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2. Overview
Authoring with animation creates history much like ancient cave paintings, cultural artefacts and preserved art from every generation. Animations tell their own stories. “Visual learning is not new. From the Paleolithic cave paintings, to the Egyptian hieroglyphics, to the visual language used in our modern-day world, we have always been a visual society. The visual language remains an important component of our evolution, which begs the question ‘Is the visual language an important component of our educational strategies?’” (Gangwer 2009: Preface x)
2.1 Overview of the sections within this thesis
2.2 Defining the scope of this project
2.3 Analogies for learning
2.4 Gender issues
2.1 Overview of the sections within this thesis
(A short synopsis of this project is available on the abstract page).
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In what ways can storyboarding and explanatory animation creation enable primary school students to articulate and consolidate their conceptual understanding?
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Short summaries are provided for the Storyboard sections. I define the scope of this project and present some analogies for learning.
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Many of the authors cited in the literature review are cognitive psychologists writing within the interdisciplinary umbrella of cognitive science.
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Technical and theoretical issues relating to the praxis that we adhered to throughout the project are addressed in the Explanatory Animation Framework (EAF). This section also makes the connections between my previous work on animation (i.e. Animating Best Practice) and my current focus on children constructing and animating their own learning.
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Epistemology |
Theoretical perspective |
Methodology |
Methods |
Constructionism |
Symbolic interactionism |
Practitioner action research |
Case study |
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All of the digital data from the 8 children working with me in the Storyboard project is accessible from this section. There are 12 different sources of data which fit together to document the evolution and completion of each of the children's explanatory animations.
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The wealth of digital data generated by the Storyboard project provided unique challenges. The Data analysis section contains my critique of the student's animations including a rubric based assessment. The 12 data sources are also discussed further in this section.
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The emerging contribution of this study to cognitive science is that explanatory animations can literally and figuratively function as cognitive models.
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There was a clear pattern which evolved between the children's use of correct terminology and their subsequent identification of relevant variables. Understanding the dynamic relationships between the variables proved to be the final step for the children in their quest to achieve conceptual consolidation. Explanatory animation creation proved to be a powerful diagnostic tool to reveal incomplete or incorrect assumptions.
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There are are wide range of implications from this study which most relate to pedagogy under such headings as:
- Partial versus simplistic explanations
- Emphasis should remain on the learning process
- Paradoxically - more is less
- 1 to 1 teaching implications for integration aides
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Storyboard attendance rolls 2010 and 2011 |
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2.2 Defining the scope of this project
The specific practice of generating animation imagery using Microsoft PowerPoint was the method adopted for the participants in this study. “More widely, action may connect with research, but in action research it relates to a specific practice.” (Ronnerman 2005:294) The idea of using PowerPoint to generate the animation frames is one those interesting phenomena where many people across the world have had the idea without any single person actually inventing it. In my case it evolved from observing some Grade 5 boys working with PowerPoint in 2006. They had figured out that by inserting duplicate slides they could then make slight adjustments in the position of any objects they had created using combinations of various "auto shapes" like basic rectangles, circles, etc. By quickly pressing "page down" they could animate their graphics at the rate of their button presses. Although PowerPoint has built-in animation features for timed events, the crude method of manual manipulation used by these boys allowed for longer and ultimately more elaborate sequences.
I showed these same boys how PowerPoint can save each slide (frame) separately in a GIF, JPG, PNG etc. format. Because each slide is named sequentially, they can then be inserted into a video editing program such as Adobe Premiere Pro. The timing can then be controlled to produce the desired result and then the whole project can be rendered as a stand-alone video file. (Most of my own animations were created using Adobe Flash but primary school children find PowerPoint much easier to use and it's also more readily available as most school computers have Microsoft Office).
Other common uses of animation in schools have been deliberately excluded from this project. Stopmotion is very popular and easy to use but I have not included it in the Storyboard methodology. Depending on the content children are trying to show, stopmotion is limiting in terms of having to physically manipulate objects unlike a pure graphic context. A hybrid approach would be to use stopmotion to time-lapse actual drawings and artwork but computer generated imagery is clearer, cleaner and more easily edited.
Pre-rendered animation environments such as Kahootz are also excluded from this study as the user is limited to those pre-rendered environments. It is important that the children I'm working with create their imagery "ex nihilo" (i.e. out of nothing). This is more time consuming but ultimately more rewarding and without limitation.
2.3 Analogies for learning
By discussing analogies for learning, I aim to orientate the reader to where I'm coming from as an educator.
