Peter Roe

The second day at the Diverse conference and the first session I attended was a presentation by a PhD research student from Lancaster University. His paper on Pedagogy and assessment  involved an analysis of the target audiences of four different HE groups that used videos during their courses. His research seems to indicate that students are most engaged by films that are made by students. This seems to agree with our own experiences during Films for Learrning workshops. I have exchanged details with Alberto Ramirez Martinell and we will be linking up in the future to see how we can help each other in our research.

Yesterday involved lots of networking and again today at the 'Creative Coffee Concepts' table there has been a free exchange of ideas and information. There is a determination amongst members of the Diverse Community to carry on the 'concept coffee breaks' outside this conference and throughout the year.

Yesterday I also appeared in a TV studio discussion on the merits of second life and how it could perhaps be applied to education. There seems to be a feeling that Second Life has been misunderstood and my own experience of Machinamation in Second Life seems to bear this out. It is my belief that just as in the internet, if you want to find and indeed go looking for the hidden underbelly of society you will find it. What we should be doing as educators is teaching our students discernment, in so many cases we filter things or block new technologies in order to control our students and what they do.

One of the joys of the Films for Learning model is that the traditional teaching model is turned on its head and students take control of their own learning in a partnership with their teacher. This 'loss of control' by the teacher flys in the face of traditional pedagogy but seems to fit in with something that two or three speakers have mentioned in their talks at this conference and was mentioned by the key note speaker Ulrich Rauch in his summation...

PARADIGM SHIFT...

• Participatory Pedagogy - engagement of the learner
• Visual Literacy - engagement with media and their power of presentation understanding a "visual rhetoric"
• Collaborative Learning - teach less - learn more - re-creation - networks of imagination
• A New Mode of Reading - becoming part of the text: enable questions of representation, perception and cognition in relation to the production of meaning

From my understanding of his all too short key note, I believe we at Films for Learning have hit upon a co-creation recipe that will help to take us toward the "Participatory Culture" that Ulrich refers to. 

Well here I am in Holland on the first day of the Diverse 2008 conference. The opening session by the Dutch hosts and the luminaries of the Diverse Community was 'Gezellig' (cosy and friendly/welcoming) and also a call to be inspired and be creative. A break for lunch and everyone scrambles to connect to the wireless network but due to a series of gremlin attacks on my computer I ended up sitting with a Systems Engineer from the University whilst we tried to figure what was going on... This meant I missed the start of the first two sessions but I was ideally placed to meet people in the 'Creative Coffee' sessions in between.

One of the strongest parts of these events is the opportunity to network with other educationalists, academics and film makers to exchange ideas and experiences. I have already met a number of people who are interested in working with us to promote film making in education. At 5.30 today I will be off to the studio with Phil O'Donoghue to discuss some of our experiences. Already we have made a strong contact and will be talking about how our students can help in video broadcast and production at next years Diverse conference in Aberystwyth.

Back soon with more experiences from Diverse 2008.

I met some interesting people who work in Media and Television. Outside their regular day jobs they get involved in making short films for fun, adverts for their friends and such like. We had a long discussion about techniques, methods and software and at the end of the day I got invited to take part or just observe in the filming of a commercial for a night club that would appear on MTV. The producer/director gave me a tour of the set... A huge pyramid open on 2 sides with green screens set up for the chromakey shots. This set was a partial but faithful recreation of the nightclub and was situated on a studio lot. I was told filming would take place on Wednesday and everything had to be in the bag before the end of the week because the place was rented to someone else after that. I am always keen to expand my knowledge by observation so said I would love to attend, they told me the location, the time and what kind of outfit to wear and that was it until the shooting.

OK, so far so good. There is a story here but not what you would expect. The whole set, the camera, the studio location and the nightclub are just a collection of zeros and ones that exist in the online world that is Second Life. The actors or dancers are real, they are all real people with Avatars that represent their self and they dance regularly at a nightclub called Dance island. The night club owner is real, her plot of land or 'Sim' is a night club... The Director, Chantal Harvey is real, a 50 year old woman with extensive media experience who works in Television and has founded a group that promotes Machinima... A combination of the word Machine and Cinema (Wikipedia reference). This is basically using Avatars as actors and everything is set and shot in the virtual world. This is an example of a short drama by Chantal that was filmed and shot in Second Life for the 48Hr Machinima competition - BUS SL 042 (This is You Tube hosted so you can't view it in most schools... I will see if Chantal will upload a copy of this film to Films for Learning).

