According
to a recent Washington Post article,
TouchCast is the most recent milestone in the march of technology into the
classroom. In a timeline starting with
Apple II in 1977 and culminating with TouchCast’s debut last year, the authors
trace how computers have changed education. TouchCast shares the timeline with
Texas Instrument calculators, the internet, interactive whiteboards, YouTube
and distance education programs. Does
TouchCast deserve to be in this exalted company? Will it revolutionize teaching or is it
simply one of many offerings listed in iTunes or on techno-bloggers’ lists of
the next new thing?
When
founders Erick Schonfeld and Edo Segal launched the iPad app in 2013, they
quickly saw the educational market as a “big use case,” according TechCrunch’s Anthony Ha. In fact, TouchCast sees itself as the leading
edge of a wave that eventually will make TV as interactive as the web, a point Segal
made in a CNBC interview in 2013. “We expect the consumers will be doing a
lot of touching. They are expecting to touch every screen they see
these days.” Since touchable interactivity will be the future of broadcasting, TouchCast
is an early step in this revolution (Sorkin, 2013).
What
it does
For the
present, however, TouchCast is a simple tool for making video with interactive
elements including embedded web content.
With a fairly simple interface and with its initial positioning as an
iPad app, the software does allow less tech savvy users a quick way to produce
fairly impressive content. Genevieve Pacada,
Technology Teacher Advisor at Berryessa Union Elementary, was excited
about the possibilities for student digital portfolios as well as another
possibility. “What if teachers used these interactive videos to do flipped
learning in the classroom?” (Pacada,
2013) Another educator, Linda Braun from
the School Library Journal, was also
enthusiastic, calling it “a versatile app that produces highly engaging
presentations” (Braun, 2013).
TouchCast
offers the video creation capabilities with valuable presentation capabilities
for teachers, but because of the larger goals of its developers, it is largely
inextricable from the TouchCast website.
This becomes obvious from the outset.
It is also annoying because the site is not at all user-friendly. Saving, sharing and even searching the saved
videos all involves hard work. The app
itself, available for iPad and Windows, is free and easy to download, but the
user must register for an account, and after logging in, faces a choice between
“cast side,” or video creation, and the “touch side,” where shared content is
stored.
To create a video, however,
the user touches the “cast side” tab and arrives at a screen with a selection
of templates. Each of these has a pre-selected title and embedded sidebar, or vApp.
These vApps can be a website, Google map, Facebook page, Twitter feed, or
elements that one creates for insertion, such as a question, quote, list,
etc. When vApps are added to a screen,
they show up as movable, resizable sidebars, manipulable before or during the
recording of the video. Besides titles
and vApps, TouchCast also offers a whiteboard feature with several backgrounds,
including whiteboard, chalkboard, grid, or glass, where writing or drawing
appears in front of the speaker’s face. One of the more impressive features of
the app is the inclusion of a teleprompter so that the video creator can speak
from a script. While recording, one can
touch buttons to add and remove elements, or use a finger to move, write or
otherwise manipulate elements. After
recording, the user can decide whether to save or re-record. Nothing can be added or edited after a
recording session is completed. The video is saved into TouchCast archives
accessible by viewers from the “Touch side”.
All vApps have live links with which viewers can interact during
playback.
Limitations
Although
the program can be fun to play with there are some significant
limitations. The most significant is the
length. Videos cannot exceed five
minutes. Furthermore, the account only
allows 60 minutes of video storage. To
save videos to one’s own hard drive seems like a solution, but users complained
that videos can’t be added to the iPad camera roll or computer hard drive
(“Worst Reviews, 2014). Actually, the
program offers a “save as” option, but the resulting video lacks live links for
interactive features (“TouchCast: Introducing”, n.d.). Another major limitation is that there is no
way to edit after recording. The viewer has to touch interface buttons to add
in all the content while recording. This
was a problem mentioned by reviewers. “It's
kind of like a juggling act having to speak into the camera while pulling up
various media pages onto the screen” (Pacada, 2013). Another problem involves the difficulty of
adding music. Overall, the app is easy
to use, but perhaps not immediately intuitive; both Braun and Pacada mentioned
challenges with getting used to it. Some
users also mentioned problems with the app crashing or not saving (“Worst
Reviews, 2014), and, in fact, I did have one brief instance of this. The table below summarizes what the app can
and cannot do.
