Below is the script used in the video presentation:
1. Introduction
o Gifs, otherwise known as “graphics interchange format” have become an integral part of our online experience. The Gif is essentially an image format – yet animated through combining multiple image frames into a single brief looping image. While the Gif isn’t new, it’s use, particularly in mobile formats is continuing to grow and evolve.
2. History
o This year, in 2017, the Gif file format turned 30 years old. Essentially, the Gif is a short looping video, created by Steve Wilhite in 1987 who was tasked with creating a graphic format that would quickly load sharp images even with slow internet connections so that the image format would work on all computers.
3. Social media
o When we think of Gifs, we likely think about social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and many other platforms have become part of our daily lives, and have become locations where Gifs are frequently shared.
4. Famous Gifs
o Many of us are familiar with cat gifs that flood our social media feeds, as well as other famous gifs, such as Joey Tribbiani reaction gifs. Something is so intriguing about these moving images, that we can’t seem to get enough. It’s a cultural and social phenomenon of our evolving digital age
5. Communication tool
o Are Gifs becoming a new language, a visual digital language? Adam Liebsohn, the COO of Giphy stated that “words can be misinterpreted” and he explained that the creation of the website Giphy started over a coffee visit talking about Ludwig Wittgenstein, a language philosopher who believed that words are really good at literal things but really clumsy at abstract things. So, according to Liebsohn, gifs are visual “characters” in the visual digital keyboard – and the foundation of Giphy’s creation.
6. Giphy
o The site, Giphy was founded in February 2013, but at that time, it was solely a search engine for gifs. By August of the same year, Giphy evolved to allow users to post and share gifs on Facebook. 26 years after the initial creation of gifs, we start to see them as a common interactive tool in our online communication. Giphy is now worth approximately $600 million dollars in investments.
7. Availability
o Because of sites and applications like Giphy and their partnership with social media platforms like Facebook, Gif use has grown exponentially. In 2016, Giphy said it serves over 1 billion Gifs each day that are seen by 100 million people.
8. Adding visual to text world
o In a world that has become so text-heavy and entranced by our devices, do gifs offer a visual cue that otherwise would be missing in our digital communication atmosphere? Do you ever read a piece of text online and wonder what the motive is behind it? Well, maybe gifs offer the ability to display visual emotion to ambiguous text and thereby enhance understanding.
9. Increased use
o While gifs are not a new medium, their use over the last two years has increased exponentially. This is largely because of their increased availability on social media as well as on mobile device messaging services. As well, the recently developed popular application Boomerang has brought forward a new form of Gif development, where the gif plays from front to back, back to front in a loop, rather than front to back, front to back.
10. Medium for satire, politics, and news
o Gifs have become a satirical medium for politics and news media. While gifs are very short, their meaning can be extensive and thought provoking. We now see entire Twitter accounts dedicated to this form of controversial satire.
11. Prior use in Education
o Surprisingly, gifs have been used in science education for quite some time as a way to make short, repeating, “tutorial-like” presentations.
Whether it is a chemistry experiment, or the launch of a rocket ship – science gifs make it simple to incorporate engaging imagery with a purpose. As well, the gif format embraces repetition, which is still considered a useful tool in certain learning situations.
12. Micro expression and learning
o Micro expressions, traditionally, are brief expressions that occur within 1/25th of a second. Even though brief, they are key to enhancing emotional awareness, and this is why they are critically important to our emotional intelligence and our connections to one another. Are Gifs a way to capture, save, and reuse micro expressions in a digital world? In addition to micro expressions, micro learning is an important tool in delivering content in small specific bursts.
13. Breaking Cultural barriers
o As mentioned before, Gifs can be useful in providing a visual cue to online conversations. Perhaps these cues could be used in online educational environments as a way to break barriers between people of different backgrounds, cultures, and beliefs. Even if just for comic relief, gifs have the potential to change static conversation.
14. Copyright
o There is still debate about the use of gifs and copyright law. There have been no legal decisions made to date that have determined whether generating and using a Gif from copyrighted material is copyright infringement. For now, gifs are under the umbrella of fair use. However, discretion should still be used when choosing gifs to use and in deciding how and where you intend to use them.
15. Software advancements
o Software and technological advancements have made it easier than ever to find, produce, and use gifs. Even now with Apple’s IOS 11, you can now save previously static gif images as moving images to your phone’s camera roll. Additionally, you can also use IOS 11 to record your phones screen, to make presentations similar to this one! You can use both videos and live images and export them into apps to finalize usable gif images.
16. Software advancements
o There are many other mobile tools available to assist in making and sharing Gifs. Boomerang, ImgPlay, Momento, Lively, and Giphy are just some of the mobile applications available for creating gifs on the go. Especially with evolving applications like Boomerang launched in 2015, we are likely just beginning to see the creative and inventive ways that Gifs applications are advancing.
17. Future in Education
o Gifs are not at the end of their developmental potential, there is still room for growth.
o With the advancements in technology, there remains a great deal of potential for gifs to be used within education. Particularly within an online course environment, these images could hold a lot of value in enhancing communication and engagement.
o As well, on site like Buzzfeed that use Gifs in nearly every article, we are seeing that younger generations are gravitating to untraditional sources and absorbing information differently.
18. Future Use in Education
o Now that mobile devices are more prevalent within our lives and within classroom and online learning environments, Gifs could be used to improve communication, enhance presentation, and encourage constructivist learning by developing gifs in real-world situations. They could be used to capture moments of exploration and learning, to be used for future reference and sharing.
19. Potential Criticisms
o As with all mediums, we have to be careful that our use with gifs is useful, not only time consuming with little pay-off. Some may think that gifs are too short, or too distracting to add value to education. With that in mind, we should be careful not to only use Gifs for decorative purposes, but push our creativity to use these micro-gif-expressions in new ways to enhance comprehension and development. While this presentation used gifs in excess, it should be noted that overuse has the potential to involuntarily change the tone of a conversation.
20. Thank you
o Thank you for watching! This presentation was developed and recorded solely using an iPhone SE with IOS 11. To learn more about this presentation, obtain resources for your own development, or to see references for this project please visit: sites.google.com/view/gifsineducation