Interviewer: This afternoon, I'm with Eugene Kim in the School of Law. We're going to be talking about electronic feedback, but really, before we get started, Eugene, I'm wondering if you can tell me or tell us a little bit about yourself and what kind of courses you teach, what's your background, what's your place in the School of Law?
Eugene: Sure. I wear a couple of hats at the law school. I am part of the legal writing department. I teach primarily writing classes. First year legal research and writing, which is required for all first year law students in any law school in the country. I also teach an advanced legal writing class, and then some classes that are geared more towards bar preparation. The other hat that I wear is an academic support hat. We call it law plus here, but it's addressing a lot of the sometimes, non-academic sides of learning and coaching, mentoring, and teaching, sometimes how to navigate the law school curriculum and not necessary the substantive piece of it. That's what I do here.
Interviewer: Essentially, how to deal with Rhonda Magee?
Eugene: No, dealing with Rhonda Magee is never the problem. It's never the problem, but I sort of fell into this. I came to law school here at USF, I guess about 10 years ago. It was a second career for me. I worked in software and then I fancied myself a musician for a little while, so I did that too, but then I was interested in law school, came here. After law school, I practiced for a while at a firm here in San Francisco. I clerked for a while as well, but during law school, I had an opportunity to tutor, actually, through this Academic Support Program. I just fell in love with working with students and providing them with guidance and coaching and things like that.
There was an opportunity for me to come back and teach and I took it and I love it. I can't imagine doing anything else.
Interviewer: Fantastic. Well, I know you do several interesting things, most of which we won't get to today. I know from previous experience with you that one of the things that you do with your students is, in your writing classes, they write a lot, but the way you give feedback is not just what I think a lot of people do is give written notes back in various forms, but you give them a special kind of electronic feedback. I'll just call it that for right now. I'll let you explain it more, but I'd like to just get a sense of the whole arc of why you do that. Could you tell us the bare bones of what you're doing with this electronic feedback?
Perhaps more importantly, why you started doing it the way you do it now versus whatever you were doing before? The more standard ways of doing it?
Eugene: Yes. This video feedback that I provide for the students, because it's not just-- Well, it is electronic, but what I'm doing is trying to simulate what it would be like for the student to sit in the office with me.
Interviewer: As you're reading their paper?
Eugene: As I'm reading the paper and making notes on the paper and my thought process, so I talk aloud in these videos. The only part that I can't simulate is having a student asked me questions in real time, but what I do is when the students submit a paper, I convert it to a PDF, and then I put it up on the screen and I use a little tablet that allows me to mark up the paper and using different color of highlighters and different color of pens and making notes to myself in the margin. I say notes to myself. It's notes to the students, but I'm explaining as I go. The students, they see on the screen and this all gets published into a video that they can watch.
On the screen, they will see the actual piece of the paper that I'm commenting on, that I'm marking up, and they hear my voice explaining why I'm marking them. Why I'm circling this one word here, drawing an arrow there, putting a question mark and hearing the concerns that I have, and then also sometimes validation too, saying, "This is exactly what I'm looking for. Let me bracket this little piece here. I want to see more of this," and explaining why. The reason I started doing that was because I felt that there were certain lessons that were being left on the table, so to speak. I would use the traditional form of written feedback for my students.
I spent a lot of time doing it, I write it as clearly as I thought I could, but students were still sometimes not understanding some of the lessons that I was trying to teach on the feedback. What I found was that they come into my office hours and when I'd explain using examples, and sometimes just the fact that we were sitting face-to-face and talking made it easier for them to understand certain concepts. Part of it also is no matter how clearly I think I'm writing some of these comments, they may not be interpreting them in the way that I think they should be interpreting them.
