Developing and using videos to learn and reflect
I was always rubbish at practical subjects like Design Technology at school. That became my barometer of whether someone had practical skills – were they able to whittle something out of wood? I was not. I was an introspective thinky boy, which has fed into my perception of myself as an adult.
I found myself reflecting on my childhood education whilst listening to this Squiggly Careers podcast on doing by learning. David Erixon talks about how YouTube videos are powerful moments of learning, and it struck a chord with me.
I'd given up on being a practical guy until I got into cycling. But as I started racking up the miles on my bike, I realised that I couldn't take it into the bike shop everytime something needed a tweak. It was going to get expensive very quickly unless I could learn how to maintain the bike myself. I've learnt and applied so much from channels like GCN Tech, which have saved me a fortune on bike servicing.
Kermit standing on a moving bike
How do we communicate complex learning ideas in video?
We're currently testing some video development processes. We're looking at alternatives to the talking heads approach so that we can create narratives around the application of social care tools in practice.
The GCN videos that have enabled me to index my gears and recondition my brakes are in really simple contexts – the bike either works or it doesn't. In social care it's about hearts and minds. We have to work with people's messy realities and engage with them. This means thinking about how we can bring people with us.
My colleague Phil (who is part of Baobab Theatre) and I have been working on how we can commission or develop better videos. We're thinking in particular around how our resources make people feel. In initial conversations with colleagues, Phil's use of mood boards made it much easier to explain how we want resources to resonate with people.
Influencing practice
Mairi-Anne Macdonald shared this EfratFurst site on making sense of cognitive science and education with me, which breaks learning down into different stages. I find the “making meaning” stage fascinating, where we organise new concepts and connect them to existing ones before we are motivated to apply them. When I'm fixing my bike, I'll compare the setup of my bike to what I'm seeing in the video, bringing that knowledge together with my motivation to have a bike that works.
The learner motivation is a little muddier when there isn't a binary right and wrong. It means that we need a clear idea of what we want learners to achieve through watching our video, so strong learning outcomes and a good treatment is really important. If we know that facts don't change minds, then it’s really important that we tell stories in an engaging way. It's how we bring people with us and align our goals.
Then it becomes about putting things into practice. For the practical YouTube videos, actioning the learning was my rationale for watching them in the first place. But theory can be applied in lots of different ways and in varying conditions. We need to think about how we can prompt people to put the learning into practice and make it a part of what they do. Then it's not just about doing that once, but making it a part of a routine.
There's the reward for the learning and putting it into practice too – that Ikea effect where there is a sense of satisfaction from the practical effort that we put in. We are more likely to feel connected to our learning if it's done with us, not to us, and it makes a practical difference.
An approach that includes these factors is much more likely to influence change. We're on a journey with how we we make use of and work with video. I'm looking forward to seeing how we can apply some of this learning in what we do.