I am taking a university-sponsored course created by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE) called “Effective Teaching Practices”.  I am enjoying seeing how much can be done when you have deep pockets.  It is by conventional standards a very highly scaffolded and polished online course.  They are using Canvas as their LMS.  (Yeah, I know, you seen one and you seen ’em all.)

The course is full of videos (I would have to call them class ‘recreations’: students with convenient questions and predictable problems.) And they also have sketchnote-style animations.  I was struck by how slick (think RSA Animate slick) the animations were as they were folded into the videos.  I felt that their was an underlying message in them that I was missing in all the slick noise. I needed a way to “close read” these animations.

One of the most effective ways I know to do that is to hack and remix.  Most folks do not really understand the “slow” of close reading.  Almost any strategy that makes you go slow and reconsider at the creator’s pace will do.  For example, I have been doing a close reading of the book, Affinity Online, by printing out photocopies of the book’s pages and then annotating them.  I use highlighters (BTW, those new gel highlighters are the best), colored pencils, washi tape, gel pens, fountain pens, and combinations of the above to try to descend into the fields of play the authors have created. It is a form of non-destructive deconstruction whose purpose is to empathize with the creators as much as is pragmatic.

Here’s sample below:

It is a different game with videos and animations.  What I did with those was to pull all the animations out using Snag-It. I converted them into gifs. Why?  I wanted to make them as short and to the point as possible. I felt that that all the video post-production that made them so slick needed messing with.  They needed to pulled from their context so that I had to watch them over and over with different editing “eyes”.  That is how I did the “slow” of close video reading.

Once I pulled out the animations as gifs I also had as a matter of course stripped away the audio.  Again with the simplifying, right?  Did the animation work by itself. I think they mostly did.  Once I pulled out the animations as gifs, I put them back together using Camtasia. I did very little post-production editing. I didn’t concern myself with too much “re-slickification” of the video. Mostly I just wanted to get to know the animations. I also wanted to know what would happen to my experience of the close read if I added audio.

The first video has a punk track and the second has a mellow acoustic track.  Night and day. I know that I understand the message of the animations better for doing this close reading.  I wonder if my colleagues who are taking the course understand how visual our students have become.  And more so each day.  Do we get the idea of the Gutenberg Parenthesis. ?  Do we understand how the oral/visual are being valorized by our learners? Or at least it is by the leaders in that generation.

 

 

I prefer the punk version much of the time because of its punching urgency.  The mellow track?  The hidden message might be that you should just chill and take the learning as it comes.  I like the slam in the audio gut.  Almost always.

What I need to do is to find ways to do this kind of slow close reading more quickly. Contra? Yes.  I’m working on it.