Digital Explanations: Learning and Communicating Content using Student-created Digital Media

Finding new ways to engage university students with content is a challenge for all academics. One way is to get them to use their own technology (mobile phone and free movie making software on a Mac and PC) to create digital explanations to represent and communicate discipline knowledge.

At this NEST seminar a suite of student-created digital media that can be used to engage students in explaining and communicating content: podcast, digital story, slowmation, video, and blended media, will be presented. 

These media forms involve students explaining content using a three to five minute narration complemented by a selection of modes of communication such as still images, slow moving images (slowmation), fast moving images (video) and writing.

Creating blended media is especially engaging whereby students can integrate their own media with video from YouTube and still images from Google images to complement their narration, which is like an “educational mash-up”.

In addition, a theoretical framework, called a semiotic progression, will be presented that underpins the quality of learning when students create a sequence of representations resulting in digital media to explain content. 

The seminar will be supported by a comprehensive website www.digiexplanations.com aimed at making the instructions for media creation clear for university students.

The Presenter: Associate Professor Garry Hoban, University of Wollongong

Garry is an Australian Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT) National Senior Fellow. He is internationally known as the creator of "Slowmation" (simplified animation) and has led an ARC Discovery Grant and OLT Competitive Grant as well as published internationally in the field of student-created animations for science learning. The OLT Fellowship focuses on six forms of student-created digital media: podcasts, video, screencast, digital story, screencast and blended media, collectively called "Digital Explanations" that will be used to promote student engagement with content in science and science teacher courses.

Please rsvp to Denyse D.Macnish@murdoch.edu.au

NEST (Networks Enhancing the Scholarship of Teaching) is situated in CUTL and promotes the aims of the Office for Learning and Teaching.