Promoting Audiovisual Formats for Developing Teaching Digital Competences

1. Introduction

In modern society of information’s context -dominated by the iconosphere - Abraham Moles, The mosaic culture (Moles, 1978) - the video’s performance is quite important as a communicative channel. All contents generated in written format have been relegated lately by immediacy, closeness, attractive and precision of audiovisual media. It should be underlined Joan Ferrés statement: ‘Audiovisual culture or iconosphere generates a new kind of person, deeply modified about perceptive habits, mental processes and tastes’ (Ferrés, 1994). So, different researchers following the line opened by Vigotsky between the sixties and eighties (Vigotsky, 1986) state that new generations are starting to incorporate in their neurological nature an outstanding predisposition for assimilating audiovisual contents against written contents. Taking just a look at the most popular communication systems actually such as social networking sites fed mainly by audiovisual language (Facebook, Twitter) and public video libraries (YouTube, Vimeo) have been gaining ground over written formats for spreading contents until forcing traditional media to incorporate on their online editions an ever increasing amount of informative videos for competing in same conditions facing the rising demand.

In business world, it’s usual since a few years ago that internal and external communications from corporations are performed through video messages. So, communications between different work teams with customers or public take place through videos (video tutorials, videoconference and video news). This trend has been reinforced by time saving and cheaper production costs against other formats such as paper or eBooks. This means time and costs spent in writing a document, taking pictures and printing or either digitalizing its information is replaced by an image snapshot with sound from the speaker and a computer screen where all content that could be printed is shown properly: text document, images and graphics. Also there is the incentive of simultaneity as informative material recorded, interactive or live allows multidirectional communication so video’s addressees may answer in the same format generating new contents from other users in the same video library.