Monday, May 19, 2008

Comment Challenge Day 13 - Reflecting on my digital information literacy project

Today the Comment Challenge requires me to write a post based on the comments that have been left on my blog. This is a way of expanding conversations and encouraging deeper reflection. So I am going to kill two birds with one stone and use the opportunity to expand my thoughts on the digital information literacy project I am involved with.

The goals I wish to achieve in this project are to increase my skills of making and editing audio and video stories and teaching resources, and become more familiar with tools such as Camtasia and Audacity.

Bronwyn wrote:

As part of your action research cycle, it would be useful if you could identify the issue(s) which have led you to choose these goals.

To be honest, I do not have a really specific idea about how I will use these skills - my aim for learning them is more about being ready to develop an audio/video resource as and when the need arises. Or rather, removing the barrier of lack of skills to my thinking about how I can deliver teaching content in a more innovative way. In other words, I don't have any plans to start a project on collecting midwifery stories but I can see that having a couple of stories presented in an audio or video form will give context to my teaching undergraduates about the history of midwifery. It makes a lovely change to delivering content from miles and miles of PowerPoint slides. This is especially important as my department at Otago Polytechnic is moving into distance education for midwifery students, so the content we deliver must be as engaging as possible. The other side to this is facilitating students to use video and audio themselves to record their own learning journey and make connections with people as they go.

From a personal point of view, I would like to use video and audio to record my own learning particularly to put in my ePortfolio as well as to record family events, thoughts and history. My children are leaving home and I want to capture our moments together before they completely leave the nest.

I want to get to the stage where making a short information video about something or interviewing people becomes second nature, like Beth Kanter does on her travels.

For example, is midwifery history "thin on the ground" or is there a lack of audiovisual material? and why is it important to have this form of recording midwifery history?

High quality midwifery audiovisual material is thin on the ground and usually costs a reasonable amount of money. My dream is that we (the profession) builds a wide-ranging library of free of resources that we share, which can be accessed anywhere in the world. Then the time and resources we spend in 're-inventing the wheel' can be spent in other ways.

Also why is it important to create videos of clinical skills?
Watching a video gives a dimension to learning a skill that cannot be captured in a text book. But when you look on YouTube for a video on perineal suturing, for example, it is very difficult to find one that encapsulates all the elements of suturing that I teach. If I can make a video that meets the learning outcomes I have identified and fits the context I teach in, the likelihood is that it will also meet the needs of midwifery students in other areas.

Before you start making your own resources - how do you intend to go about searching for existing material?
I will do a search of the Internet including sites like YouTube, Google Video and Howcast. I will look at blogs and send out requests for information to my midwifery support network including the various midwifery email groups I belong to. I may even send out a question about resources to the various student midwife forums that are about.

So my question to the midwives and students who read this blog is: do you know of any good audiovisual midwifery resources that are available free to share?

What audiovisual resources would you find useful to have access to?

Image: 'untitled' toner
www.flickr.com/photos/31533333@N00/64387313

No comments: