SECTION 2: Digital Resources in Performance Studies 2.5: Teaching and Learning Applications: 'Digital Dialogues'
David Hughes 1. What is Digital Dialogues? Digital Dialogues is a computer-mediated, web-based multimedia collaborative educational environment delivering critical theory, contextual studies, art history, research methodology and image manipulation teaching materials. It is not technology driven. It aims to use technology to support pedagogic aims and principles and is designed to facilitate, encourage, support and motivate student learning through engagement and interaction. It combines key primary and secondary texts, annotated by tutors, transcripts of lectures and multimedia resources. Completing worksheets within each named seminar, the student is constantly prompted to answer questions which will reinforce their understanding of the texts and complete exercises that invite them to write their own explanatory, analytic and critical texts following and reinforcing sound academic principles. The multimedia resources of sound, image and video provide immediate illustration and practical application for the theory. Being web linked, the research potential of the Internet is constantly at hand and currently the Microsoft Exchange family of applications (the learning environment that houses the Digital Dialogues web pages) allows students to engage in online seminars as a group, with the tutor and in private chat rooms as collaborative working clusters. 1.1 A Brief History of the Project Digital Dialogues began life as a response to the need to deliver, to a large student cohort, courses in critical and contextual studies and digital image manipulation. With online teaching and learning resources, online seminar and student feedback mechanisms, a small number of staff would be able to monitor and provide support for all the cohorts engaged with the system. Our experience of using Information Technology with students in practical performance projects and text-based bulletin boards suggested that we could enhance the learning environment by the use of IT and digital media, thereby increasing student engagement and motivation. In the academic year 1996/97 I was running a module I had called "Postmodernism and Performance" and we were dealing with the book Masters of Deception (Quittner and Slatalla, 1995) about young computer hackers in America. We were using computers to hold online discussions and seminars and we developed and maintained a bulletin board where people invented identities and narratives. There was a heady mix of fact, fantasy and theory. It worked. It was motivating. Students were making terrific work on and through the system, sometimes manifest as site-specific events and live performances but heavily informed and energised by the computer community. It seemed too good to be true. We should use this kind of system with its promise of delivering text, image, sound, video and all kinds of teaching materials to deliver critical studies modules; we wanted to enter digital culture; we wanted to be able to continue the dialogue that was the basis of all work with our students. We'd called it Digital Dialogues. Everyone hated the title: we still do, but now we're stuck with it and worse, the whole faculty knows it as DD or even Diggidogs. Hint number one: naming a project is like naming a child. They have to live with it for the rest of their lives! What was also alarming at this point to my colleagues was that most of them did not have a computer on their desks or even within reach. How could we attempt this complete reengineering of an undergraduate course in contemporary arts without access to computers ourselves and, more, without the skills that come from access and familiarity? This was addressed by a strategy to access more and more and better and better computers through means fair and foul. Even now, four years down the road, some of my colleagues still have bits of plastic on their desks that look like the dummy computers they use to decorate beech veneer workstations at IKEA. Another thing we didn't think about at the beginning, but which became highly significant, was the speed and specification of the machines being used. There is very little point in waiting for minutes for one piece of software to load or to access one web page: if you can't get the right kit for the job then the good work you do in design or in preparing teaching materials might go completely unappreciated. It is important to get each link in the chain right: the material is delivered through a desktop machine which has to have the right software, the right speed, memory, video screen and so on; browsers need the right plug-ins for the kind of media viewers you want to use; the connection between that desktop machine and the server needs to be fast; the server needs to be able to deal with the demands made on it by the numbers of students using the system; the link to the Internet needs to be fast if you are building in a concept such as the 'library without walls' (which is to say your in-house electronic library and the internet becoming seamlessly connected research resources). On the other hand it has been necessary to get on with the job in good faith and indeed the University's Computing Services, seeing our level of use, has subsequently provided suites of new PCs with excellent specs. A short-term ironic downside of that, however, was the rare event that initially the new specification was too high! So problems can arise when you least expect them. In this instance the server which had been identified for our use was now too old and slow for the new workstations, resulting in only a few students being able to log on at once: we had to move to another server with a bigger capacity 'pipe' linking it to the network. This is the kind of thing that really needs very careful pre-planning. Another problem of this kind that we encountered was designing on a Mac and then delivering on a PC: all kinds of things don't travel well from one platform to another (such as fonts) and you have to ensure that what you work hard to achieve on the design machine is what you are going to be able to deliver on the students' desktops. Whilst my colleagues were alarmed at the prospect of having to come to terms with cyberhorror there was undoubtedly excitement about the work being done on the 'Postmods' module. The computer element allowed the students to be creative, to play, to improvise, to collaborate and also to think, to read to discuss (online) and to return to discussions again and again after reflection and to revise and rewrite and question. We had high hopes for Diggidogs if it could bring the same experience in the study of critical and cultural theory. We subsequently introduced VAXNOTES, the system we had first used on 'Postmods', as an online chat, seminar and tutorial system for third year students as a supplement to live seminars. We found, perhaps predictably, that the students who spoke less in class were very articulate and prolific online and that overall there was an altogether higher level of engagement with and analysis of theory because the students could take more time making their contributions and could return to issues after online sessions and develop or add to them. Our project attracted a great deal of attention. Dr Hugh Miller, from our Faculty of Social Sciences, was researching 'net identity', precisely this creative aspect of invention in the process of writing online. He brought his enquiries to our work and developed ideas and strategies with the students. The Centre for Learning and Teaching became interested as they were in the process of developing teaching resources and new strategies for delivery as a result of which they offered us loads of really old equipment! But they did try to help! And at least they set us up to start scanning and working with more software with the students. They also helped us make a bid to a Staff Release Fund run by Staff Development which allowed me a day a week for a year with a group of three very active and aware graduates who worked with me on learning environment, networks, servers and the design of our web site. We had decided that DD would essentially be a web site which delivered the teaching and learning materials and we really explored the nature of play in cyberspace, linking that with evolving design concepts and to the notion that students really should be able to customise their own online learning environment. Two elements in the design which we felt worked well and appealed to students were using the London Underground map as the basis for the site design of our 'Structuralism and Semiotics' modules and to have little witty animated gifs (such as one of Freud reading in his garden on the navigation page of our 'Psychoanalysis' section and a great image of Elvis on a ground of pink in the Popular Culture area!). We spent months researching different methods of prompting the reader to think: exercises which would reinforce good academic practices such as précising and structured essay writing but also rigorous analytic thinking. We identified many texts that would provide the 'reader' for the project and sketched out the whole of the critical studies modules from year one through to the third year dissertation. At that time this of course was being delivered through the conventional lecture seminar formula but, as the whole staff team became more involved, this had the effect of enhancing the role of critical theory across the course and providing an underpinning. It's also to be hoped that our students did become better at thinking and using concepts as material in their art making. So we continued with our experiments in DD because by then we believed that it was our responsibility to give our students a good 'digital education' in preparation for the world they would be leaving us to enter. Besides which, by this time, we were all nerds anyway and liked playing with computers! Page 1 of 4 Top of Page
| 
Page last modified: by