Eating.....exercising
When I first commenced this study I would have defined my analogy for learning as being one of a good dining experience. As teachers it is our responsibility to ensure our students have a nutritious educational diet. Teachers can take this analogy further by adding variety and improving quality and efficiency in their teaching. Ideally, students would play a more active role in this scenario where they prepare and share their own meals and even participate in growing and farming the food.
Schools have traditionally focused on equiping their students with knowledge and skills:
(Figure 1: Knowledge and skills)
Other areas such as creativity are encouraged in theory but often not in practice. This eating analogy has now been replaced in my own thinking with one involving exercise. One problem I encountered with the eating analogy is the common complaint by teachers about the crowded curriculum i.e. "How much can we fit on our plates?" The exercise analogy tackles this issue directly by looking for learning activities that exercise numerous muscles simultaneously. "The reflexive quality of information science offers a solution to the apparent impossibility of adding another component to an already full school day. If some knowledge facilitates other knowledge, then, in a beautifully paradoxical way, more can mean less!" (Harel & Papert 1991:75)
(Figure 2: Knowledge, skills, cognition and creativity)
The process of creating an explanatory animation is not just another activity to be crammed into the curriculum but rather a rich learning activity which makes better use of the one resource which both teachers and students share, i.e. time. The teaching of woodwork has parallels here in that you need a range of skills and processes to be able to make even the simplest piece of furniture. You could teach a new type of joint or how to use a different tool but these skills are best used in the context of actually making things. To practise cutting on a piece of wood could be considered wasteful. As educators, we are in danger of wasting our students time if our skill development is not contextualised in real situations working on authentic tasks.
Paraphrase and vector-based learning
A paraphrase refers to the ability to use different words or a different order of words to convey the same information. Bruner (1966) saw early childhood as a critical period when the opportunity to paraphrase verbally with adults was a determining factor in successful learning in later life.
Teachers often present different angles or perspectives on the same information to make their point. This is because they have a consolidated understanding of the topic so that they can look at it in different ways and personalise or contextualise the essential elements in meaningful and relevant ways. The students in the Storyboard project were involved in learning by teaching so there was an expectation that they would achieve sufficient conceptual consolidation to be able to look at their topic in a variety of ways. This was evidenced through their representations in either language and / or images.
Vector-based learning is a new analogy presented in this thesis which addresses the epistemological question of “what is knowledge?” The analogy is derived from vector-based graphics as contrasted with bitmap graphics. Bitmap graphics refer to a screen being mapped out as a grid of pixels or a page being mapped out as a grid of dots. Bitmap image files contain the information about where the dots or pixels go and which colours they are. Vector based graphics contain geometric information about how and where to draw the pixels or dots. Vector based graphics have the advantage of being scalable without any loss of clarity or detail which avoids distortion or pixilation.
Knowledge is often viewed as information and learning as the acquisition of information. Learners then “file away” the information that they acquire for future use much like bitmap images provide specific information as pixels on a screen or dots on a page. Another way to look at this is the action of drawing. Some people like to complete a small section on a page first before moving on whereas most people like to draw the broad guidelines and then fill in the details. Storyboard participants are encouraged to get their main ideas in order before spending too much time rendering in the details. This reduces the impact of inevitable revisions as the design process works its course.
Vector-based images are a beautiful depiction of constructionism. Using this analogy, every concept has a particular “shape” depending on the key components and how they relate to one another. Conceptual consolidation allows conceptual knowledge to be transferred to other settings (where appropriate) without distortion as the interrelationships are the most important information. This also brings the whole concrete / abstract notion full circle (see section 3.2) as consolidated understandings can be abstracted with full clarity much like vector graphics.
Other analogies or metaphors presented in this thesis are:
2.4 Gender issues
In which ways can multimedia be considered an inclusive or exclusive technology?
It is often said that females are not as comfortable with technology as males. "Research has shown that on average girls and women experience more anxiety when working with computers than do boys and men". (Cooper and Weaver 2003:7) I have not found this to be true in my experience working with Primary school aged children or even with adults. Maybe this is because technology has become so ubiquitous that it is no longer seen as a gadget or novelty.
I did notice however during the 2010 Storyboard trial that the competitive nature of some of the boys accounted for some differences in how they approached the animation task and measured its success. These boys liked to focus on how many slides they had created in a competitive manner. In the 2011 Storyboard project the children were encouraged to be as succinct as possible and told that achieving the largest number of frames was irrelevant.
I deliberately chose to work with equal numbers of male and female students. Some researchers also discuss a stereotype threat where "...the mere existence and knowledge of a negative stereotype causes anxiety and pressure in members of the stereotyped group". (Cooper and Weaver 2003:95) For this reason I will make no further comments about gender issues unless something of interest arises.
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