Christina Hendricks

An Investigation of Textbook-Style Highlighting for Video

Video is used extensively as an instructional aid within educational contexts such as blended (flipped) courses, self-learning with MOOCs and informal learning through online tutorials. One challenge is providing mechanisms for students to manage their video collection and quickly review or search for content. We provided students with a number of video interface features to establish which they would find most useful for video courses. From this, we designed an interface which uses textbook-style highlighting on a video filmstrip and transcript, both presented adjacent to a video player. This interface was qualitatively evaluated to determine if highlighting works well for saving intervals, and what strategies students use when given both direct video highlighting and the textbased transcript interface. Our participants reported that highlighting is a useful addition to instructional video. The familiar interaction of highlighting text was preferred, with the filmstrip used for intervals with more visual stimuli.

Navigating Between Extremes: A Commentary on Turgeon

In “The Art and Danger of the Question: Its Place Within Philosophy for Children and Its Philosophical History,” Wendy C. Turgeon reviews some of the debates in the literature about how questions should best be used in the practice of engaging young people in philosophical inquiry and provides a background to these debates in the form of a brief summary of some of the ways questions have functioned in the history of Western philosophy. I approached her article as somewhat of a novice in Philosophy for Children (P4C), so I found her account of the role of questions in the P4C literature helpful. In what follows, I provide my own reading of some of the main points of her article and pose two questions that came up for me after reflecting on it. Matthew Lipman (2003), founder of Philosophy for Children, characterized questioning within a community of inquiry as way to step back from what may have previously seemed obviously true and engage in criticism: “To question is to institutionalize and legitimize doubt and to invite critical evaluation. It hints openly of new options and fresh alternatives” (p. 99). I think of such an activity of questioning along the same lines as Michel Foucault, who describes it as a practice of “freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem” (Foucault, 1994/1996a, p. 421). Questioning allows us to take a step back from a particular way of thinking or acting, “[make] things more fragile,” and thereby show that “what appears obvious to us is not at all so obvious” (Foucault, 1988/1996b, p. 412). Further, Lipman also argued that we cannot say, at the beginning of a philosophical inquiry, where it will end; we must follow the argument where it leads us and develop approaches and possible solutions to problems organically. The facilitator of a community of inquiry cannot have in mind at the outset what the answers to questions or problems will be; these, along with new questions, will develop and change as the inquiry proceeds. In this way, new, unexpected questions and answers can further detach us from our previous ways of thinking and acting.