Voice Annotation of Multimedia Artifacts: Reflective Learning in Distributed Professional Communities

This paper reports on a UK ESRC-funded project studying representations of practice, in video clips and voice annotations, for professional collaborative learning in distributed online environments. The project ran two main studies with learning technology professionals. The key results emerging from this work are that different kinds of video clips were found to offer support for professional development needs. The subjects agreed that watching themselves in video clips was still a relatively novel experience and that using artifacts relating to the practice helped to ‘ground’ or anchor a representation in realistic ways for reflective learning. The studies found video clips and voice annotations could be rapidly created. Speed was seen as a significant benefit, and regarded as more important than creating a polished product, especially in fluid, evolving areas such as the learning technology field.