Guidelines for Video Research in Education by Derry (Editor)

I've been recently made aware of a little brochure by Sharon J. Derry (Editor), named "Guidelines for Video Research in Education- Recommendations from an Expert Panel."

While I haven't read it in its entirety yet, it seems like an awesome practitioner's guide for video research that is based on the same literature foundations that we use, Erickson, Goodwin, Jordan & Henderson, and so on. Even the practical implementation of recording video in a classroom seems to be very similar to what we are doing. And the technical recommendations are much more up to date (and more specific) than in the Jordan & Henderson paper.

In General, I think this brochure is a worthwhile read for all of us, providing a lot of information from "what equipment to get" to "how to use video in research about learning."

How to use iEtherpad

Normally during the EPSRI, two Scholars at a time act as observers in the classroom, taking field notes.  Two partner-Scholars who also observe that same class are back in the office, thinking, talking, and writing about what they have already observed.  We have developed a system in which the two classroom observers take field notes in a document that is shared online, so that both they and their partner-Scholars back in the office can see what's written.  This system presents both intellectual and technical challenges.  This post addresses the technical issues. The intellectual issues are addressed elsewhere.

We use a free online program called iEtherpad for field notes.  (Returning Scholars:  this is a new system!)  Basically, iEtherpad has a window for a shared, multi-author text document that authors edit together in real time.  There is also a chat window.  Features of this system include:

• The document window updates every half second, so you get to see what other people are typing right away.  
• Each observer's typing appears in a different color, so you can easily see who wrote what.
• Since each observer is normally observing a different person or group, you can easily read the observations of that particular person or group by reading only that color.
• The complete revision history of the document is automatically recorded without anyone having to do anything.  In a separate window, you can slide a slider along a timeline and see what the document looked like at a specific time.  You never lose anything that was ever written; even if someone erases text, it remains in the revision history.  
• Observers need not time-stamp their observations manually, because you can slide to any time you like to see what the document looked like at that time.  However, it will probably still be helpful to insert visible time stamps.
• iEtherpad is free, secure, and has no platform dependencies since it's all online.  (It's based on what Google Wave was going to be.)
• iEtherpad documents are exportable to various formats (pdf, doc, etc)
• There is essentially zero learning curve.  It's obvious how to use it and no one can accidentally screw it up or lose data.

In order to take field notes using iEtherpad, the owner of the appropriate document will invite you by email to access the document.  Access is by invitation only.  There will be a separate document for each day of each class.  

At the beginning of the document, write the name of the observer, the table you're observing, the names of all the people at the table, and who's wearing the microphone, if anyone.  For example: "Sam observing Table 3: Joe, Helen, Mike, Sylvia, Shawn wearing the microphone"

When something interesting happens, such that you will want to look at the video of that later, flag it by typing the word "flag" and a phrase indicating the issue that got your attention.  For example: "flag - inventing a new representation" or "flag, rogerian discourse" or "flag: gesture."  This will make it easy to find later.

If there are two observers observing different tables, each person should keep all their field notes together separate from the other person's notes, as long as the participants are working in small groups and not as whole class.  When the class shifts to whole-class discussion or lecture mode, and both observers are observing the same thing, both should skip down to the bottom of the two sets of small group activity notes and intersperse their comments so that they appear more or less in chronological order. At the beginning of each shift between whole class and small group activity, one or both observers should type in a manual time stamp and the phrase "small group" or "whole class."

There is a chat window, also.  Chats are saved as part of the pad.  In a strange twist, chat is the slowest way to say what you have to say, because it isn't sent until you hit return.  Everything else, the other observers see in half a second.  We are still thinking about the question of what to say in the chat vs. in the document.

Real time field notes

During the EPSRI, classroom observers take field notes to document the events they observe.  The primary purpose of the field notes is to help later researchers locate events in the video record:  text is more easily searched or scanned than video.  Two other purposes of the field notes are to inform other observers of what happened in their class while they were not there, and to provide a journal space for the active observer to record developing thoughts and interpretations of what they see.  There are both technical and intellectual challenges that go with these purposes.  This post addresses the intellectual issues.  The technical issues are addressed elsewhere.

As an observer, your mantra is to write down what you see happening so that other people can find it in the video later.  This sounds straightforward but can be quite difficult in practice.