Can do
|
Can’t do (at least not easily)
|
·
Record video from iPad camera (or webcam)
|
·
Edit video after recording
|
·
Embed web content in movable, resizable windows
|
·
Add background audio, like music
|
·
Add image files (movable, scalable)
|
·
Record more than 5 minutes
|
·
Add simple lists, interactive quizzes or questions
|
·
Import Power Point presentations to talk about
|
·
Users can interact with pull-out content during playback
if within TouchCast system
|
·
Record in more than one session or add to existing recording
|
·
Upload videos to Youtube (non-interactive) or share them
|
·
Directly save in conventional video formatting
|
·
Use screen as whiteboard
|
|
·
Replace background with green screen feature (on iPad)
|
|
·
Use teleprompter to record lectures smoothly
|
|
·
Add sound effects (gimmick, mostly)
|
Since
TouchCast is a free tool with a simple interface, it is an appealing addition
to an educator’s toolkit for producing short lessons or student
presentations. I can imagine using it in
several of my courses. For example, I
might use the whiteboard feature for illustrating sentence diagramming, which I
use as graphic organizers for sentence analysis in my grammar and linguistics
class. True, for video capture of web content, other desktop alternatives
exist, such as Ezvid, Camstudio, Jing, Debut, and Camtasia. Some, like Debut for example,
combines both the capability of screen capture and recording from the web cam. TouchCast holds the advantage, though, in mixing
web content with face video, especially since all web content is interactive
within the video. Likewise, there are other
iPad apps with video and whiteboard functionality, but none combines both.
Concerns
For a
reflective educator, though, TouchCast touches on larger concerns. Technology is
always tangled with ideology, and often students and instructors fail to notice
the ways in which they are carrying these embedded assumptions into their own
rhetoric (DePew). TouchCast does imply a
certain view of education. Although an
assignment like a multimodal self-introduction on TouchCast might facilitate
community, generally videos only offer a tool for delivering content. In other words, TouchCast still buys into a banking
model of learning with methods that “clearly privilege the instructor’s
knowledge and evaluation” (DePew & Lettner-Rust, 2009, p. 174). Although
TouchCast was not developed for education per se, the developers’ commitment to
education is evident. But what is being
offered is a presentational technology. Cook (2005) warned that presentational
technologies discourage discussion in the classroom. Online, these technologies deliver
information, but “interruptions and questions require different delivery
technology” (p. 58). By adding in the
question and the quiz VApps, the TouchCast developers may imagine that positive
interruption has occurred, but in fact that is not the case. The interruption occurs where the presenter
placed it, not necessarily where the learner finds it salient or helpful, and
the canned format precludes real thinking.
With only pre-selected answer choices, the interaction reinforces rather
than relieves the power imbalance between presenter and user. In fact, the video presenter may become
little more than a tour guide for web content.
This places the web, too, in a position of power, particularly for a
student presenter attracted to VApps that pull in web content. It is the strongest affordance of the
product, and the web is a virtual candy shop of content. Why produce your own content when you can
grab and go? This leads to intellectual
property questions. It is easy to pull
up content; it is difficult to credit it.
The
banking model of learning also privileges information over understanding, a
problem exacerbated by nearly all contemporary media.
Since TouchCasts never exceed five minutes, they offer little
time for developed arguments to emerge.
In this sense, it offers something of the “now…this…” problem that Neil
Postman (1985) talked about in reference to television news, where serious
matters are trivialized by being presented in short and disconnected segments. Since TouchCast packages content into small
bites, it may exacerbate this fragmented view of knowledge, already worsened by
the click and skim of the online experience.
The software assumes an ever-shifting array of sound bites and imagery,
an electronic show-and-tell with bells and whistles. Like in the web where hyperlinks often serve
to interrupt rather than extend the discourse, embedded content in a TouchCast is
unlikely to lead to a deeper engagement with the topic. Far more likely, it may simply provide a
place to play by the wayside. As Cook (2005) notes, “Transitions from one
predominant learning technology to another have often accompanied and
frequently required changes in learning theories, practices, and activities” (p.
54). It may be that as more and more
technology offers the possibility of dumping in content that is touchable and
shifting, educators and learners may come to believe that learning demands
this, that without visual action, learning does not take place. As Nicholas Carr (2010) warns, deeper reading
and reflective thinking could be a casualty.
