So, I'm Richard Alley
I'm Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences at Penn State at
University Park.
We're using video in an
advanced undergraduate major course for people who are close to
graduating and moving off into the real world. And it's for a
capstone project where the students get in a group - they get into the
technical literature, learn the real science and then have to synthesize
it and then make it available to someone who hasn't been in the
technical literature - in this case, the other students in the class but next year
or the year after, it could be their boss or it could be their senator.
 
We've you've traditional projects - *sighs* write a term paper,
show a PowerPoint - and it doesn't seem to
engage the students; they don't have much fun with it. And they don't seem
to have the sort of natural ability to use that
to show them what they don't know. Making
the PowerPoint, writing the paper does not show them the gaps in their
understanding in the same way that it would for me when I try to prepare something to
teach. I say *smacks head* "I don't know that." But the video
- they've consumed enough video [that] they know how it should look and how it should 
flow - that when they try to make a video, they find out what they don't
understand and what they need to put in to make the narrative structure work. So I
think it interests them more and I think it's more useful to them
in the learning process.
Some of our students arrive [and] they are ready to make video,
they know what they're doing and some of them - don't like to admit it
 - but they're not. You go to Media Commons [and] in a very short period of time
all [of] the students are up to a level - they can do what's needed, they're all comfortable.
The ones who don't want to admit they don't know it know it. So it really works.
 
I intend to use video
for anything that we're using the students to engage
a lot because it interests them and because it helps them to
tell the story in a useful way.
