Text is a more interactive way to teach than video.

Joseph Shea
7:03pm 4 April 2011

From my point of view in teaching foreign languages, video RULES!

Colin Torrance
7:33pm 4 April 2011

My first thoughts are what kind of text vs what kind of video? Both with the right software can be made interactive and editable with options for user/viewer influences on content interpretation.

Colin Torrance
3:15pm 5 April 2011

Kinda back to the horses for courses argument, or the medium needs to suit the message. Also why one or the other? These days we can create learning objects that include more that one medium. Can’t even say that text allows more depth of understanding than video - in my field a well narrated or labelled dissection video can achieve as much learning as an anatomy text and certainly more than text without graphics.

Probably a bit of a gruesome example if you are not in my field but compare the description of the rectus muscle in text with a dissection video (warning real dissection). When you see it you understand it! Although when you read it then see it it is even better

text - http://www.bartleby.com/107/118.html

video 3 - http://www.anatomy.wisc.edu/courses/gross/

Joseph Shea
4:04pm 5 April 2011

I think the text in no way prepares you for the reality of the video.

And I would say the same in my field. Which do you prefer? (My examples are more digestible!)

text - http://www.planeteye.com/City/Paris+France+3987.aspx

video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfDv5TTJ3Bc

Alison Page
4:24pm 5 April 2011

Well, I think that text resources put control in the hands of the learner, who can approach any part of the text, in any order and with any timing, whereas video material goes at the pace and in the sequence determined by the teacher.

I don't know about you, but when I see a bit of video online I just can't be bothered to spend ten minutes waiting for it to slowly unfold. An example - the Guardian film reviews online are fun, but the video ones - I just can't be bothered with them. Too impatient I guess.

Alison Page
4:28pm 5 April 2011

Colin - you got me there - at least it wasn't Mr Astley

brendan mcfadden
4:54pm 5 April 2011

I prefer text resources for the same reasons as Alison. You are in more control of the resource. You can use the 'find' function and find key words in the text. it is also easier to scan read.

If videos are more in bite size chunks and indexed then they could be more accessible to find the particular subject you might need. The BBC's The Virtual Revolution is an example of what I mean: http://www.bbc.co.uk/virtualrevolution/

brendan mcfadden
4:58pm 5 April 2011

I was going to suggest that if video's could become more interactive then they would be particular useful  teaching tool, but I suppose this is what a video game is! I loved the example of how designers were tricked into using a new CAD update by incorporating it into a computer game scenario.

Alison Page
5:38pm 5 April 2011

Though I really like funny videos and re-edits and masups and things like that. It's just when it's learning materials I like to rush through at top speed.

Joseph Shea
5:52pm 5 April 2011

Picture is worth a thousand words. Nothing can convey culture and the real feel of being there like a video.

Joseph Shea
5:53pm 5 April 2011 (Edited 6:04pm 5 April 2011)

Text is silent. How useful is that for learning a foreign language?

Alison Page
6:12pm 5 April 2011

What about audio on it's own - how would you rate that against video?

Bernie McGinley
6:52pm 5 April 2011

I almost find myself ageeing with everyone....... Even when 'everyone' is disagreeing!

I'm inclined to lean toward Alison' s point in respect of learning a foreign language.  I rate audio as extremely significant and the relevant visuals and texts are there to augment the meanings. The visuals do not have to be video though.

Good modelling, good instructions, good monitoring, good fun and sensitive feedback. (Wish I could do all those!)

I'm reminded in this of an interpreter I once had when I worked as a nurse in Nigeria. She could speak 9 languages but couldn't read or write.  Even the Canadian doctor there felt ashamed when she began to translate the language of some passing French Canadians for him (At one point in her life she's interacted with people from Benin I think it was).

Bernie McGinley
6:52pm 5 April 2011

I almost find myself ageeing with everyone....... Even when 'everyone' is disagreeing!

I'm inclined to lean toward Alison' s point in respect of learning a foreign language.  I rate audio as extremely significant and the relevant visuals and texts are there to augment the meanings. The visuals do not have to be video though.

Good modelling, good instructions, good monitoring, good fun and sensitive feedback. (Wish I could do all those!)

I'm reminded in this of an interpreter I once had when I worked as a nurse in Nigeria. She could speak 9 languages but couldn't read or write.  Even the Canadian doctor there felt ashamed when she began to translate the language of some passing French Canadians for him (At one point in her life she's interacted with people from Benin I think it was).

