EdTec 775: Internship
An Analysis of Effective and Ineffective Attributes in Flash-Based Educational Media is my favorite of all the assignments I did in the EdTec program. In all honesty it wasn't even a real assignment because nobody ever really "assigned" it to me. Perhaps this is why I take so much pride in it, because it was a completely organic occurrence arising from hours of diligent analysis of hundreds of flash video files and represents something I accomplished on my own accord, not to earn a grade or pass a class, but simply to produce something of value and share what I had learned with the rest of the world.
When I wrote the paper I was in Beijing, China on an internship with Beijing Normal University. My job was a simple one: transcribe into English the text used in various Flash-based educational vignettes that the college was using in conjunction with local schools to teach Chinese students the English language. My contribution to the project would help establish a searchable database for the English teachers to use when planning a lesson for their students. The repetitive nature of the assignment quickly became apparent, and I soon found my life being disproportionately affected by well designed or (more frequently) poorly designed vignettes. The well designed ones were a pleasure to transcribe while the poorly designed examples not only made my task more difficult but also more tedious as I knew I was spending time transcribing something of poor quality that really had no place being used at all. Without really even knowing why, about a third of the way through my task I began to copy into a separate folder those vignettes that were especially notable for either their quality or lack thereof. It wasn't until several days later that the idea really arose to truly investigate what attributes these particular examples exhibited that set them apart from the rest.
I began the paper by reviewing all of the vignettes I had placed in both the "positive" folder and the "negative" folder. Of course, certain properties came to me very quickly as worthy of being noted, specifically those that made it easier for me as a viewer and transcriber to navigate within the file such as navigation bars and user controls over aspects of the vignette. Others I had to delve deeper to find, such as the potential positive effects to be had through a consistent cast of recurring characters in each lesson or the benefits of the word-to-picture property inclusion.
Even more difficult for me to articulate on paper were the negative attributes. Contrary to the positive attributes that I had almost subconsciously been making note of with every viewing, I had never really thought about why it was that certain examples were so ineffective; they simply did not work correctly. After reviewing the various examples I had in my folder though, it became clear that most of what made these examples so poor was a simple lack of positive properties. There were some things that were simply poor design or judgment, such as inconsistencies across the features of the vignette or an utter lack of context that could confuse young learners, but for the most part an ineffective vignette was defined by its lack of positive attributes rather than its inclusion of negative ones.
What makes this assignment so special for me is that it represents everything positive about my experience in the EdTec program. It was spawned in a foreign country where I was attempting to aid in the very transfer of knowledge I had worked on stateside. It arose as an auxiliary work to an important, if somewhat tedious, assignment I had dedicated myself to. Finally, it was an original piece of work done simply for the reason of imparting knowledge that might be beneficial to the education community as a whole.
By participating in an EdTec Internship program in Beijing, I was able to observe and analyze various Flash-based educational vignettes for attributes that both promote and inhibit learning in the hopes of positively affecting the electronic education community as a whole.