There are certain things that even as a writing teacher, there are certain things that are just easier to do in spoken word. I gave that a try last year, and for the first time last year, all of my feedback was in this form. The students, they loved it. They thought it was so different, so interesting. There are all these little side benefits that I didn't even anticipate. One of them was, giving constructive feedback by its nature often requires you to offer some constructive criticisms. Those things can be really hard to take some time for someone who has spent a lot of time and energy writing and crafting what they think is the perfect sentence or paragraph.
I can use my voice to deliver that constructive criticism in a way that really makes clear, "We're all working towards a common goal of improving your writing. This is not me evaluating you and saying that you did something poorly and this is just wrong, but rather explain using my inflection. Now, I'm a little unclear what you mean by this here because this could mean X or it could mean Y, and we need to make sure we eliminate that kind of ambiguity."
Interviewer: That's so often missing in the written word.
Eugene: Despite our best efforts, it is often missing.
Interviewer: It's a great point.
Eugene: There are all these techniques that we've all learned about, like you start with a positive comment and then you sandwich the critical feedback. Sometimes, quite frankly, I'm grasping for some of these positive things to put on either end and at least they may even sometimes plays sound or read, I should say, disingenuous. I'm about to comment on grammar and I say, "Great job on using the correct font. You do want to make sure that every sentence has a verb." Just to give a silly example, but if I read the sentence aloud, and I say, "Hmm," and I read the sentence aloud again, and I say, "Do you mean?" I read the sentence again, a third way, but just adding another word. "Is that what you mean?"
That conveys to the writer, "Hey, this sentence doesn't say exactly what I think it says. Maybe I need to adjust that."
I haven't had to put a question mark in grammar or anything like that, the students are able to get that message. I actually had several students tell me, "Hey, generally, I'm a little bit self-conscious about my writing. It was never something that I thought was a strong suit of mine. I really appreciate the way that you've not approach this with a slashing red pen, that you've been very constructive."
Now, I always thought that I was being constructive in my written feedback also, but I never got that kind of feedback from my students telling me, "Boy, you were just so nice about the way you gave me this constructive criticism." That's one fringe benefit. Another thing that I found is because of the way that I publish these video feedback, these recordings from my students, I'm able to track what the students have actually been watching in these videos. What I mean is, if I were to write out comments and hand it back to the student, there's really no way for me to know whether the student even bothered to look at my feedback.
Through the program that I published these videos, I'm able to track, did the student even watch the video? When did the student watch the video, which is sometimes very helpful when I find that they're making the same mistake on a later assignment, and then I could say, "Oh, well, you haven't looked at my feedback from the previous assignment where you made that same mistake." I can also see if there's a certain part of the video that they're watching over and over again. I can see, "Oh, that was the third part of the video when I was really commenting on sentence style and structure. That's the piece that this student is either more interested in or perhaps struggling with a little bit more."
I can then, in office hours, have a little bit more of a tailored discussion with that student saying, "I noticed that you seem to be a little confused about this last piece here. Maybe we should talk about that a little bit." Or I can incorporate that in my lessons, if I see that all of the students are really focusing on this first part, when we're talking about the substance, I can devote a part of my class time to give global comments about that. There are all these little side benefits to this that I'm learning as I go.
Interviewer: I'm going to back away and get just a few mechanics from you from what you're describing, because there's a part of what you're describing that I think most people if they heard this would go, "Oh my gosh, this is crazy." Typically, I know it varies a little bit, but how many students do you have and when are your classes?
Eugene: On average, 20 per section. I typically teach two sections a year, that means at any given time, I'm grading 40 memos, legal memos.
Interviewer: About how often are they turning in a written assignment that you're going to then give feedback on?
Eugene: It does depend, but in general every three weeks or so, they'll have a full life memo that they will submit to me, and then I'll need a week or two to turn around the feedback to them. There should be time for them to then incorporate their feedback on the next memo that they're working on.
Interviewer: Because many people listening to this may not be from the legal community. For me a memo is remember to buy milk today. In your jargon, I don't think it means that. Mechanically, what goes into a memo in terms of the kind of length and quality of writing?