Joseph Shea
7:07pm 5 April 2011

Would you rather read how to do something, listen to someone tell you how to do something, or have someone show you how to do something?

;-)

Katie Maddock
8:46pm 5 April 2011

I'm a reader by choice but sometimes I like to watch people demonstrate something.  As Colin says, surely this is horses for courses? 

My sad confession is that I love to watch craftsmen (and women!) at work.  I can quite happily stand for hours watching somebody do a really skilled task - weaving, woodworking, blacksmithing - and I learn a lot from this kind of process.  But that is because I'm interested in it.  I've found in practice that a short video combined with some text and some speaking can convey a message beautifully. 

Following on from the great anatomy clips, I've verbally described the insertion of a naso-gastric feeding tube to students (it's quite a simple process to describe) but the bit about the patient needing to be conscious didn't hit home to the group until I showed them a video.  Empathy increased dramatically after this point!

Colin Torrance
4:37am 6 April 2011 (Edited 9:19am 6 April 2011)

Would you rather read how to do something

, listen to someone tell you how to do something - depends on what, how complex and and how well they explain

, or have someone show you how to do something? - depends on what the balance between explicit and implicate is in learning the activity, some complex task need explanation as well as illustration

I am afraid my answers are usually of the maybe it depends type - maybe education is a bit more complex than governments and school league tables suggest

Joseph Shea
8:59am 6 April 2011

I see your point Colin. But I'm wondering why those dissection videos were made if text is all we need...

Colin Torrance
1:09pm 6 April 2011

In the end we either need both or perhaps combinations e.g. annotated video to achieve some ends. Taking the dissection video example it illustrates relationships and positional representations in a way text can't match but following some of the complex terminology would be difficult if you were not already very familiar with it - here text might help more than the verbal elements of the video

Bernie McGinley
5:16pm 6 April 2011

Yep combinations I think.

I remember (again from the bush in Nigeria) that I was able to make good strides with the less tonal languages but was very poor on the those which required aural nuances......... Hausa was less tonal than Yoruba and Nupe for instance.  But when I received text with 'markings' to indicate high, mid or low tones, this facilitated my uptake enormously.  

This was really good because it enabled me to tell the pregnant women to return in two weeks, rather than two soaps! (when I got the tone wrong). 
It would also have helped the priest who kept calling the chief  'monkey' (oga) instead of 'chief' (oga but with a different inflection somewhere)  because he was just ever so slightly 'off' tone! 

Bernie McGinley
5:51pm 6 April 2011

I agree with Katie that this medium is hardly any different to our forum? Except that maybe if we should still wish to converse on such matters in two years time!?

'Diacritics' .................... Yep that's the word I wanted instead of 'markings' as in previous post...................!

Anyway it's horses for courses I guess because my work colleague in Nigeria had acute aural sensitivity and didn't need such textual assistance as I did. (Difficult not to be envious of such propensities!)

Also it's a matter of culture in that we've had 'schooling' so we would have an idea of the cultural arbitrariness of specific diacitics and textual layouts etc?

Oh my brain is tired thinking now. Gotta have a rest!

Hope Thomas
9:13pm 6 April 2011

Here is my contribution to the debate: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBHvJxXQ00M

Transcript in my blog here:http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?user=732214

Links/Videos Used:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE The maching is us/ing us

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJsacDCsiPg&feature=watch_response Spanish Translation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amy6Ruc-duM Dance Version

Oksana Fedotova
9:59am 7 April 2011 (Edited 11:50am 7 April 2011)

Hi everyone - agree that a combination of both is probably best,  however if I was ever forced into either / or, I'd go for text, for the same reason that has been stated already - a greater control over the process. 

The debate is however, which one is more interactive.  This probably depends on how one defines interactivity; and  to what extent the user / learner is   included into the parameters of the discussion.  In other words,  is it about which mode has a greater potential in itself, inherently?  Or is it about what people tend to do with it nowadays? 

 I guess it shows my age, talking about 'the olden days' -  but when I was 5, a chunk of wood could easily become a doll, and a piece of coloured glass changed the whole world into magnificent colours when I looked through it.   Would this work the same for a today's 5 yr-old?  Is interactivity in the eye (or hand) of the beholder, to some extent?  

