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What is MediaStage?
MediaStage is software for modelling human behaviour. In an early stage of development during 2003, Futurelab collaborated with the developers (Immersive Education) to refine and develop the tool through research with students and teachers. The tool has undergone significant further development following this early research phase and is now available as a commercial product for use in media studies education. The following report describes the prototype as at June 2003, and summarises the findings from Futurelab's research with students and teachers.
Mediastage portrays a three-dimensional virtual television studio with a three-dimensional company of actors and a range of sets and properties. In the test version there were 10 adult actors and about 20 sets. Users first select backdrops, and then arrange the properties and actors as wished. A sophisticated animation of the face occurs when actors are given a voice by a text-to-speech engine or using recordings made by users or others. In addition actors can be given a variety of default behaviours or body languages, for example, affection or aggression. This determines other actions such as walking style. They can also be assigned poses from a large repertoire to provide gesture during a performance. The user also controls ambient light, three spotlights with variable beams and which can be located around the set and made to track specific actions, and three cameras that can also be positioned, panned and zoomed with a combination of mouse and direction keys. MediaStage is open software in that it enables the student to create a scenario and present it as they wish.
What we wanted to find about MediaStage
- What can we do with MediaStage to support exciting and engaging learning?
- How easy is the software to learn?
- How creative could students be using this software?
- What affordances - things that allow you to do things - and barriers are there to their creativity?
- What were student and teachers ideas for improving the software?
- What was the quality of the learning outcomes in using this software?
We wanted to identify strengths and potential in the existing implementation and to identify improvements and directions for further development. The inevitable technical bugs in this test software are not reported here.
Research
The research had three phases:
- A half-day workshop with a group of school teachers.
- One day's intensive planning with a teacher to devise a set of curricular activities.
- A six-week, 12-hour classroom-laboratory in school with 15 Year 8 students.
1. The teacher workshop
Nine secondary school teachers participated: their subjects were English (and media studies), citizenship, and history. They were introduced to the software and then given an opportunity to explore its potential in subject groups. The teachers felt MediaStage would motivate students, in particular:
- Its potential for assisting the development of: empathy, (eg with historical/fictional characters); interpretation (in history and English); decision making; collaboration; planning; reflection; creativity; understanding bias, undersanding change over time; and building confidence.
- Its use as a self-directed tool for students, compensating for shyness through creation of scenarios instead of role-playing.
- Its use as a 'drafting/sketching' resource to enable students to plan out role play.
- Its use as a small-group activity, with groups of students preparing and comparing scenarios.
However, the system flexibility provoked debate in the workshop. History teachers wanted resources (props/characters/photographs) of real individuals to create exact reproductions of events to aid the teaching of specific topics. Whereas English teachers wanted resources that might 'hint' at characters from plays, such as costumes for periods or genres. Both history and English teachers thought the package needed focused content to fulfil its curriculum potential, while media teachers felt it would be better as a fully open-ended tool.
2 & 3. School field work
The fieldwork was conducted with 15 high school students, six male and nine female, in Year 8 (12/13 years old) in a performing arts specialist school in Bristol. Six two-hour sessions were held on consecutive Wednesdays in June/July 2003 in time set aside for voluntary extended activity. The sessions were held in a regular English classroom with five groups of three working around five multimedia workstations. Students were encouraged to consider themselves as co-researchers. Attendance was almost 100%.
Data was gathered about the classroom activity each week and comprised of: student logs, questionnaires, interviews, observation, and the analysis of students' outputs (ie MediaStage performances). As the students were using software at a very early stage in its development bugs had an impact on what they did and it was a significant part of their logs and reporting. However what is clear is that even though there were these problems the interest and motivation in creating with the software meant that the students persevered.
We gave students the task to create a fictional short report that would model a typical insert in an evening TV regional news programme. In preparation for this in Week 1 we introduced the software - a demonstration and some examples; allowed free play and exploration; introduced the genre with a videotape of a current example and discussion; focused students' thinking about the facilities the system supports: camera views shots; interview styles; actor dialogue; body language and poses.
In Week 2 we supported the introduction and planning of the task with templates of shot scripts. Students undertook an exploratory attempt at the problem - seeing what was possible with the actors props and scenery in the test system and making a short rough attempt at the task.
Weeks 3, 4, 5 and 6 were left open-ended to allow students to explore the theme with the system. Although groups had different ideas, there was a great deal of commonality in the issues raised in the use of MediaStage to achieve finished performances at the end of Week 6. The weeks seemed to form a progression from exploration to refinement that one might expect in many creative activities.
There was reason to celebrate in Week 6. Students had become efficient and effective users of MediaStage and coped well with the limitations of an early prototype. They did feel limited by system crashing, and the characters, props and scenes available to them and difficulty with the editor. It was difficult to find the right poses, camera changes happened in counter-intuitive ways (pans rather than cuts), and lighting did not always work as expected.
Observations from trials
Recordings of students activities during the trials produced the following observations:
Producing performances seems to be very straightforward. Student difficulties were in camera setting, lighting setting and most significantly in editing. Students did not welcome much formal front of class intervention - just in time help was preferred. This suggests some online tutorial and walk-throughs would be ideal.
The performances that students created provided evidence of creative thinking. There was a great deal of wit and parody in the pieces the students produced. The major limitations would seem to be a) the time it takes to produce what the students consider a satisfactory performance and b) the difficulty in editing and refining what they have produced.
(CONTINUE...)
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