technology in asl courses

tuatara

tuatara

pro-water
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Information Technology at Purdue

This is an article about the work of Robin Shay, who teaches ASL at Purdue. She uses an application called Kaltura to give her students more practice and feedback through online videos.
 
While it's a cool idea, I'd find making and posting ASL assignment frustrating. As someone who is into photography, I detest homemade/webcam videos, as their quality is typically quite poor. So I'd have a hard time submitting ASL assignments of myself knowing that it could be better if only I had the right equipment.
 
I feel the same way. It sounds really useful on a practical level, helping students learn more effectively, but I'm pretty sensitive to video quality too.
 
Would thinking of the purpose of making and watching help those that are sensitive to video quality. It is being done for the information it can convey rather than watching it to enjoy a video. I feel I am not stating this very well but hope my idea is coming across.
 
Depends on how/why the quality is bad. Cluttered backgrounds are distracting but I those I can generally ignore. Ironically, those things are often the easiest to correct if the person making the video would just pay attention to their surroundings. Other issues such as poor lighting, ultra wide-angle lens distortion, blurry motion due to frame rate actually make it very difficult understand the info conveyed for someone who's learning ASL.
 
Jane B. said:
Would thinking of the purpose of making and watching help those that are sensitive to video quality. It is being done for the information it can convey rather than watching it to enjoy a video. I feel I am not stating this very well but hope my idea is coming across.
Click to expand...

No, that doesn't help. Not for me anyway. If the distortion is bad, or the motion is blurry, or there's not enough contrast, or even if the person signing has an unpleasant way about them, I can self-talk all I want, but while I'm trying to watch I'm going to get stressed out, tired, headache, etc. To the point where I'm not taking in any information, even if I'm trying. Not worth it. Espeically since there are lots of great sources of high quality video of high quality signing out there.

(Note: I'm talking about bad asl video out there in general. Not necessarily in any way associated with the project I originally posted about.)
 
Gallaudet uses voicethread with blackboard for homework. It is pretty good. It's nice to watch your video and see the teachers reactions and comments at the same time.
 
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