Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

10.21.10 | First Nations tribes have lived in the coastal area north of Vancouver for nearly 9,000 years. For most of that time, they have lived in tune with their natural surroundings. However, with each succeeding generation, nature receded a little more.

Just how much had changed was apparent earlier this year when Ryan Nadel, then a graduate student in the Masters of Digital Media Program at Vancouver’s Centre for Digital Media, and members of the environmental conservation group Pacific Wild organized a hike into the Great Bear Rainforest for students from the Heiltsuk Nation.

On that cold, blustery morning, several students showed up without boots, jackets or hiking gear, listening to their iPods and playing games on their cell phones.

“They seemed so out of touch with the space around them,” says Nadel, now an instructor at the Vancouver Film School. “The economies and livelihood up there used to all be based on natural resources, and that’s fallen apart over the last couple of decades.”

Nadel was there with Pacific Wild to take a digital media project to the next level. The Centre for Digital Media had recently chosen Pacific Wild from more than 50 entrants as the winner of its Big Push Social Change initiative. Nadel and a team of graduate students were now collaborating with Pacific Wild to give a live video feed a stronger educational framework. 

For a few years, Pacific Wild had been pioneering a remote camera system that could be used as a tool for the scientific study of elusive wildlife behavior in northwestern Canada and the Great Bear Rainforest, the largest non-tropical rainforest in the world.

Using remote-controlled pan, tilt and zoom (PTZ) cameras powered by methanol-based fuel cells, Pacific Wild had been beaming video of life in the rainforest into classrooms in the Heiltsuk community of Bella Bella and the Gitga’at community of Hartley Bay.

“It was just basically a raw feed streaming into the classrooms, says Ian McAllister, Pacific Wild’s founding director. “Although students were interested in the video feeds, “we realized that a lot more could be done with it as a learning experience. We’d spent a bunch of time developing the technology, but had really fallen behind in trying to make it more relevant and suitable as an educational tool.”

The goal for the initial project had been to use technology as a means of educating the students—not just about wildlife and science, but also about the rainforest and the natural world in which their families had lived for thousands of years.

“There is such a huge amount of external influence through television and the internet that even though these are remote communities and the students live in a huge intact wilderness, they don’t have the traditional teachings that their fathers and grandfathers had about the world around them,” McAllister says. “We wanted them to use technology to rediscover their natural world by observing rare or elusive wildlife behavior.”

Nadel and his team were brought in to create a learning frame to supplement the live feeds that were capturing the lives of cougars, sandhill cranes, grizzlies, wolves, salmon and the Spirit Bear—a rare, sometimes white-coated, subspecies of American Black Bear. 

Together, the group developed a new curriculum that was highly interactive and could be delivered along with the streaming video on SMARTBoards and computers in the two communities. Lesson plans focused on scientific observation, games, archival footage of animals and up-to-date information about various species, all incorporated to create an educational experience through a medium the kids primarily associated with entertainment. 

“It would be an observational science journal, like a blog entry with guiding questions,” Nadel says. “The goal was to collate and collect data and real science.”

According to Nadel, the live feeds themselves were somewhat boring. Students were often just watching nature, in its wild, uncontrollable and often uneventful form. But he also noticed that the students and teachers would perk up when something simple happened, like a branch moving.

“I started to realize that the point of this set-up was the collective excitement about what might happen, what could happen,” Nadel says.

With the interactive educational program built around the feed, McAllister says the students and teachers became more engaged.

“The presentation was a lot more compelling, and teachers had a full package in terms of exploring whatever natural history the camera was picking up,” McAllister says. “If they were observing wolves or their social behavior, there was more information about wolf ecology and traditional understandings of behavior among wolves.”

Recently, McAllister visited a classroom where the students were watching live footage of a pack of wolves feeding on salmon, which was an unknown phenomenon before the live feeds. Students also have observed a symbiotic relationship between two predators sharing a high-calorie meal in the rainforest:Bears devour the stomachs of the salmon and leave the heads for the wolves, and vice versa.

“These cameras were able to document things that haven’t been documented before,” McAllister says. “We’re furthering our understanding of interspecies relationships where human impact would usually be a deterrent to their study.”

The experience has been deeply engaging for the students, who now troubleshoot technical challenges and scout new locations for the cameras on the basis of what kind of ecosystem or behavior they would like to study.

“One of the positive outcomes,” says McAllister, “is that we aren’t saying, ‘Leave all of your [technology] at the door,’ and then set up a lesson plan on the chalkboard. What we are saying is, ‘This is amazing technology that’s at your disposal to explore your world.’”

The cameras and the interactive website are empowering the students, McAllister says to ask those questions they might not have asked before. “It’s also giving them tools to pursue the answers.”