Mojiti: Collaborative Annotation of Video Content
Created by Catherine Howell (University of Cambridge) on April 17, 2007
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.
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.
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