EDUCAUSE | Digital Video

ELI 2008 Spring Focus Session: View Full Program and Register

pkurkowski — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:12:43 -0600

The full program is now available for the ELI 2008 Spring Focus Session, "Real-World and Technology Rich: Learning by Doing, Learning in Context," being held March 18–19 in Raleigh, North Carolina. Register by February 19 to save money with low, early-bird rates.

Some of the featured sessions and speakers will include:

Making Learning Real: Turning Sim City into "Sim Science"!
Tuesday, March 18, 1:45–2:30 p.m.
Diane Jass Ketelhut, Assistant Professor of Science Education, Temple University
Authentic Learning in History and Social Sciences: How "Real" Can We Make the Classroom Experience?
Wednesday, March 19, 8:15–9:00 a.m.
Scot A. French, Associate Professor/Director, University of Virginia
Authentic Critical Reflection: Critique_It in Second Life
Wednesday, March 19, 9:30–10:15 a.m.
Michael Connors, Associate Professor, Digital Printmaking, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Other focus session offerings will include student perspective videos, digital documentaries, project parlors, and more. View the full program for more details.

Mojiti: Collaborative Annotation of Video Content

catherine — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 06:04:15 -0500

I came across Mojiti via the wealth of blog discussion centred on Ken Robinson's talk on creativity in education (part of the video podcasts from TED Talks -- see D'Arcy Norman's comments on the series). Great talk, by the way, but that's a post for another day.

Mojiti is a kind of meta-portal for video content. It's not a hosting service like YouTube; instead, the site allows users to bring together diverse content that interests them, from a whole range of portals, into one online "front end". It's a bit like an online bookmarking service for video, but with the content virtually "present".

My first impression is pretty positive. In fact, it looks as though Mojiti has solved some of the most important problems in using video as a tool for teaching and learning. It's hard to imagine a more "web 2.0"ish service (the site design is already looking a bit dated), but at the same time, Mojiti appears to offer something I've wanted for a long time -- the ability to let students easily annotate video, and share their annotations, just as easily as they can annotate photos on Flickr.

Of course, one of video's key distinctive features, shared with audio, is that it involves the dimension of time. Video thus presents an initial barrier to searching for useful content -- a problem that search services such as PodZinger and BlinkX have only partly solved (however, here's a useful guide to search services that let you search 'inside' audio/video content).

Once you've found the video you're looking for, and have found the bit of the video you want, you'll probably want to find it again, quickly and easily. Especially if you are going to watch/listen to a piece repeatedly, as you probably will if you are using it for a class. You'll want an easy way to direct people to a specific bit, or bits, you want them to pay attention to (other than by laboriously quoting the exact runtime!). Or you want to enable people to tell you which bits of the content they find intriguing, confusing, inspiring, or incomprehensible.

So, Mojiti lets you create internal video "bookmarks", which you can then use as a way of navigating video content. In Mojiti's terminology, your annotations are created as "Spots" and "Spot Sets". Mojiti uses contextual advertising, and I'm curious to know whether other people find this a turnoff. At the moment, ads seem reasonably low-key and non-invasive (much like Google ads). The Mojiti FAQ also states that ads are meant to diminish in frequency as you use the service: "as your Spot Set gets filled up with more Spots from you and other users, you'll see less and less of our Ad Spots."

After getting a brief overview of the service, there are a couple of things that immediately come to mind as useful extensions. First, the ability to export your annotations. It may be possible to do this using RSS, with the RSS Spot Feature, in some obvious way I haven't figured out yet (if anyone has solved this, let me know). Secondly, granular control for privacy levels -- at the moment, Mojiti seems to have only two modes, "open" (share with everyone) and "closed" (share with no-one). I think some teachers would like to be able to restrict Spot-sharing to class-level.

An Interview with Jim Gregory

mpasiewicz — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 11:29:42 -0600

In this 17 minute recording, we'll hear from Jim Gregory about a range of topics including a very interesting approach to classroom technology support and the use of automatic lecture recording systems (and video more broadly).

An Interview with John Morris

mpasiewicz — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 11:29:51 -0600

In this 17 minute recording, Marilu Goodyear sits down with John Morris for a discussion about transcoding legacy media, digital preservation, and the synergy between architecture and technology.

An Interview with Peter Kaufman and Mark Phillipson

mpasiewicz — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 11:30:03 -0600

In this 23 minute recording, we'll hear Peter Kaufman and Mark Phillipson, both from the Columbia University's Center for New Media Teaching and Learning. Listen in as they cover a range of topics related to the use of digital video in education.