Eugene: The quality should of course always be excellent but the length varies depending on the question that's asked. It's a formal legal analysis of a legal question. There's always some question and it could be as simple as, is my client guilty in this case? What are the possible defenses that the opposing party may raise and are they viable and how can we prepare for them?
A legal memo involves identifying very clearly what that issue is, what the legal issue is, and then researching the relevant law so you can find out what the answer should be and then applying that law to the facts, and these are hypothetical's, but applying the law to those facts and then reaching some conclusion about, "Well, this is what the likely outcome would be. If this issue were to go to a court, the court would have to decide what the correct answer is. This is what the likely outcome would be and here's why." It's the why that's so critical because we can't read the future. We don't know what's going to happen but it can be really valuable to understand what the logic is behind it that will then guide the next step in the litigation process. It'll guide sometimes whether you decide to settle the case versus pursue trial.
These memos are full life memos that I typically give near the latter half of the semester in the latter half of the semester will be 10, 12 pages, double spaced. It isn't that much text necessarily but the work that goes into it is pretty significant and the language crafting is pretty significant.
Interviewer: It sounds like there's no room for dillydallying.
Eugene: There isn't. In fact, one of the first lessons that we work on in the first year of law school is writing in plain English. There's this misconception that lawyers use legalese and all this jargon here to fore and all that but really that kind of thing tends to just interfere with the goal of legal writing, which is to communicate this is what the legal analysis is. A lot of my feedback in these video recordings is also, "I understand what you mean here, but could we say this more clearly so that a busy judge, a busy partner, a client who isn't as familiar with the legal jargon can understand what you mean."
Again, if I read the sentence without taking a breath, sometimes that's enough to get the point across. If I read this whole sentence and I don't stop without taking a breath, taking a breath and then I can say, "I think you understand the point that I'm making here." This is not an easy sentence to deconstruct and figure out what you mean. How could we write this in just plain English so that the reader actually understands what you're talking about?
Interviewer: Fantastic. Now to build this up, I think a faculty member listening to this go, okay, so, I'm just going to make up some numbers, but you have about 20 people in the class, and let's say they've all turned in more or less 12-page papers. I think in the imagination of many faculty is growing and you're going to create a video of the feedback that's going to take you freaking until 2017. In reality, how long does it take you, more or less? I know it changes, but more or less per student.
Eugene: Per student, if I'm really on my game and I'm focused, so if I'm making sure that I'm not trying to do 10 memos in one sitting, it'll take me at least an hour for each one. In the beginning, it took me longer. Closer to two hours for each memo.
Interviewer: Was that because of the feedback or because of getting used to the technology or both?
Eugene: A little of both, but it didn't take too long for me to get used to the technology. After a while, I just forget that I'm recording something. I'm just talking aloud and pretending that the student is in the room with me. The thing to keep in mind is that it was taking me about that long to write out my comments anyway because I couldn't just get away with writing a word or two or a phrase in the way that I can now. Because now I write out a phrase just to let the student know what I'm talking about. PE, Plain English, and then I can make a comment or a little joke about how this would be a little bit easier to understand if it were in plain English.
If I were writing it out? I could just write PE, plain English, but I'd have to identify this is the part that doesn't really make sense. This is the part that you should be spelling a little bit more clearly. Wouldn't it be better if you wrote it in this way?
One of the problems with being a writing teacher is you need to make sure that when you write, it's clear also. I don't have to spend time thinking about what's the best way to articulate this so that the student understands so that it's true to the message that I'm trying to convey and so that my hand doesn't cramp up. If it's too long, it's going to take me forever or I'm literally going to run out of space on the page to write these margin comments or end comments.
After I got used to the technology, it wasn't taking me that much longer. It did still take me a little longer, but the reason it continued to take a little bit longer was because I had more time to now be able to give feedback on things that I wouldn't be able to include before I would have. When I'm writing physically I felt the need to triage. I just can't cover this page literally with my pencil scrawl. It will make it too hard for the student to pick out what the most important comments are. They may not be able to read their own writing by the time I'm done scribbling all over it and my hand would just get tired.
