My explanatory animation theory is stated at the conclusion of this section. I have expressed it as Explanatory Animation Design Guidelines.
Redefining animation
Variant graphics
High tech / low tech / no tech
Graphic enhancement
Storyboard (order and sequence)
Multimedia
Mayer's multimedia theory
Audio
Video
Images and graphic design
Text
Navigation
File management
Explanatory Animation Design Guidelines
Redefining animation
The two subheadings under "Redefining animation" are summarised findings from my 2007 Masters thesis Animating Best Practice. A more concise snapshot of my previous work on animation is in the new Examples of educational animations section within this Storyboard thesis.
Variant graphics
We would normally define animation as a succession of moving images. A more inclusive term for educational purposes is variant graphics where various images are viewed in succession. This is a more accurate definition because films are also moving images. Variant graphics is also a more inclusive term as it would include common presentation styles such as PowerPoint presentations. An important element of variant images is that there is also a constant image. Unlike a traditional lecture where an occasional diagram might be presented, the idea of a constant image implies that the screen is the desired focus for the duration of the presentation whether the images are moving or static.
High tech / low tech / no tech
To allow for the differences in the skills of the classroom teacher and the technology resources available, I have defined three categories of sophistication for explanatory animations:
High tech: The students create and present stand-alone animations. These could be created using Flash, Stop Motion Pro, PowerPoint, etc.
Low tech: The students create a series of visuals which are explained in person like a traditional PowerPoint presentation.
No tech: The students create a series of posters which are explained in order much like a book.
Taking the emphasis off the actual movement and focusing on the order and content of the information being presented makes this medium accessible for all teachers. There is also the opportunity for content to go from no tech to low tech by digitising the posters using a camera or scanner. Low tech can also move to high tech by simply recording the presentation on video.
Graphic enhancement
Graphic enhancement is the common element amongst the three main uses of animation.(i.e. entertainment, education and advertising). The term graphic enhancement builds on my animation definition of variant graphics. A common use of animation such as the on screen score of a sporting match could be considered a graphic enhancement in an entertainment context.
Storyboard (order and sequence)
At the heart of the Storyboard methodology is order and sequence. Walt Disney coined this term in the 1930's and I do not propose to expand or change the commonly held understanding of this term in any way. It is precisely the simplicity of the word and the inherent logic within it that prompted me to use this as my thesis title. Order and sequence are evident in every animation, regardless of technical sophistication.
Surprisingly, when working with the children in the Storyboard project I am not too pedantic about how they arrange their storyboard and I don't even insist that they have one as the various slides within the presentation function as a storyboard automatically. In other words, the Storyboard is the animation. This use of the word is more functional in a design sense than a traditional storyboard which is shorter and more prescriptive. In this sense the way I construct a storyboard is more like the prototype Resnick refers to: "We never expect to get things right on the first try. We are constantly critiquing, adjusting, modifying, revising. The ability to develop rapid prototypes is critically important in this process. We find that storyboards are not enough; we want functioning prototypes". (Resnick 2007:5).
The following animation on the Treble Clef and the subsequent variation on it illustrates the importance of order. Around two years after completing the original animation I realised that the information had been presented in the same chronological order in which I had learnt it. The final piece of information I had learnt was about how the Treble Clef is also known as the G clef. My revised animation puts this fact near the beginning to help give the viewer an anchor to help comprehend the remaining information.
This Treble Clef animation was done in 2006.
This slightly rearranged improvement was done two years later in 2008.
Multimedia
What I don't want to get bogged down with in the Storyboard project are technical specifications as they are constantly changing and ultimately irrelevant. I have set out to explain my methodology of working with multimedia within a conceptual framework building on six complentary theories of cognitive architecture for multimedia. "Three theories have primarily been evaluated in traditional laboratory studies: Paivio’s dual coding theory, Baddeley’s working memory model, and Engelkamp’s multimodal theory. The other three theories have been evaluated in instructional contexts: Sweller’s cognitive load theory, Mayer’s multimedia learning theory, and Nathan’s ANIMATE theory. The six theories are not rivals but focus on different aspects of multimedia learning". (Reed 2006:87).
Mayer's Multimedia theory (2001) includes 7 principles to assist students learning from multimedia presentations:
1
Multimedia principle
Students learn better from words and pictures than from words alone.
2
Spatial contiguity principle
Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near, rather than far from, each other on the page or screen.
3
Temporal contiguity principle
Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously rather than successively.
4
Coherence principle
Students learn better when extraneous words, pictures, and sounds are excluded.
5
Modality principle
Students learn better from animation and narration than from animation and on-screen text.
6
Redundancy principle
Students learn better from animation and narration than from animation, narration, and on-screen text.
7
Individual differences principle
Design effects are stronger for low-knowledge learners than for high-knowledge learners and for high-spatial learners than for low-spatial learners.
