---
# System prepended metadata

title: Preparation for avLab's designLab
tags: [av-lab]

---

# Preparation for avLab's designLab
###### tags: `av-lab`
## Details
November 4, 2022 3:30-5:00 PM
Learning Lab, Main Studio
## Objective
* Participants will 1) explore the differences in what and how they are able to communicate information when creating videos that feature either audio or visual content and 2) get practice adjusting how they communicate to different audiences.
* LLUFs will gain useful experience articulating the importance of the work they are doing

## Plan for the lab
* Showing examples and leading a discussion at the start of the workshop
    * What do you think works/doesn't work in the video examples?
    * Why is the type of explainer video where information is explained at different levels of complexity interesting/useful?
    * Why do you think making explainer videos would be useful for undergraduate education?
    * What is useful about the video format of a person talking to the camera (oral-focused)? What do you gain with this format?
    * What is useful about the video format of overhead capture of graphics like paper models (visual-focused)? What do you gain with this format?
* Running the activity
    * There will be four stations creating four different videos.
        * Oral explainer to novice audience
        * Oral explainer to expert audience
        * Visual explainer to novice audience
        * Visual explainer to expert audience
    * What do the two types of explainers entail?
        * Oral = Students speaking directly to a camera
        * Visual = Student has made paper visuals (notecards, models, other props) and is showing them under an overhead camera
    * Who are the audiences?
        * Novice = grade-school age student
        * Expert = faculty member or universty administrator
    * What will they be explaining?
        * Why are video assignments valuable in education?	

## To-do list
* Find examples of explainer videos that demonstrate what we are looking for. Find examples of people explaining topics to different audiences or examples of effective explainers featuring people talking to the camera or utilizing visuals
    * Useful examples:
        * [Neuroscientist Explains One Concept at 5 Levels of Difficulty](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opqIa5Jiwuw&list=PLibNZv5Zd0dyCoQ6f4pdXUFnpAIlKgm3N)
        * [Central Dogma Overhead Camera and Paper Models](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCblY7YoyKA)
        * [Astrophysicist Answers Questions from Twitter (just talking to the camera)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mt3eexuKelg)
* Find materials related to the topic (e.g., articles about the value of graphics in science education).  Copy links to relevant articles here and extract relevant quotes that students might reference when they are talking to the expdert audience
    * Relevant articles:
        * A [tech blog](https://www.techsmith.com/blog/why-visual-communication-matters/#:~:text=Visual%20communication%20saves%20time%20by,than%20text%2Dheavy%20content%20alone.) on why visual communication is useful
        * the old saying, a picture is worth 1000 words: why? 
        * "Design is a political activity." (J. Baldwin, *Visual Communication, from theory to Practice.* 2006) what are the implications of this in academic presentations? Are visuals naturally more persuasive that other mediums? 
        * "for it happens that men's ears are less apt of belief than their eyes" Herodotus,  *Histories*, 1.8. This was written in the 5th century BCE: how has this ancient Greek idea shaped our ideas of perception and knowing (for good and bad), and how might it apply to visual communication? 
        * "Plato thought that true understanding does not come from the senses, but from recollection and rigorous dialectical exercises, which are often impeded by sense perception. Aristotle, by contrast, thought that true understanding must start with the senses." Gregoric, Pavel, and Jakob Leth Fink. *Sense Perception in Aristotle and the Aristotelian Tradition*. Brill, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004506077_003.
        * In language learning, from "Language and Superdiversity" by Jan Blommaert and Ben Rampton in Diversities vol. 13, No. 2, 2011. "This is because meaning is multi­modal, communicated in much more than language alone. People apprehend meaning in gestures, postures, faces, bodies, movements, physical arrangements and the material environment, and in different combinations these constitute contexts shaping the way in which utterances are produced and understood (Goffman 1964; Goodwin 2000; Goodwin 2006; Bezemer & Jew­ itt 2009). This obviously applies to written and technologically mediated communication as well as to speech (Kress & Van Leeuwen 1996), and even when they are alone, people are continu­ ously reading multi­modal signs to make sense of their circumstances, as likely as not drawing on interpretive frameworks with social origins of which they are largely unaware (Leppänen et al. 2009). In fact, with people communicating more and more in varying combinations of oral, writ­ ten, pictorial and ‘design’ modes (going on Face­ book, playing online games, using mobile phones etc), multi­modal analysis is an inevitable empiri­ cal adjustment to contemporary conditions, and we are compelled to move from ‘language’ in the strict sense towards semiosis as our focus of inquiry, and from ‘linguistics’ towards a new sociolinguistically informed semiotics as our dis­ ciplinary space (Scollon & Scollon 2003, 2004; Kress 2009)." www.unesco.org/shs/diversities/vol13/issue2/art1

