Multimedia Courseware for Introductory Child Psychology
Charlotte Patterson, Psychology
1996 TTI Fellow
Email: cjp@virginia.edu
One of the great challenges in teaching psychology is to present examples of human behavior in a realistic way. Short of live examples, the best way to capture the subtlety of human gestures, movements and expressions is with video recordings. Video is especially valuable in the study of child development, since most students have little or no experience with child behavior from which to draw. But with textbooks the use of video is not possible, while in the classroom it is of limited use, since video tape is difficult to edit and move around in.With the aid of the new digital video technologies, such as MPEG, Charlotte Patterson proposes to create an electronic textbook that can be used both inside and outside of the classroom. A distinct advantage of digital video is that it can be edited into separate files so that individual segments can be randomly accessed. This allows one to quickly move from one clip to another, in any order, without having to fast-forward, rewind, change tapes, and stop in the right places. Morever, it is extremely easy to capture still images from video for use in other contexts.With a growing library of digital images, many of which Patterson will create from her own camera, Patterson's electronic textbook will contain many more examples of child behavior than would be possible to include in a traditional textbook. And since the material will be available on the World Wide Web, students will have access to the textbook from any terminal that is connected to the Internet.