(Adapted from Reed 2006:91-92).
Audio
People are more forgiving of video than sound. Grungy imagery can be an aesthetic choice but bad audio is harder to tolerate.
Voice recording is a component of all of the Storyboard animations as the children explain their topic. There are three basic methods of synchronizing audio and video i.e. presynched, postsynched and interactive. When planning an animation, it is best to decide in advance which type of voice synchronization will be used so you can proceed accordingly. Each process has its own advantages and challenges:
All videos in the Storyboard project are assembled by the children completing their imagery in PowerPoint and then "saving as" an image format such as jpg. PowerPoint numbers each slide sequentially and then these slides, which are now animation frames, are then imported into video editing software. These frames are then combined and rendered into one single video file.
This process works differently depending on the software being used. Some technical comment is necessary here to ensure that the animations end up looking the way they were first conceived and constructed in PowerPoint:
My preferred editing package is Adobe Premiere Pro because I'm most familiar with that. I like being able to alter the speed (and thus duration) of small sections of video to achieve accurate synchronisation with the voice-over.
I have, however, found that I need to use Microsoft Movie Maker first to ensure that my frames aren't cropped. Premiere Pro and Movie Maker handle the incoming frames generated from PowerPoint differently.
The PowerPoint frames are 960 pixels wide and 720 pixels high. As this size is bigger than the largest template available in Premiere Pro, each frame is automated cropped. Movie Maker resizes the frames which is much better as no visual information is lost.
The two step process then involves opening the resized video file (rendered by Movie Maker) into Premiere Pro to do the synchronisation and all other editing.
This method of creating video from still images in the Storyboard project is not a common method as there is no video camera used in the process. Any method of creating video can be considered an instrinsically metacognitive task. Schuck and Kearney (2004:80) have defined three purposes or modes for student generated digital video:
Communication tool.
Observation and analysis tool.
Reflective tool to support student's reflection on their own learning.
They found that although Mode 3 is potentially the most powerful in terms of learning outcomes it was the least represented. Henderson et. al. (2010) has noted that when students were engaged in video production, reflection was usually present: "...the process of reflection was an embedded pedagogical practice represented in most video production activities". (Henderson et. al. 2010:17). He also notes that this seems to contradict Schuck and Kearney's findings that reflection is the least represented mode. From my experience when authoring explanatory animations for Animating Best Practice, I found metacognition to be a natural outcome of the design process. It appears that Schuck and Kearney have made the same assumption as Wilson and Clarke (2004). Wilson and Clarke contrasted the various components of metacognition (awareness / evaluation / regulation) but left them as separate entities. I propose that a more holistic understanding of metacognition could be made by describing these various elements as attributes. For Schuck and Kearney, they may well have found that reflection was not just present in their reported 12% of video projects but rather 100%. The only way you could not reflect on video footage would be to never watch it again and to never think about it again!
Images and graphic design
Graphic design is a discipline which often involves the psychology of marketing. "Design is choice. The theory of the visual display of quantitative information consists of principles that generate design options and that guide choices among options". (Tufte 1983:191)
The following principles and guidelines are from Tufte (1983:77) and they relate to the integrity of data in graphs:
The representation of numbers, as physically measured on the surface of the graphic itself, should be directly proportional to the numerical quantities represented.
Clear, detailed, and thorough labeling should be used to defeat graphical distortion and ambiguity. Write out explanations of the data on the graph itself. Label important events in the data.
Show data variation, not design variation.
In time-series displays of money, deflated and standarized units of monetary measurment are nearly always better than nominal units.
The number of information-carrying (variable) dimensions depicted should not exceed the number of dimensions in the data.
Graphics must not quote data out of context.
Tufte warns against applying these principles too vigourously. "Most principles of design should be greeted with some skepticism, for word authority can dominate our vision, and we may come to see only through the lenses of word authority rather than with our own eyes". (Tufte 1983:191)
One breach of graphical integrity can be descibed as as a "lie factor" (Tufte 1983:57) which is basically:
Text
When using text within an animation, I am mindful of the Gestalt principle that the combination is greater than the sum of the individual parts. This also applies to screen layout too . “The combinatory effects of bringing multiple modes together into one ‘space’ – the screen – have to be borne in mind. Pages become more orientated towards display rather than narrative, and the task of text-makers becomes focused on design. Written texts may be ‘demoted’ to a smaller proportion of screen space”. (Dicks 2005:79 original emphasis). In this way web design is more closely aligned with magazine pages than pages from a conventional book.
“Perhaps the biggest obstacle to academic hypermedia authoring is likely to be academic institutions. Academic credit is still based on publishing conventionally-authored monographs with major publishers or articles in peer-reviewed journals. Hypermedia is a move away from the formal structures of the academic article or book with chapters”. (Dicks et al 2005:67). My intention was to present this Storyboard thesis electronically because the children’s work is digital and can be best accessed in this medium. Instead I have retained these digital elements as an electronic supplement to the written thesis.