I used to do, you know, comments in Microsoft word using track changes or things like that but that has its own problems too. After a while, it's still kind of hard to read and figure out what the most important comments were. Here I'm able to indulge some of these other comments that I wouldn't have been able to make using traditional feedback methods.
Interviewer: It's very interesting to me what you're saying because if there's another faculty member who would usually spend 15 minutes or 20 minutes per student on the assignment, doesn't matter what the assignment is and how long it is, part of the story that's coming across is you could be giving this kind of video feedback still in basically the same timeline. It doesn't have to take a lot longer.
Now I still want to leave the technology to the side for the moment. I guess the bottom line would be since you started doing this, you've gotten really good feedback from your students that they enjoy it, which I can easily imagine because it's like having a personal coach, right? That's with you?
Eugene: It can feel like that. Yes.
Interviewer: Except for the personal coach you can't listen to them. You can't say, could you just repeat that again, and could you just repeat that again? For certain things, you're able to repeat without feeling guilty or bad or anything as a student. Now let's go to the other end so I can understand why the students would feel better. Have you noticed that in the end of the semester that the actual student writing seems to be better or what seems to have changed in terms of their actual, I can see the process for you and I can see the process for them is better, but at the end of the day, what seems to have changed in terms of their bottom line?
Eugene: I think what changes is not so much from my limited experience with this. It's not so much that the end product that they're then delivering to me at the end of the semester, at the end of the year is so much better, but the process was so much more enjoyable for many of the students as they've explained it to me. What I've observed also, whether they say it to me explicitly or not, they seemed to be taking on an approach of how they can develop and how they can make this a skill that they want to get better at instead of, "Well, these are things that he's giving me comments on and so I want to make sure that he doesn't give me those comments again."
I wish that there, you know, that they were suddenly turning in these great memos that were just perfect and they could all just go and be practicing attorneys right off the bat after one semester of law school. That isn't really the case but it does seem to be a lot less stressful for them when we're talking about particular issues. Because I think I've eliminated for many of the students is this extra step of, "Okay, well, I've done the work, I've received the feedback and now I can apply it." Before there was also this extra step of, "Did I understand his feedback? Am I doing the wrong thing here? He wrote a couple of comments and assuming that I could read his handwriting, I think what he meant was that I should do this. I guess I'll just give it a try and see whether that's right or not."
Because there's a little bit more of a conversational style now to this feedback for many of the students, not for all of them, and it depends on the concept and depends on the student, but for many of the students there's more of a, "Oh, I see. Okay." Then they can then just focus on implementing that as opposed to, "I'm not even sure I understand exactly what you're trying to tell me with this phrase that you've written here in the margins. 
Interviewer: I'm surmising or I'm guessing because we don't really know, but based on what you're telling me, I would guess that in addition to it being more enjoyable, because right now you don't know if it's more effective in terms of their final. They're still doing whatever job they did before, they're more or less doing the same hopefully.
It's a good job but what might be going on in the background as you're describing to me is that for them the process may be much more efficient, less worry time, more hair on their head at the end of the semester and just navigating the process of understanding how to improve your writing in a shorter amount of time. I don't know this is going on, I know you don't know for sure, but from what you're describing that would be at least a guess on my part.
That may be one of the benefits that we don't see as instructors, but they may be learning from your feedback more efficiently now.
Eugene: I think so. Part of that I think has to do with the way I run my class generally also. What I mean by that is, so I develop a rapport with each of my students in the context of feedback during class because I spend good chunks of time in several of my classes. Sometimes the entire class time where I will invite them to start working on their assignment in class right there.