Some
teachers see the multimodal features and simple interface of TouchCast as an
opportunity for students to improve rhetorical awareness. One education review claims that the software
fosters this by stimulating students “to choose the effects wisely and only add
apps and content that enhance their presentations” (“TouchCast: Cool,” 2014). Certainly,
finding ways to resize a topic to fit the five-minute package could be a useful
cognitive challenge. By allowing the
manipulation of familiar content such as Facebook, Google maps and Twitter
feeds, the software requires students to remediate. However, does this automatically result in
rhetorical reflection? Within composition, the appeal of digital and
multimodal tools has sometimes led teachers to deemphasize writing, a danger
that the CCCC committee on online writing warns against (“A Position
Statement,” 2013). Reviewing a recent work on multimodal literacies, Elizabeth
Wardle also addresses this concern, where some teachers see writing “as a
flexible process that is always already multimodal; thus our task as teachers
is to help students gain rhetorical dexterity in responding to a variety of
complex, changing rhetorical situations,” while others may regard writing as “passé;
the world is requiring less and less traditional textual communication; thus
our task in composition classes is to engage students in entertaining or novel
uses of technology and multimodality for their own sake” (p. 664). All multimodal tools offer both rhetorical
opportunity and risk. Since TouchCast
offers a quick and easy way to build a video with impressive interactivity, it
will remain an appealing tool for educators. Nevertheless, educators need to be
aware of the implications of its limitations, both in terms of functionality
and philosophy.
References
A Position
Statement of Principles and Example Effective Practices for Online Writing
Instruction. (2013). Conference on
College Composition and Communication. Retrieved from: http://www.ncte.org/cccc/resources/positions/owiprinciples
Braun, L.W.
(2013, November 13). SLJ reviews TouchCast video creation app for iPad. The Digital Shift. Retrieved from: http://www.thedigitalshift.com/2013/11/opinion/test-drive/slj-reviews-video-creation-app-touchcast-feature-rich-ipad-platform-creating-studio-quality-productions-test-drive/
Carr, N. G.
(2010). The shallows: What the
Internet is doing to our brains. New York: W.W. Norton.
Coburn, D. and
Tobey, K.M. (2014, May 19). From Apple II to
Touchcast, the evolution of computers in the classroom. The Washington Post. Retrieved from:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2014/05/19/from-apple-ii-to-touchcast-the-evolution-of-computers-in-the-classroom/
Cook, K.C.
(2005). An argument for pedagogy-driven online education. In K.C. Cook & K.
Grant-Davie (Eds.), Online Education: Global Questions, Local Answers. Farmingdale, NY: Baywood.
DePew, K.E.
Preparing instructors and students for the rhetoricity of OWI technologies. In
B.L. Hewett & K.E. DePew (Eds.), Foundational
Practices of Online Writing Instruction. Unpublished manuscript.
DePew, K.E.
& Lettner-Rust, H. (2009). Mediating power: Distance learning interfaces,
classroom epistemology, and the gaze. Computers
and Composition, 26(3),
174-189. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2009.05.002
Ha, A. (2013,
December 4). TouchCast brings its interactive video tools to PCs. TechCrunch. Retrieved from:
http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/04/touchcast-pcs/
Pacada, G. (2013, July 25). TouchCast:
Reviews. Edshelf. Retrieved from: https://edshelf.com/tool/touchcast
Postman, N. (1985). Amusing ourselves
to death: Public discourse in the age of show business. New York: Viking.
Sorkin, A.R. (anchor). (2013, July 9).
How TouchCast plans
to disrupt TV watching.
Squawk Box. Retrieved from: http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000181566&play=1
TouchCast: Cool tool takes videos to
next level, but some privacy concerns. (2014). Graphite. Common Sense Media. Retrieved from:
https://www.graphite.org/app/touchcast
Wardle, E. (2014). Review essay:
Considering what it means to teach “composition” in the 21st
century. College
Composition and Communication, 65(4),
659-671. Retrieved from: http://www.ncte.org/cccc/ccc/issues/v65-4
Worst reviews & ratings
for TouchCast. (2014, May 19). Apptweak. Retrieved from: https://www.apptweak.com/touchcast/ipad/united-states/app-store-optimization-aso/reviews-ratings/worst/all-versions/603258418#.U5mFKHJdXh5
No comments:
Post a Comment