I was recently invited to talk to a group of people from the PSU Libraries and the Graduate School about opportunities for integrating rich media into student theses and dissertations. The charge given to them by the dean of the Libraries was to identify new procedures which address the fact that more and more instructors are asking students to produce digital media as evidence of their learning, and that students are inevitably wanting to include these artifacts in their ETD's (eTheses and Dissertations). Right now graduate and undergraduate honors students are asked to fill in a Microsoft Word-based template that, once submitted, is archived as part of that student's permanent record. Now, maybe you already see where I'm going with this, but here's the problem.. Student records need to be archived and readable for something like 75 years. The woman sitting next to me at this meeting worked for the Library's digitization services, and told me that they currently use microfiche to do long-term archiving of ETD's. This is actually the most durable solution they have for this, and it works fine for papers. But enter video and audio, and it's a different ballgame. There's some serious challenges concerning the longevity of file formats (will Quicktime be around in 75 years?) and of data storage (think about how much audio and video students will produce of the course of 75 years...).
There are some that might argue that the media pieces I'm talking about, while they might belong in an ePortfolio, do not have a place in a formal academic document like a dissertation. But consider something like this: http://softmatter.cscm.ir/FilmMotor/. These videos are just as significant as any other illustration that was included in papers on this research. I can think of dozens of other examples, from Engineering to Liberal Arts, where audio and video would be key elements of a research paper. And these elements would have to be stored with the paper.
Archiving isn't an especially exciting topic, but it's one that bears some thinking. It is a potentially serious limiting factor in getting instructors (especially in graduate and honors programs) to adopt this technology in their teaching. One person at this meeting mentioned an experience she had with an Engineering class where students were given the option to write a short paper or produce a video. The instructor assumed that the students would be excited about the latter, but they overwhelmingly chose to write a paper. When asked about it, most were concerned that come job interview time, the video would be too cumbersome.
There's no easy technical solution to this problem. But it would be a shame if these limitations were stifling innovative teaching practices. It's certainly something that I and the Digital Commons team are going to spend some time researching.
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