But if someone gave me a Barbie at the time, oooohhh I would much rather have a Barbie than making do with a chunk of wood,  and oh can I have a doll house too!   Is text a chunk of wood and video a  Barbie?

Neil Smith
10:30pm 7 April 2011

Oksana makes a good point about interactivity.  Responding to text with text is easy - Twitter, email, forum posts all take seconds.  Responding to a video with a video is a much more labour intensive exercise.  What is more, a high quality text response can be produced from anywhere, with little preparation or equipment.  A high quality video response needs recording, editing, lighting......with the technology available to the average student, high quality video is not easy.

If interactivity is the measure, then text wins.

Colin Torrance
5:08pm 8 April 2011

I still think it depends on what kind of text - a printed book is text - I can read it, make notes on its margins (something I never do as I can't bear to deface a book), make notes about it, email, post in forums  etc. But except writing on the book margins I can do all the same with a video as the trigger. I am not sure that we can say that text is more interactive way to teach than video.

Is it a more interactive way to learn? Again I think that really is very dependent on the content, skill base of the learner, learning style predilections etc. Given that one can these days easily add text to annotate a video or add your own commentary or as Hope did make your own video about a video it does not seem to me that we can definitively say one is more interactive than another. If we discuss a book or video in a live videoconference (and perhaps record it) is that less interactive than synchronous or asynchronous forum postings?

Alison Walker
2:14pm 9 April 2011

For me a combination of both is best.

For my personal learning I love to deface and highlight (sorry Colin) books, turn down pages and make the text my own - don't feel I can do this in the same way with video! although if I engage with the video I tend to remember more in the short term than using text.

In my professionsla life yyext seems to work best for delegates when they are learning about principles, options, theories and video best for examples of approaches eg good/poor practice - its much easier to pick out behaviours. Video is also fantastic as a review tool - record the delegate carrying out an activity and thaen review the playback - very powerful for behaviour change, particularly around communication and personal impact

Joseph Shea
2:11pm 10 April 2011 (Edited 2:13pm 10 April 2011)

On the video question, I think today, especially young people, use their cell/mobile phones for video quite easily so video answers aren't really a problem. I think YouTube also illustrates how powerful and interactive video is. It ain't YouText ;-)

To elicit a reaction from my students, a video is far superior to text. They watch, they speak. They read, they're bored.

Kudos to Hope and her video! And to Oksana and Neil for their participation.

paul jonathan smithers
3:13pm 11 April 2011

I trained as a draughtsman and subsequently moved on to 2D & 3D Computer Aided Design. Eventually the CAD systems could animate the designs drawn on them. The point being that the majority of this learning was visual not text, and that the video output of modern CAD designs avoids the use of text, by employing standardised visual icons (ISO 8888).

This avoidance of text has a purpose, no text, no language barriers, a CAD drawing (for which read video) created in UK can be read and reproduced by a chinese engineer with no knowledge of English.

Alison Walker
6:40pm 11 April 2011

Paul - what a great point! I had no idea this was possible! Do you think that video is particularly appropriate for sharing a certain type of learning and text may be appropriate in another context? 

The number of 'homemade' videos(via mobiles) that have come out of Libya/Bahrain/Yemen etc in recent weeks have spoken volumes to the world, text wouldn't have had anywhere near the same impact.

Will Pollard
2:25pm 19 April 2011

Video and text can be mixed together. Adobe want to promote PDF as a container for sound and video in the latest Acrobat. But so far there are not many examples.

Blogger and other sites allow fairly easy embedding of video into a blog. Also possible on this site but some academic sites are still stronger on text. Will this change any time soon?

Kevin Richardson
7:55pm 8 May 2011

I think back to the article titled, 'Of Mind and Media' in which I felt that different media affords the learner different learning experiences. Adding a musical soundtrack to video, for example, can certainly provide an emotive experience to the viewer that text alone would not be able to convey. Likewise, text is easier for the reader to consume at their own pace. Mixing and mashing up the media types according to the pedagogical experience I would wish to design is my preference. I do prefer using video where appropriate.

I also think that whilst technology is lowering the entry level barrier which might have previously deterred teachers from using video, not everyone is going to be skilled in producing video presentations. I certainly agree with Hope, that we should 'give it go', but I think trying all sorts of technology (wiki's, blogs, xtra normal presentations, video, flikr etc) provides a great new media pallette for designing learning.