The idea being that, right now when you're writing it, that's when you need my guidance, not when you're at home banging your head against the wall. I can explain a concept to you in class and everyone nods their head and then they go home and they complain that they didn't get it. Now they don't have that excuse because now I'm right there. I have them working in groups and they're going around the room.
You can usually see when somebody is hitting a wall or struggling with something, they're also not shy about asking. I'll come over and I'll look at what they have written right there on the screen or in their notepad and I'll say, this is interesting, I think this is the right idea but that doesn't really convey it in the way that we want. For example, in persuasive writing, we want to be persuading the reader that our client is going to be the winner.
We probably want to show that this element is satisfying because that's what our client wants, but the way you've written it makes it sound like you don't really care or that sort of up in the air. How might we phrase this differently? I'm doing this in class all the time. Now when they get their feedback on their more formal assignments, it's more of the same.
There isn't going to be this process of them having to then understand how to interpret a different form of feedback. There is of course value in learning how to interpret written feedback and from different sources. When they go out into practice, they're going to encounter all types of supervisors, some who invite them into their office where they'll spend 20, 30 minutes to talk about it.
Others will just draw a line through the page and write, no and then say rewrite. It's important to know how to adapt to those types of feedback styles. Really the lesson I'm trying to teach them is not how to incorporate different types of feedback or how to interpret types of feedback, it's how do we at least get off the ground here, fundamentals. For that I want to minimize the moving parts actually.
Then I consciously in the second semester, I give them different types of feedback. I will continue with the video feedback. I will also return some papers using what I call law firm partner feedback where it's just sort of like quick scribbles and expecting you to understand what I mean. Then I also have individual one on one conferences too where I have them come in and we just talk about it in real time.
The idea there at that point, they've got the fundamentals down. It's to help them understand, listen, sometimes the same message can be delivered in different ways. You need to understand how to interpret all those different ways so that you can be effective in practice.
Interviewer: This sounds really exciting. Now I'm going to shift a little bit. Let's say somebody is listening to this and they go, "I'd like to explore doing this for myself, but I have no idea what Eugene is talking about in terms of the technology." I know you mentioned that you use a tablet and I'm actually sitting at Eugene's office and I can see the tablet box.
It looks like it's a Wacom bamboo tablet and there's a few different products out there that are priced very modestly to more expensive, but beyond the tablet and you described how you create a PDF and then you're tableting on it. How are you actually recording the video and then you said on your service that you use, you can tell whether they've not just played it but looked at specific sections.
I'm wondering if you can take us through that, the more techie part of that, of how you recorded and what kind of service you use for delivering your feedback to students.
Eugene: The tablet is what I'm drawing my stylus across and like you said, there are many that are very modestly priced. I think this one was like 79 bucks on Amazon or something like that. Then there's a program called PDF annotator and there are competing programs, alternatives to PDF annotator, that happens to be the one that was recommended to me so I used it.
Interviewer: You happen to be on Mac or windows?
Eugene: PDF Annotator is only on Windows right now. Mac has its own version. I have a Mac, I just made sure that it was a dual boot machine so that when I'm doing the video feedback, I just boot it up as a Window's machine. That also I think was an educators discount, 75, 80, maybe 90 bucks. It opens up the PDF document and then you have a pallet of highlighters and pens and things like that, and then you just scribble on it till your heart's content.
For the actual spoken word, I just have a microphone that's built into my headphones and while I'm writing and scribbling and highlighting and circling and things like that, I'm just talking aloud just like we're doing now. I say, this is good, this looks good. I'm not going to spend too much time on it. Wait a second, this is not what I expected to see. Let's talk about this a little bit. Maybe zoom in a little bit.
Let me highlight this one part. Let me spend the next few minutes talking about this sentence and tell you why I think this sentence is so critical and what we need to do to make this a little bit better. Now all of that is being recorded in a program called Echo Personal Capture and that's available through USF if you have a USF login, free for USF faculty and staff. You can download it and ITS can help you set that up.
