number the more blurry and out of focus the ideas become. The goal when working with such complex ideas is to maintain a focus on the primary idea (we are all people) while addressing the nuances that impact and are impacted by the primary idea. Viewing Wordles in a sequence rather than isolated (as they are often presented) allows us to see semantically the tensions, complexities, and nuances that exist within the ideas discussed in texts and, importantly, the texts themselves.

Posted in classification, IT, peace | Tagged afghanistan, cairo, democracy, iran, iraq, israel, obama, palestine, politics, religion, speech, text, web 2.0, women's rights, wordle | 3 Comments

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