Why is this here? Why this blog post? Well its not the first Machinima that I have seen but it is very well done and worthy as a post of an exemplaar. There is already on this site an example of Machinima that uses different software called Media Stage. Reactive Metals is an example of how to use software with students to produce documentarys or drama. Imagine using this software to work out the stage positions and pace for a whole play... Or how about making your own Machinima drama using the award winning software Media Stage or similar award winning software Kar2ouche or how about Games software like Sims 2, Halo or Half life? Let me know if you have knowledge of any other software out there and we will start a forum thread with feedback on your experiences with the various software.

How can we use this in education? At this point I am still in thinking mode... It strikes me that there is a lot of potential in virtual stage software for media students, drama students and more. I was just grateful for the opportunity to take part in this virtual shoot. As for Machinima in Second lIfe it seems my experience is just the tip of the iceberg. A media company has produced a virtual comedy series using Second Life... 5 episodes so far called "Divas" sort of a cross between 'Desperate Housewives' and the Film 'Death Becomes Her'. You Tube also has a huge offering of films made by teenagers using games like Halo to make little set piece dramas. We need to find a way to tap into this film making talent and engage some of those teenage boys and girls who are already making 'Mash Ups' (A video that recombines and modifies existing digital works to create a derivative work.) in their own homes with nothing more sophisticated than a desktop or laptop computer. 

Machinima FAQs 

Funnily enough, a science colleague came to me this week and asked if I had any short films made on my mobile. He'd had this idea that teachers could engage students by getting them to use the video camera on their mobile to film some practical experiments. This was a little experiment to prove it could be done, so this is the film, Reaction of Magnesium in Hydrochloric Acid, as filmed on my Nokia N95 and edited in Windows Movie Maker for Vista.

I also had a JVC Everio Hard Disc Camcorder that I was testing out so I filmed the experiment with that at the same time (Reaction of Magnesium, camcorder version). I will record the trial and frustrations of that particular test in a the hardware thread in the forums. Suffice to say that with this camera not everything was as easy as I had first hoped it would be.

How about making a stop motion animation using your mobi? Get a lump of bluetac or playdough or a beanbag to rest it on and start shooting stills of your animation... Use lego, every home has some, it usually comes with the carpets (At least I am always treading on the stuff so it has to be true!). Let me see what you can do. My challenge, to do the same within one week of this blog post... educational? No reason why not...

Link to >> BLUETAC DOG <<

 I have been playing with the new site over the Christmas break and I have been getting quite excited at all the new features that the website has got. We had some positive press coverage in the run up to Christmas which has led to increased traffic at the old site and a number of enquiries from educationalists that want to get involved with this project. We will be meeting with people at the BETT show in the second week of January and hope to have some exciting news for Further and Higher Education. We will keep you in touch via these pages as we get more information.

I guess I start at the beginning... I have worked in Education for the last 10 years, 5 years for an American University in the Netherlands and 5 years for The Thomas Hardye School in Dorchester.  I left school at 16 and joined the Air Force where I first encountered computers... Big clunky dumb things... and Fax machines the size of a large wardrobe... Whatever they were though I was fascinated and learnt to program in Basic. When I left the Air Force after 6 years I did a computer programming course in COBOL, RPG2 and BASIC. I built my first PC and paid £128 for 2 Mb of memory! I worked in the service and retail industries in various roles the constant theme being computers. Circumstances led me to the Netherlands where I was first the Network Manager and then Multimedia coordinator for Webster University. I returned to England to work for The Thomas Hardye School, first as Network Manager and currently as Media Development Manager.

I have been editing and making films almost as soon as the first DV Cams hit the stores... I paid as much money as I could afford for a Sony pro-sumer model, much to my wife's dismay... But it paid off, the camera is still going strong and perhaps 50% of my working time is spent in film making and development. I teach film making as an enrichment and extra curricular/cpd activity for students and teaching staff. I have been a technical facilitator for Films for Learning since its inception 3 years ago, that means that I have worked alongside Mark Richardson developing this project and bringing it to this point. I have been responsible for technical support throughout, mentoring students and teachers during workshops, and developing and maintaining the website. One of the biggest 'pinch points' for the old style web site was me... All films had to go through me for inclusion in the web site. The upload facility provided in the new design will release me from that task and give me more space to innovate, facilitate and create. I am anticipating the most exciting year for Films for Learning yet and I will share the triumphs and challenges through this blog.