January 12, 2006
Video Traces: A flexible new medium for instruction
Consider, say, a quarterback and coach reviewing a play from last week’s football game.
The two can talk in person, but that lacks the documentation and imagery available through technology. They can swap images, films or comments online, but that, in turn, lacks the directness of personal communication. Then there are technologies such as the Telestrator, made popular in televised football games, where play patterns and such are drawn on images being discussed and broadcast live.
But for educators — and coaches, directors and others without network feeds and instant replays at their fingertips — wouldn’t it be great if there was a program to enable people to capture still or moving images, annotate them by pointing with text or a spoken-word audio commentary and share them?
Reed Stevens, an associate professor of Educational Psychology and part of the leadership of the College of Education’s LIFE Center on the Science of Learning, has created just such a tool. It’s called Video Traces, and it’s a bit like a sports-style Telestrator on steroids, created to ramp up communication and information sharing without increasing technological difficulty or complexity.
The notion dates back 10 years or more, Stevens said, to his interest in how people learn from museums when he was a graduate student in Berkeley.
“My background is using video to study people in their natural environment,” he said. After using video to document how people go through a certain exhibit and writing a paper about it, “it occurred to me — what if you could actually have what I arranged for the study built together — a recording of something and a recording of people’s annotation/interpretation on top of it?”
That’s exactly what Video Traces is.
Simply put, the program is a digital software application used to create short audio and/or visual loops, called “traces.” These can be replayed at any speed and annotated by pointing, drawing and/or audio recordings by parties referring to the same material. Users can annotate films or still shots using their computer mouse and and even record their comments for playback by other users, who can add their own comments and traces
Reed said he intentionally tried to keep the software easy to use, to better combine it with people’s current work habits. He said it was important to avoid “scope creep,” adding, “I purposefully kept is as close to everyday interaction as I could… I’ve built it out of common practices, like those from VCRs and other everyday devices.” Indeed, among the most common of all — looking, talking, demonstrating and pointing. Stevens said, “I’ve always been interested in making things that people can really use.”
Technological limits, Stevens said, prevented the idea from making much progress until 2000, when advancements made it easier to connect digitial cameras to computers. Stevens said he brought the idea to Scott Macklin, then director of the UW’s Program for Educational Transformation Through Technology (PETTT). “We decided to go forward, and PETTT provided the initial funding to start the development process.”
Last year, the College of Education started using Video Traces in its work connecting college faculty with novice working teachers at local schools as part of a partnership with the Ginger and Barry Ackerley Family Foundation. Among these was Susan Ball, a fourth-grade teacher at Bellevue’s Newport Heights Elementary, who used the program in her work training two teaching assistants. “It made us the first to use it, which was really cool,” Ball said.
Ball described the real-world benefit of the program to her classroom work. “Maybe a student was having trouble with math concepts, and maybe there was a worksheet where they came up with some unusual pattern that wasn’t what the teacher was looking for. Maybe a student teacher would ask for ideas on how the student is thinking about math and how to help them understand the correct process.”
In another situation she described, a boy was having trouble with his English fluency. A teacher had the boy read out loud and recorded the result, creating an audio/video trace. Ball said she could later view the trace and add her own comments and suggestions, which appear graphically different from those of others. She called such interaction “really beneficial,” as was the possibility of bringing traces to College of Education faculty members for guidance.
Stevens knows that the possible uses of Video Traces are many, branching out from education into the worlds of sports, physical and occupational therapy, arts and all manner of performance.
The UW School of Music already has discovered the uses of Video Traces. Timothy Salzman, holder of the Ruth Sutton Waters Endowed Professorship in music and director of the school’s wind ensemble, said the technology “has a definite positive impact on what we are trying to do, particularly with younger students.”
Salzman said the program helps him guide aspiring conductors in their all-important movements as they lead musicians. “We are concerned with gesture and how it impacts sound — trying to get students to learn the vocabulary of physical gestures that will elicit sound responses,” he said. He currently has nine graduate and 21 undergraduate student conductors, all with different personal styles.
“(The graduate students) come to us with more ingrained habits because all of them are veteran teachers at the public school level or college, and all have their own idiosyncrasies,” Salzman said. “The beautiful thing about Video Traces is that you can slow it down and really become minute in your discussion of what’s going on.”
He added, “It seems to me that it gets them through their personal obstacles much more quickly than just using video tape. It has to do with their commentary and my subsequent trace feedback, which seems to send the needed message to a deeper part of their consciousness. It seems to embed more deeply in their performing.”
Plus, Salzman said, the fact that Video Traces acts a bit like that Monday Night Football device only makes it more attractive to the students, he said. “It kind of has a Telestrater sports broadcast look to it, and given our sports-obsessed and technology-obsessed culture, it’s completely appealing to the user.”
Stevens, creator of Video Traces, said that so far, the program has been limited to use on particular computer hard drives, but that a coming version will place the program on the Internet. This will increase its power and potential exponentially, allowing users to share traces with the ease of e-mail. He also knows that the invention may be highly commercial at some point for teachers of all types.
He said he views the program as more than just a teaching and learning aid.
“I view Video Traces as a medium,” he said. “And I want to be able to share a medium with people that lets them do what they will do with it.” He added, “I hope it will expand the possibilities for productive learning and teaching interactions, to have tools like this.”
