On the value of posters, elevator pitches, short movies and other restrictive formats

Today I had a meeting with Carol Rutter and Susan Brock of the CAPITAL Centre (Creativity and Performance in Teaching and Learning). I will be working in CAPITAL on the Open Space Learning project, starting in September. But today we were discussing another linked idea. We would like to set up a online video-based journal of academic and creative performance work by students and teachers. It will be a means for showcasing good work from across the whole university. It will also help us to evaluate and communicate methods for using performance in learning and teaching. For the students, it will give them the opportunity for their work to appear in a peer-reviewed online publication.

We discussed the three necessary components of the project:

1. Designing the online "container" for the journal, which needs to be easy to maintain but visually impressive.
2. Running an editorial process, with various publishing "zones", leading from simple sharing of work up to full peer reviewed publication in the journal.
3. How students can create good quality videos quickly (in one session) and without constant support.
   

Part 3 is the most difficult. But with the experience I have got from the E-Squad and Media Workshop, and the equipment that I have bought (iMacs, Sanyo Xacti cameras), I believe that I can get the video production process working efficiently.

There's a final issue that we discussed, one that I think is pedagogically very interesting. Carol has taken as her inspiration for this the Version online arts journal, created by the University of California, San Diego. It features:

short-form writing, photography, video and other media work limited to 500 words, five images or 50 seconds in length. UCSD News, March 2009

Does this signify the end of civilisation? A fatal collapse of academic standards? Soundbite academia?

Or perhaps the ultra-short format has benefits that can complement and enhance traditional formats. I've been involved in a couple of initiatives that get students to work in short formats. The Warwick Shootout Competition sees its competitors creating 7 minute creative movies over 24 hours. The results are often brilliant. The students learn the value of efficiency. To succeed they must get inside the minds of the audience and understand how to use cues, symbols and narrative structures to communicate an often complicated idea without belittling it. The genius behind the competition, my former mentor Kay Sanderson, would tell me that the most important part of the writing process is the editing - even when that means losing half of what you write.

A second interesting example is one that seems to be becoming popular in many academic departments: the poster. At Warwick we run an annual poster competition, in which PhD students present an A2 poster explaining their research to a non-specialist audience. I'm always impressed by how much conceptual sophistication they can get into that format without completely overloading it with meaningless jargon (or using 8px type). The winners often have very little text, but rather use great visual design and images. Focus really matters. Understanding and representing process and structure matters. I have been one of the judges. Each student has a short amount of time to complement their poster with a verbal presentation. The students who match a well designed, efficient poster with a confident and well thought out pitch are the ones that win. In my informal conversations with students who have entered the competition, I have discovered how the challenge of creating an efficient and effective visual design helps them to construct and deliver the verbal picth, and consequently to be more confident and coherent in understanding their own research process.

I've also been doing some work on using the writing of "elevator pitches" (80 word long statements) as a collaborative thinking exercise. Last week I taught a 2 hour session to IT professionals on "presenting yourself on the web" and used an elevator pitch activity (preceeded by some mind mapping with Mindmanager) as a way to get them to formulate and express difficult ideas efficiently and without jargon.

So, there's a good pedagogical reason for the format that we are considering for the online video journal. And an interesting example of how "design literacy" can significantly enhance learning.

Robert O'Toole : 18 Jun 2009 12:56 |  Tags: Communications Design Focussed Thinking Implementation |  Comments (3) |  Report a problem