"Hypermedia promotes the idea of learning as design, not just information relayed from the teacher, because the students and teacher collaborate in designing the knowledge. Moreover, hypermedia involves many skills - not only those of writer and illustrator but also those related to project management, research, organization, and presentation". (Anderson & Speck 2001:85).
Navigation
You will have noticed from the Storyboard main menu that I've used a circle as a navigational structure to make the hypertext environment managable. Dicks expressed navigational concerns about people getting lost in a seemingly endless chain of links when viewing hypermedia documents (web pages) (Dicks et al 2005:173). She then goes on to propose some metaphors such as a guided tour or a tree where ideas stem out from large branches into smaller sections. (Dicks et al 2005:170-171).
Site maps are becoming obsolete as people have come to expect logical menus structures and / or search functionality to find what they're after. There is a hypertension between freedom and control. “Hypertext opens up the text through multiple linking, allowing the reader the opportunity to generate unpredictable reading paths. Given this, how does an author, especially one dealing with academic argumentation, simultaneously orientate a reader towards intended readings as well as allow a reader to discover his or her own pathways through the hypertext?” (Dicks et al. 2005:64).
Definitions of hypertext as non-linear are problematic as people can follow the same linear path in spite of the options they are presented with.
There is also the possibility of having multiples screens (or segments within a screen) displaying information simultaneously. I would not want to limit options or functionality but my use of linking is always to link one main idea to another. This means that for the purposes of providing a clear and intended focus, information I present will always be the single focus as the user does not have to wrestle with competing messages.
File management
It is valuable for me to be able to show the development of each child’s work during the year. Students are encouraged to use “Save as” and then add a date suffix to their files names. This is particularly important if they want to try out an experimental idea. Creating new files allows for quick comparisons without losing their original files in case students wish to revert to previous versions.
Explanatory Animation Design Guidelines
The theoretical basic for each guideline is listed in a separate column. What I would actually share with the children is simpler and more practical as described in the instructions for children column.
There is a difference between a fixed element and choosing to omit it altogether.
e.g. Swing / straight musical example.
* There are at least two complementary theories which support the design objective of creating a cohesive logic flow.
The Gestalt principle that the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts. Minsky (1985) is critical of the way people use the term "Gestalt". "We say "gestalt" when things combine to act in ways we can't explain..." (1985:27). He argues that subjective and objective perspectives can account for Gestalt theory. An example he gives for subjective is: "What makes a drawing more than just its separate lines?" and an example for objective is "Why is a chain more than its various links?" He describes Gestalt theory as an inadequate explanation but fails to realise that it is merely a description. Minsky finds answers to complex systems like the human mind but breaking processes (agencies) downs into component parts (agents). As stated in my Animating Best Practice thesis: "Gestalt theory arose in the 1890s as a reaction against atomism. Context was emphasised as the framework for perception. Christian von Ehrenfels used music to illustrate context. He stated that a melody can be readily recognised when transposed to a different key, even if the new key doesn't contain the same notes".
A similar notion to Gestalt theory is Punctualisation from Actor-network theory. This basically means that the people consider the individual parts of a system to be a cohesive whole. A car is a good example as people don't normally think about all of the different parts but rather consider a car as a single entity. A broken down car would then draw attention to the individual parts. A well conceived animation should also be viewed as a cohesive whole in the same way that a good film does not distract the viewer to the process of film making by using excessive scene transitions or camera panning, zooming etc.
Resnick, M. (2007). All I really need to know (about creative thinking) I learned (by studying how children learn) in kindergarten. Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCHI conference on Creativity & cognition, June 13-15, 2007, Washington, DC, USA. (1-6).
Reed, S. K.(2006). Cognitive Architectures for Multimedia Learning. Educational Psychologist. Vol. 41, No. 2, (87-98).
Henderson, M. et. al. (2010). Students creating digital video in the primary classroom: student autonomy, learning outcomes, and professional learning communities. Australian Educational Computing - Journal of the Australian Council for computers in education. Vol. 24, No. 2, (12-20).
Wilson, J. and Clarke,. D. (2004). Towards the Modelling of Mathematical Metacognition. Mathematics Education Research Journal. Vol. 16. No. 2. (25-48).
Tufte, E. R. (1983). The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Cheshire, Connecticut: Graphics Press.
Dicks, B., Mason, B., Coffey, A., & Atkinson, P. (2005). Qualitative Research and Hypermedia: Ethnography for the Digital Age. London: Sage.
Anderson, R. S. & Speck. B. W. (2001). Using Technology in K-8 Literacy Classrooms. New Jersey: Merrill Prentice Hall.
Minsky, M. (1985). The Society of Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster.
