Authentic learning through the use of digital video

Abstract

Over the past decade, digital video has developed from an expensive, rather clumsy medium, to a cheaper, user-friendly medium with many capabilities that facilitate learner control. This development has given rise to a host of new applications in education, including the ability of students to capture, edit and generate their own video; a process supported and made viable by the development of clear and easy-to-use video-editing software. As a result, student-generated digital video is now being used in classrooms to support, extend, or change, pedagogy and curriculum outcomes. The project on which this paper is based studied the use of digital video in five schools, to study the ways in which pedagogy was enhanced by this use. One area we examined was how digital video developed authentic learning, and what in fact, this meant. This paper examines teacher and student beliefs about the perceived 'authentic nature' of student-generated digital video tasks and will present sample uses that develop understanding of authentic learning.