See also:
http://www.cni.org/tfms/2006b.fall/abstracts/PB-teaching-kaufman.html
http://www.columbia.edu/ccnmtl/projects/vital/index.html

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2006 Fall Task Force Meeting. The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity. You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org

An Interview with Tim Lorang

mpasiewicz — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 11:30:13 -0600

In this 10 minute recording, Bill Hogue sits down with Tim Lorang to get some thoughts on the Research Channel and their digital asset management software, Digital Well.

Video Skills for Interdisciplinary Research

catherine — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 09:57:42 -0600

Use of digital video is exploding in UK higher education, both as a tool for teaching but also as a topic for research -- and in the arts and humanities, as well as the sciences. New meta-search tools like PureVideo are making video content newly accessible to researchers and institutions. Organisations like JISC, AHDS and the British Universities' Film and Video Council are helping to set up open-access video archives for education. There's a whole constellation of factors at work (technological developments, affordability, licensing agreements, etc.), jointly conspiring to make digital video an emergent key research tool.

What particularly interests me in all this is that film and video, as research tools but also as research subjects in their own right, have broken free of the boundaries of disciplines like Media Studies, Design, and Journalism. In the humanities, digital video is now of significant interest to historians, political scientists, performing arts specialists, literary scholars, architects--in fact, the whole scholarly battalion. In Cambridge, high demand has led to establishment of a new graduate degree programme in Screen Media, and a cluster of associated research seminars. At a graduate training seminar I gave recently, I couldn't keep up with the video-related questions fired at me by the students.

Using digital video seems to enable interdisciplinarity. This is intriguing, especially in the context of a research-intensive university with well-established disciplinary methods and microcultures. And it demands that staff and students acquire new skills -- including "social" skills like e-safety and copyright, as well as technical skills. Who within research institutions is recognised as having this kind of expertise, and who is best placed to deliver "whole package" training? Is there a growing skills gap between older and younger staff, or between staff and students? What new forms of collaboration might video use enable, or require?

An Interview with Google's Vint Cerf

mpasiewicz — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 13:41:11 -0500

This 25 minute recording provides coverage of an interview with Google's Vint Cerf. In a couple of weeks, Dr. Cerf will be speaking at our Annual Conference, and we hope to see you then. For now, let's listen in as we cover a range of topics including Google Video, digital preservation, intellectual property, net neutrality and high performance computing.

Learnitology Podcast 8 - Tales from Wakonse

cclark2 — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 16:45:18 -0500

The eighth Learnitology Podcast is a special treat that features short stories about effective uses of technology in college teaching. The storytellers are faculty from all over the country who participated in the Wakonse Conference on College Teaching. Wakonse is an annual "professor camp" on Lake Michigan, near Muskegon. Eddy Cuisinier teaches French at Western Kentucky University, where they have created podcasts to reinforce language learning. Scott LaJoie is in the Health Knowledge & Cognitive Science department at the University of Louisville. He helped create disaster training for mental health professionals, which was delivered via teleconferencing. Paul McDowell, a French professor at the University of Notre Dame videotapes his students in "French through Acting." Leona Rubin teaches anatomy in the vet school at the University of Missouri, where she makes digital images of students' lab slides as part of self-learning modules. Steve Keller, a Chemistry prof at the University of Missouri, uses WebCT chat rooms to conduct "virtual office hours." Sree Nilakanta is in Information Systems at Iowa State. He tells about his use of electronic portfolios. Indira Somani teaches Media Literacy at the University of Maryland. She uses video clips to illustrate key concepts. You can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes.

VIA Project: Digital Video-Based Research Methods

catherine — Tue, 02 May 2006 07:02:52 -0500

This weekend, I was in Manchester for the second workshop of the Live Sociology research methods course. I met Jen Patashnick from the VIA Project, who travelled over from Boston to give a talk about her experience using video-based research methods.

VIA is a fascinating research project based at Boston Children's Hospital. Founded by Dr Michael Rich, the project uses digital video and a participative research design to investigate patients' experiences of living with chronic illness. Jen has been working on VIA for eight years now, and has overseen the transformation of its analytic methods from using paper-based forms, through to computer-assisted qualitative analysis using Visual Basic macros and NVivo, through to using the open-source software Transana.

CARET has also used Transana for video-based education research projects, so I was really interested to hear from Jen how the VIA project has evolved its particular methodology over time. We agreed that one of the main benefits of using OSS is the possibility for direct dialogue with developers. Research in healthcare and education can be a slow process, in terms of research design and data collection, but research methods can develop very quickly and the software used needs to be responsive to that. I'd be really interested to hear from any other learning technologists or education / social researchers using Transana.