1. Translating your perceptions of classroom events into text is not so easy.  You're not taking dictation; you're seeing and hearing things happen and trying to quickly capture the essence of what you see and hear in writing.  Some people are able to semi-transcribe parts of what they're hearing, which can be useful, especially if you're hearing something really remarkable.  However, no one can keep this up for long.  Normally it is both more useful and more feasible to concisely summarize what you're seeing and hearing.  I imagine that journalists get good at this kind of writing.

2. You're seeing and hearing a lot.  Interactions are complex events, including talk, gestures, response patterns, etc.  You can't attend to more than a fraction of all this, much less write it down.  What's even more challenging is that your sense of "what's happening" may be informed by, yet removed from, the observable evidence, including things like what you think the instructor means for the learners to be doing and what the learners seem to be understanding as the nature of their shared activity.  It is easy to be overwhelmed by all you are seeing and thinking about, and experience field-note paralysis as a result.

3. The action moves very fast.  Every time you stop to think, you miss a little something.

4. You are documenting classroom events for later researchers whose interests are unknown to you.  Thus, you can't really know what will help them find what they're looking for.  

5. Field notes are interpretive:  they not only document events, they begin to identify what the events may mean.  This is not an extra burden; most likely you won't be able to help yourself.  

6. While you are juggling all of this, your partner-Scholar is observing another group in the same room, and you might want to read about what they are observing.

All of these pressures make the job of taking field notes exhilarating and exhausting.  

Here's an example (from field notes I took myself) that I think illustrates some of the above issues.  I was observing a class of secondary teachers who were performing energy theater (called "ET" once here) for each other.  The scenario they were modeling was a car driving on a road.  SV is Stamatis Vokos; all the other names are of participating teachers.

Second group (Amina's group) has energy going into and then out of the road.  1:44 Nina has lots of questions about their theater.  1:48 I am having trouble following the content of the conversation BUT it is really apparent to me that they are working the hell out of the ET representation.  They are taking it seriously as a model, asking questions about the details.  1:49 SV: "What I just saw Janel do here is I will take this seriously enough to make a modification of something and see where that takes me.  That is the ultimate compliment we can pay to each other. This kind of argument cannot happen very easily when we are only talking with words."  This meta-moment seems like an interruption -- Nina goes right back to asking content questions.  But he's right and it's cool; they are really using the representation for everything it's worth.  1:54 Jim's group:  One object-circle is INSIDE the other.  Eep!  1:56 "The car is on the road," is their explanation for that.  Why isn't anyone calling them on this??  

The above example brings up an issue that we EPSRI directors have discussed extensively, which is the likelihood of the field notes containing material that would not be appropriate for everyone to read.  My excerpt, for example, uses a very colloquial voice and makes at least two comments that critique the participants, or perhaps the instructors (it's not clear who I think should be "calling them on this").  It can get a lot more raw than this; sometimes as an observer I am frustrated, or mystified, or having an epiphany, or feeling critical of a particular person's actions, and that comes through in my notes.  The result is that field notes can't be shared freely.  Our policy in previous years has been that field notes are strictly private and may be accessed only by the observers of that particular class and the EPSRI directors.  If anyone else needs to know when something happened, they ask one of us, and we use the field notes to direct them to useful parts of the video.

I continue to be in favor of this system for two reasons.  The first reason is that I'm not at all sure that I am cognitively capable of producing notes that would be appropriate for wider audiences.  There is already so much going on, I can hardly keep up, and to add in the monitoring and revision that would be required would slow me down a lot.  The second reason is that I think that strong feelings are informative for us as researchers.  Passionate (or snarky!) outbursts are indicators that something is going on that really matters to the speaker.  The Energy Project is a research context in which we have the opportunity (and the burden) of locating our own research questions, and part of your job as an EPSRI Scholar is to articulate your interests and teach them to the rest of us.  I think this happens most effectively when we have a safe place to say what we really think in that moment.

Many qualitative video researchers don't face these challenges because they don't take real-time field notes.  Often, observers are either in the room holding the camera and thus not writing, or are not in the room and thus not observing in real time.  When researchers don't take field notes in real time, part of their later process includes watching the video and writing notes recording the events in it (creating a content log).  This takes more post-EPSRI time than the Energy Project can support, so we rely on real time field notes.  

Cognitively, content logging is a very different process than taking field notes.  One difference is the lack of time pressure: you can stop the video to muse on how best to characterize what's happening.  Another difference is the lack of access to information outside the camera frame -- whatever else may be going on in the real world right then that could inform what's going on.  Thus the content of a content log tends to be pretty different than the content of field notes.