Interviewer: As an aside Echo Personal Capture for people listening is both Windows and Mac.
Eugene: Yes it is. It's a very simple program. It doesn't have a whole bunch of bells and whistles but in many ways that makes it easier to use in the beginning. All it does is it records, it captures whatever's going on on your screen and whatever audio input is going through the microphone at that time. It just captures it and then you click a button and it publishes it and publishing it just means that it creates a link that anyone with a USF login can access.
The link then is great because it generates a separate link for each video and I can send that link just to the student who needs to see that, which is important because you don't want the students feeling like, everyone else is looking at the feedback that was given to me.
Then when I return feedback, instead of handing back a stack of papers during class I say, check your email, you have received an email from me with a link, click on it with some headphones and then there's this whole process that I guide them through also on how they should then use that video effectively. I tell them they should sit down with a copy of their own memo, watch my video and a notepad taking notes of anything that they have questions about and maybe even jotting down the time.
You know at eight minutes and twenty eight seconds you said this and I thought I understood you but when I tried doing that on the next paper, you said that I still wasn't doing that. Did I misunderstand you? If we have that time marker, I can go back and check to see exactly what I said, and either correct myself if I misspoke or usually there was some ambiguity in what I said and the student didn't quite understand.
Interviewer: I'm going to go back for just a moment. Either you're just an incredibly intelligent guy, which I'm sure it's right or because what I'm globbing onto is this notion of you give them instructions for how to use the materials you've just sent them, right?
Eugene: Yes.
Interviewer: The first time you did this, did you give them those instructions?
Eugene: The first time I did not give them those instructions.
Interviewer: I was wondering, because I was figuring those came from somewhere. It wasn't just out of the either you knew that. You must have experienced that somehow, initially at least some of the students weren't listening to the feedback as effectively as they could.
Eugene: That's right. I was able to tell that when I would have individual conferences with some students. Some students intuitively knew to do this, or maybe it wasn't intuitive, but somehow they figured out that that was going to be effective for them. Or maybe they were just trying to see if it would be effective, but some students would come in with their memos corrected based upon the feedback that I had given them.
They're not able to download the marked up PDF unless I send it to them. They can't just download it from the video file. I would hope that students wouldn't just take a memo and have my markup on it and then say, now it's perfect, but some students might try to take that shortcut, at least in some small way and some students were coming in and showing me okay, I adjusted this now based upon your feedback, is this right? Those students were getting it faster. Whereas other students, who just watched it passively were going to forget a lot of what I had to say and make the same mistakes over again or not repeat the successes that they had and then some of them would just wouldn't be as effective because of that and I learned from my students, the ones who did it that way and then I encouraged all the students to do it in that way.
Interviewer: When I started doing some on a completely different note, some audio lectures for students outside the class. I noticed very quickly something similar that some, I can't remember how I noticed it, because it's a few years ago but some people when they would listen to it, they would do the same thing as if they were coming into a class, whatever that was right, piece of paper or pen or maybe it was opening their laptop and taking notes, but others didn't and it's like, I need to remind them that we're now you may be in your home in your jammies and all that but we're right now in this moment in a classroom situation. Use all those things you would use in a classroom.
Eugene: That's right. Except that now you can pause this class if you feel the need to go to the bathroom, which is great. Now, even the students who did watch it very passively, all of them were letting me know and I really should have mentioned this as one of the side benefits of doing this that I hadn't anticipated. They were then privy to all of them, anyone who watches this video, they were all privy to my thought process and critical analysis of their writing and they really, really appreciated that and that did a lot for developing our rapport and helping them, they would take me seriously. They took me, they appreciated what I was doing and they thought of me as really providing helpful feedback as opposed to well he's just making these marks he can justify a grade that was given to me.
