In this blog I have included an Image of each question and the results, to help visualise the results. Overall I have had a maximum of 61 participants. Not all of the questions in my my survey were compulsory to answer, this was specifically for questions in the third section to do with participant attributes. Initially I didn’t think it was important for participants to give me their details, as I felt that this survey shouldn’t depend on participant attributes to keep the anonymity strong (I found that having a large number of participants made the anonymity a lot stronger) but after one participant didn’t answer whether they were staff or student I realised, that some attributes are crucial, because it would indicate the life experience of a participant which would influence how they would answer.
I started off with an obvious yet crucial question: ‘Do you watch Video Essays?’ I fount that the results were quite surprising due to the 17 participants saying that they do NOT watch video essays. when seeing this result I immediately scrolled down to the age section (question 15) which confirmed my thoughts of age being a factor in the way we watch video essays.
My Participants consisted of UAL staff and students, naturally there would be a great amount of diversity with the staff and student participants, as well as the age diversity. This lead me to consider the varied platforms they could watch their video essays on, such as Artist Websites, Mubi, and BiliBili (Chau 2010).
This question was formulated when considering the nature certain video essays which can be polemic or academic, some of them even being both. Looking at the results it is evident, that the Polemic video essay that challenges participants beliefs might do better than the academic neutral one (Lange, 2019). I do wonder if that is because the stereotypical association to the word academic might be somewhat dull and boring. But it seems that an overwhelming majority of the participants who watch Video Essays can watch either style dependent on the subject matter. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of subject matters for video essays is too broad a subject to tackle in the short amount of time I currently have for the ARP unit.
However, I want to find out if the Video Essay is considered an engaging teaching method, for which I used a Likert scale to measure participant views. the most popular measurements are level 7 and 8 leaning towards ‘Highly Engaging’ with a draw, beating out the traditional methods.
40% Of participants agreed that both the video imagery and audio is more engaging than face to face teaching due to pre-planning the content and students ability to step back without having to put themselves out there publicly. None the less face to face teaching very much has its place in education, with 60% of participants preferring it. It seems that the video essay would be an effecting asynchronous learning tool.
The video essay is made up of many different components (Keathley et al 2019), these components have been represented on the image below. The most effective component is the the audio clarity with the second most effective being the editing style. Surprisingly, references and video essay duration were the least effective in the participants view, with references also being considered by some as very ineffective. I aim to create my Video Essay, informed by the effectiveness of each component.
For question 7 below I have to admit I am surprised that 5 participants of those that watch video essays would like their video essays to be above 30 minutes. After looking further into the age group it seems like 26-35, 36-45 and 46-55 are the age groups , at first I hade thought that they may have all been staff but out of the 5 there were 3 staff members and 2 students, the students were both aged 26-25. The majority of participants answered 10 minutes and they were people of all ages, staff and students. I will make my Video Essay 10 minutes long.
A vast majority of people said that Video Essays are a viable solution for tackling serious topics like climate change and human rights, as shown below.
The participants that answered no in the question above, explain briefly below that serious subject matters should be an open discussion and Video Essay does not allow for discourse, how ever the people who answered yes, agreed that it allows for a well researched explanation of the arguments for and against.
This is where the second section begins which is about cobalt mining. I needed to introduce this to my participants and this is what I want the Video Essays topic to be about, I wanted to gage their understanding and feeling towards this subject. It seems like from the pie chart below that the 31% are ‘somewhat familiar’, with 36% opting for ‘heard of it but don’t know much’; and 26% percent of Participants saying they are ‘not familiar at all’. Indicating that majority of participants don’t have enough knowledge on this subject matter.
Overall, I think it’s fantastic that majority staff and students are aware about what comprises the technology they use, as indicated below with 70% of participants saying yes. There are still 30% participants that are unaware that cobalt is used in Lithium Ion batteries, thus this information must be included in the final outcome of my video essay.
In this segment I wanted to hear what the participants felt, because I wanted to echo what they felt, from what I had wrote about cobalt mining, and the exploitative labour practices associated just being the tip of the iceberg.
I wanted to know how likely participants would be to listen to any call to action that I might make at the end of the Video Essay.
Furthermore, since the last question and current question is about consumption habits, I wanted participants to feel that making a difference could be as easy as using your current mobile phone model for more than a year.
This third section was about participant attributes, which at first I didn’t even want to include because I felt it didn’t add to my research findings, but I decided that there could be a difference in the way people of varied ages might respond to the short form video essays we consume today which would help me understand motivation and causality (Foddy, 1993).
This ended up being a crucial attribute for me because I ended up measuring video essay durations, platforms and components according to the staff and student category as I think preferences have a lot to do with age and occupation. I didn’t include the gender attribute as I don’t believe it matters for my findings.
In my view, I believed it would be important to know if participants departments also kept them informed of the contents of their rechargeable batteries.
Majority of the participants at a whopping 87% were happy to give feedback on the video essay. I have deduced that essentially my participants want to be informed and then that will help them formulate an opinion
I’m really surprised at the response given below. 55% of participants didn’t want to be interviewed for their views on cobalt mining, whereas 45% were ok with that. I thought that maybe participants would want to have their say on the injustices happening in the world, but then I realised it could also be because they may not know enough to answer in a confident manner. Even in a non high stakes environment participants may not want to be judged or come across as ignorant of global affairs. Participants may also feel that this is a burden for them and have survey fatigue (Dillman et al 2014) as there are 19 questions in the questionnaire, though they are mostly multiple choice and use the Likert scale, it still requires thinking deep to answer with your opinion.
Overall, I have decided not to go ahead with the face to face interviews on participant knowledge on Cobalt mining as one, the participants are anonymous, but also majority of them said they did not want to partake, (and I’d rather not push my participants further if majority didn’t want to further engage. Had the result been different and majority wanted to have an interview on their views on Cobalt Mining, I would have sent out an open call for participants.
Please find the link to the full data in spreadsheet below:
Video Essays, Cobalt Mining and the Ethical use of technology.xlsx
References
Arcadia. (2023) The Rise of Video Essays. Available at:https://www.byarcadia.org/post/the-rise-of-video-essays (Accessed: 12 November 2024).
Chau, C. (2010). YouTube as a participatory culture. New directions for youth development. 2010. 65-74. 10.1002/yd.376.
Dillman, D. A., Smyth, J. D., & Christian, L. M. (2014). Internet, Phone, Mail, and Mixed-Mode Surveys: The Tailored Design Method. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Foddy, W. H. (1993). Constructing questions for interviews and questionnaires: Theory and practice in social research. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511518201
Keathley, C., Mittell, J., & Grant, C. (2019).The videographic essay: criticism in sound and image. Kino Agora. Montreal, CA: Caboose books. ISBN 9781927852118.
Lange, P. G. (2019). Youtube initiation: participating through a camera. in thanks for watching: an anthropological study of video sharing on youtube (pp. 32–68). University Press of Colorado. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv2g5915d.5