Multimedia recording

Multimedia platforms (Source: Holmes8604, goo.gl/JctepT, under CC BY-SA 4.0 licence)

With smartphones and tablets, it is easy to make multimedia recordings consisting of some combination of text, photos, audio, video and animations. This means students can create records of their educational experiences, and even compose initial reflections on those experiences, while they are engaged in learning on field trips, excursions, or in everyday settings. These records can later be revisited, reorganised and reworked, as well as shared and discussed with teachers and peers.

Note that if students are merely passively viewing pre-existing multimedia recordings, ranging from lecture recordings to YouTube videos, this is a very web 1.0 educational approach based on information transmission; it only becomes a web 2.0 educational approach based on (social) constructivism and situated learning at the point when students are asked to create, reflect on, share and discuss their own recordings. In either case, however, it aligns with mobile learning to the extent that the recordings are viewed or created on mobile devices.

One of the earliest techniques involving the creation and sharing of multimedia materials was moblogging, where users could post text, images, audio or video files created on the fly to the web, usually from a mobile phone. Moblog is one example of a moblogging service which is still in operation, with Wikipedia listing other examples. Nowadays, however, moblogging has largely been subsumed into geosocial networking, such as posting multimedia updates to Facebook or Twitter/X from a mobile device, or using mobile-first sharing services such as Foursquare, Instagram and TikTok.

In educational contexts, teachers may ask students to rework their raw recordings into multimodal presentations, possibly within a digital storytelling framework, thus (re-)presenting their materials with the help of web-based or app-based tools. These presentations or stories might be shared on a class platform such as an LMS, and might be preserved in students’ e-portfolios.

Last update: March 2024.