DIVER video tool meets film studies education

After 30 years, Stanford University communications professor Henry Breitrose decided to try something new.    Though he had relied on traditional essay and multiple-choice tests to evaluate his film students, he recognized that the very nature of film studies is dynamic and multi-media, so a written test cannot completely do justice to the topic.

But with DIVER, the SCIL-created digital video software that allows users to easily and precisely refer to specific spatial and time segments of a video, and then evaluate and annotate any video, film students could potentially demonstrate their knowledge in a much more meaningful way. The marriage between the software and Breitrose's desire to best assess his students' grasp of the course material has emerged into a successful new teaching and learning experiment.

It was last winter quarter when Breitrose began working with SCIL director and DIVER principal investigator Roy Pea and SCIL senior software engineer Joe Rosen to explore how to better utilize digital multimedia in his film criticism classes. Breitrose's undergraduate film studies course provided the platform to test the premise that students could better display their knowledge of film by utilizing the tool. While two-thirds of the students took their mid-term in a traditional blue book, 13 classmates were tested using DIVER, which stands for Digital Interactive Video Exploration & Reflection.

The midterm required students to watch portions of three films: "Bridge on the River Kwai," Goddard's "Breathless," and Milos Foreman's "Fireman's Ball." They were then asked to use the desktop version of DIVER to answer questions comparing excerpts and using specific scenes as examples to make their arguments.

The students' completed works, including the clips they had chosen and their responses to the test questions were then uploaded to the WebDIVER computer server where Professor Breitrose reviewed them and performed his grading via the Internet. When the grading was complete, students could log into the same web pages to see their professor's commentary and their grades.

The experiment was successful enough that Breitrose decided to try it again in fall of 2004 with a homework assignment for his graduate seminar in film criticism. This time there was no downloading, and streaming video brought a seamless quality to the process.

The assignment required students to compare the Olivier 1943 and Branagh 1989 versions of the same speech, each performed in a different version of the film "Henry V."  

In responding to written questions, film students must first describe a scene before delving into their analysis of the content. As a result, speculates Rosen, they often use up valuable time on unimportant information and focus less on the film analysis. But with DIVER, they could simply point to specific parts of a movie clip with the "virtual camera," then write their comments and notes adjacent to the clip in the DIVER worksheet representing their 'dive' on the video.

"With just a brief online tutorial in how to use the tool, they were off and running," says Rosen, who helped set up the research project along with Professors Breitrose and Pea.

Breitrose accessed the students' online worksheets from his office or home via computer. After viewing the clips the students chose and reading their answers to the questions he had posed, he could add his own comments in a space provided next to each entry. While the process admittedly took longer than reading and grading written tests, it was well worth the investment, says Breitrose.

"DIVER enabled the students to be highly specific in their discussion of what was happening on the screen," he says. "With literature, one can always quote from the text, but this has been impossible to do with films. Most of the time, we rely on our imperfect memories, and discussions occur at a very general level. DIVER literally allows students to quote video like text, and to support their assertions and correct their memories with precise references in space and time."

Another related study involves KiddieDIVER, an application that is being tested at Bing Nursery School on campus. School of Education Ph.D. students Robb Lindgren and Lori Takeuchi employ the modified kid-friendly version of DIVER to explore its use with preschoolers. KiddieDiver may provide a new way of actively engaging children's minds with video for storytelling, and eventually replace passive viewing of video.

"The core concept behind DIVER is how do you see and how do you communicate that to someone else," Rosen explains. "This is research that uses technology to enhance the teaching and learning experience."

As Roy Pea observes about his team's development of DIVER, "When video is at the heart of inquiry as in film studies, we can see very clearly the value of providing a method for anyone to simply express their point of view on a particular segment of video."

For more information on DIVER visit: http://diver.stanford.edu/

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