Now, I thought that they understood that from my margin comments and end comments because it would take me almost as long but I think that many of them sort of thought, "Well, he's just leaning back and drinking scotch and smoking a cigar and making these random scratches on my memo," but when they hear me explaining everything, and really just talking through my thought process on all this stuff. A lot of the students came back as, "I couldn't believe that you spent this much time," and for some of them, I felt like, wow, I used to spend even more time on some of these types of things, but I guess nobody really realized.
Interviewer: To be fair to them it's hard unless you've been in that position to appreciate the time it took.
Eugene: That's right. It's absolutely fair but that only helps our rapport.
Interviewer: Exactly. I can imagine easily. Well, I'm kind of at the end timewise. I just want to be very respectful of your time. In this time together. I've tried to ask you the best questions I knew how given what I thought beforehand and what I was hearing from you, but are there any kind of big issues with your use of E-video feedback that we haven't touched upon, that you'd like to convey in some way?
Eugene: Big issues.
Interviewer: Well, they can even be small issues but are there things that would be important for another faculty member to know about that we haven't talked about? If they were thinking about trying to go the Eugene Kim way in terms of video feedback in the future.
Eugene: Yes, one of the things that really surprised me that I did this because I thought it'd be more effective, but I hadn't really thought through entirely why I think it would be effective but sometimes the medium is the message as they say and students nowadays, they're very comfortable with watching videos and if they want to learn how to do something random and home, house project or something, I think many of them, they would just go to YouTube and they would say how do I fix a leaky faucet and there is this sort of facility with learning through multimedia. That translates into all kinds of side benefits that we wouldn't anticipate sometimes. Now, I don't think that we should necessarily be catering to our students in every way that is going to be just making things more convenient for them.
They do need to learn how to read and write in the traditional ways but there are all kinds of benefits that can come from this and I've tried to apply this in other areas too and sometimes it works well, sometimes it doesn't work well but there are usually insights to be gained from this. For example, I teach a lot of fundamental concepts for my basic one hour class, first-year, law student class, using videos, I pre-record videos, and they're pretty simple but there are things that I used to just teach in class because it was easy to just teach it in class, but I found that by having them watch a 15-minute video.
They were getting it just as easily and they could rewind and watch it over and over again, they can access that, and then I had all this extra time in my class to work on in-class writing exercises. Now, that's not something that I came up with myself. I mean, the flipping movement is gotten really popular but I think that the idea of flipping is really taking advantage of all these benefits that we didn't really necessarily were available to us until we explored some different ways of communicating what we want to say, to give one last example of that. Any instructor or professor who has provided feedback as oral feedback in a one on one conference, and in written feedback.
Why would you do that? I think in part at least, it's because there are different things that can be learned, different lessons that can be taught using those different ways of communicating. This is just another way of communicating and who knows what kind of benefits there may be I think it's worth a try. I felt it was worth a try anyway, it's still an experimental phase for me and this is, I've done it for just over one year now.
Interviewer: One really cool thing I'm hearing what you just said, well, sorry, there's several cool things but one of the cool things is, if I'm a person who's thinking about using multimedia more in my classroom, doesn't matter what the discipline is, and it really doesn't matter if it's writing or some other kind of challenging project that students are involved in. Usually, there's some intermediary stage of that project, whether it's writing, it doesn't matter what it is where you get feedback, that feedback maybe it's something like a pedagogical gateway drug that is electronic feedback because it allows you as an instructor to get your feet wet.
You're talking one to one to somebody, you get probably perhaps more comfortable with just hearing your voice. Most people don't like hearing their voice and you get a little more familiar with the technology involved. That may encourage you to take further steps to do other things like videos for the whole class and so forth. You don't have to start with videos with a full class, you could start with the more intimate one to one feedback in electronic form.
Eugene: Sure and it may even be helpful a little bit.
Interviewer: Eugene, thank you for your time. You've been extremely generous and really insightful. I really appreciate it.
Eugene: Thank you much for having me talk with you.
Interviewer: Thanks.
[00:37:25] [END OF AUDIO]


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