Episode selection

One of your most important responsibilities as an I-RISE scholar is episode selection. Episode selection is when you identify and share short bits of video within the longer video record that deserve special attention. There are at least three important purposes of episode selection:

1. To make your own intellectual contribution to the data you collect. We don’t bring you here just to run a video camera; we want to know what you think about what you see. Episode selection is a major means of substantive engagement with the data.

2. To give the other I-RISE scholars and directors the opportunity to collaborate with you on what you are observing. Episode selection is how you show other people what you’ve seen. It enables you to have evidence-based discussions of what occurred and get the benefit of each other’s perspectives on it.

3. To give later researchers entry points for investigation. I-RISE scholars produce about 160 hours of video every week (20 hours each). If all of your hours just get shelved, it’s good that they’re there, but later researchers won’t know where to start.

Here are the basic instructions for episode selection:

Find and share a moment where something interesting happens. 

That’s really it. Now I will try to unpack this for you.

"Find" 
You will be observing what’s happening in the class as you videotape, by watching the whole class visually, by listening to your group with headphones, and by taking page after page after page of time-stamped fieldnotes. Some things that you see happen will stand out to you as especially exciting or noteworthy. (If you don’t see anything all that interesting, or if you are not sure, you may be taping the wrong group; consult your director.) In order to find those exciting or noteworthy things in the video record later, write the word “FLAG” in the field notes, along with a short description of what caught your eye. For example, “FLAG: Usefulness of energy” or “FLAG: Tons of gestures.”

It takes a few hours, or overnight, for your video to become available to you. This is because it has to be retrieved from the camera, archived to multiple locations, and converted to an editable format before you can have at it. Write enough in the field notes that you will be able to find your spot in the video later and remember what was so cool about it.

“Share”

There are two crucial forms of sharing in the I-RISE. One is to grab whoever else is around and show them your episode. The other is to post the episode to the blog. Do both of these as much as you can.

“A moment”

In my episode-selection world, a moment is a few minutes. Under five minutes is best. Two minutes is excellent. You are likely to identify longer sequences of interaction that are interesting to you: for example, it might take a group of participants twenty minutes to work out an Energy Theater enactment and you feel like you need the whole thing in order for it to make sense. That’s fine; go ahead and identify that longer sequence, blog about it, and label/archive it for other people to access. You will find, though, that very few of your fellow researchers will be able to collaborate with you on an episode that is more than five minutes. There’s just too much that happens in that long of a video; your viewer will not know what to focus on, and won’t be much use to you in helping you refine your ideas. Try really hard to find a short episode within your longer sequence that is makes your point. Engaging in this effort will help you recognize what point you think this piece of data makes. In other words, it will push you toward claim development.

“Something happens”

An event is something that happens. The time scale of a couple minutes corresponds to a certain kind of event. For example, a learner presents an idea; another participant responds to that idea; multiple learners negotiate a joint understanding. Each of these events could correspond to an episode.

Alternatively, an event could be something that happens on a shorter time scale: someone makes a certain gesture, uses a certain surprising word, stomps her foot, something like that. For these kinds of events, you can make a short episode (perhaps under 30 seconds); or you may find that you still need two minutes to provide context for the quick event.

For each episode that you share, you will need to explain to your audience what you see happening in that episode – the nature of the event.

“Interesting”

This is the word that really seems to worry some people. What does it mean for something to be “interesting”? What kinds of things are interesting? Interesting to who? Here are a few possible answers.

• Your areas of interest. You are a scholar with a unique background and experiences. Those experiences shape what you see when you make observations. For example, a high school teacher might especially notice teaching strategies that instructors use in the class, whereas a graduate researcher with cognitive science background might see evidence of mental models. Please share your perspective with us by selecting episodes that highlight your own interests. 
• Energy Project research themes. We have a number of existing research themes, and we are interested in whatever you might see that contributes to one of those themes. You don’t have to provide episodes that match our themes, but if you see something, we’d love to know. 
• You can’t get it out of your head. If history is any indication, you will probably observe something in class that is compelling to you, maybe even to the point of causing an emotional response. It may get under your skin, in a good way or a bad way. Maybe someone will say something that strikes you as strange or out of character. Maybe people will think of the physics in a way that you’re not sure if it’s right or wrong. Maybe you will see people debating the nature of learning. Maybe there will be uncomfortable argument. Maybe something will happen that you don’t quite know what it was, but something about it won’t let you go. These are often the most wonderfully productive starting points for investigation. Please select these episodes.