In my previous post I mentioned that the new Social Media Law for under 16 year olds had passed in the Australian Parliament and included some information about the law. It’s a good step and is still a year away so there is time for refinement. While the focus of the law is about preventing potential harm caused by social media, I want to use this moment to highlight some of the features inspired by social media that can be adopted in our education multimedia content creations for good reasons.
While one of the topics in this week’s SMOOTHIE is all about social media and the new law that’s being brought in by the Australian Government to ban people from under 16 using a lot of the famous social media tools like Facebook and Snapchat, etc..
Using social media tricks for educational purposes
What I want to do in this section is actually talk about some of the features that are potentially problematic, the things that addict students or keep them coming back and see whether we can use them for education purposes. And I’ve mentioned this in a previous blog post when I’ve spoken about Duolingo’s approach to enticing people to come back and continue learning a foreign language.
One of the things that they use, apart from sending annoying reminders, is the notion of streaks. We want to see whether we can implement streaks in an education setting and what is a streak? Well, that’s the incentive to actually come back within a timely fashion once a day, once every three days to rework or restudy or continue studying. And this can be the same for exercise or education or anything where repetitive behaviour will increase your ability in a particular Area.
Creating streaks is something that’s quite good. Streaks create consistency. And consistency is habit forming or vice versa.
Captions or Subtitles
Another C-word I’d like to bring up is captions. When we’re creating training videos and people are watching them sitting on a bus or sitting sitting somewhere with other people but in their own space, sometimes I’ll watch a video without headphones on, but if the captions are there, they’ll read through the captions. And people do that at home when they’re watching television.
Burning in captions to your videos is something worth doing, especially if they’re short videos. And that’s the other letter I want to talk about. We’ve got streams and streaks. Creating a streak or a repetitive behaviour by putting videos out there, “C” with captions to allow people to actually get the message, even with the volume turned off and the last “S” is short. Keep your video short.
In this particular training session, what I’m going to do is cover off how in Premiere Pro we can create some nice-looking captions automatically from script that we might have recorded using the podcast tool. You can clean that up in the podcast tool and have that as a voice over to your video, as I’ve done in this flying video. And the other thing you can do is keep it short. As I’ve done, even though the flying video goes for well over an hour, I’ve cut that down to just one minute to get a message about barramundi out there. I haven’t got anything to create a streak in this instance, but it’s just an example. And the topics that I have within smoothies form a kind of streak which get you to come back and hopefully subscribe.
I’m trying to get people to come back so they can learn more but do it in a way that takes some of the techniques from social media and hopefully uses them for good.
Sample Video
This video below is the resulting video from the “how to” video steps below that. It is short, has burnt in captions and demonstrates “ducking”. These three things along won’t make you a YouTube star, but it might help you make a video.
This short video is about a passion of mine – flying – combined with a knowledge nugget about barramundi spawning in the land I fly over.
If you like these kinds of videos and stories, feel free to check out my Pilotographer blog.
How I did the edits
Now to the Learnshifting piece where I cover the edits in Premiere Pro to create graphically powerful captions that you burn into your video and also automatically lowering the volume of background music when the voiceover audio plays. This is called “ducking”. (You’ll note I have copied the neon style from Camtasia to use as a model to create the caption style you see above.) You can turn captions on in Vimeo if that is helpful.