Learning to Work With Video
A professor had her students in the Library Media program use small DV cameras to tape brief instructional videos, edit them in iMovie on new Apple iBooks, compress them into QuickTime clips, and burn them on CD-ROM.
Largely successful – many students really enjoyed the new machines and the software. Yet some had difficulty adjusting to the Mac OS after working in Windows, and many had difficulty understanding the difference between DV as a file format and the QuickTime movies they made.
It’s an important reminder to me as a teacher of technology, and I hope others who teach technology skills, that most people want computers to functino as an appliance with no regard for its inner workings. It’s not a lack of sophistication – these are very smart people. It’s just that they aren’t interested in how the hardware or the compression algorithm works; they just want a transparent, easy to use interface that will burn their files to the CD so they can get on to the next task. It’s my job to help that happen – to “wash the window” so they can see through it and get stuff done.——-