The Learning Potential of Video Sketching

This paper introduces a video sketching technique applied to learning settings and investigates what participants learn from creating and redesigning videos while sketching. This process links various sketching techniques and creative reflection processes to video productions. Traditionally, designers across various disciplines have used sketching as an integrative part of their everyday practice, and sketching has proven to have a multitude of purposes in professional design. The purpose of this paper is to explore what happens when an extra layer of video recording is added during the early sketching phases. Using empirical examples, this paper presents and discusses the video recording of sketching sessions. The empirical data is based on workshop sessions with researchers, students and teachers. Inspired by the work of Olofsson and Sjölén (2007), the sketching sessions were organised into four different phases: investigative, exploratory, explanatory and persuasive. The findings show that adding video to investigative and explorative sketching sessions adds a different time and space dimension, allowing participants to identify and return to crucial moments, such as when one idea spawns a new one or another is rejected. Also, video can make participants very and even too self-aware, though in explanatory and persuasive sessions, this may support participants to use more precise and explicit language. Based on these experiments, four different steps of collaborative video sketching have been identified: shaping, recording, viewing and editing. Combined with the different modes, these steps constitute the basis of our video sketching framework. This framework has been used as a tool for redesigning learning activities. It suggests new scenarios to include in future research using the setups presented in the two cases in this paper. Thus, the video sketching framework is to be viewed as a dynamic framework that is open for further exploration.
Keywords: video sketching, learning, reflection, technologically enhanced learning, creativity