Should lecture capture be used to relieve classroom over crowding?

This is my newest column for the October-November issue of Streaming Media Magazine:
At the beginning of this school year, Echo360 Inc. CEO Fred Singer wrote an editorial for The Huffington Post extolling the virtues of lecture capture. He observed that the lean economy “won’t allow institutions to simply erect new buildings and hire qualified staff to meet rising needs” but that lecture capture can assist because it’s “like DVR’ing class with full playback functionality.” Singer went on to argue that “lecture capture addresses overcrowding by freeing seats,” permitting students who prefer to view an online lecture to skip class.

He also cited studies that pointed to higher student achievement and even better classroom attendance resulting from students reviewing video materials outside of the classroom.

Nevertheless, my interest was piqued by Singer’s argument that lecture capture can substitute for the in-class experience for a student who prefers watching online. It’s not something I often hear in the promotion of lecture capture. While companies list distance learning as a core use case, they take care not to imply that recordings of classes in on-the-ground curricula should substitute for attendance.

Justified or not, the relationship between attendance and lecture recording is a sensitive issue. When there’s resistance to adopting lecture capture, the risk of encouraging would-be slackers to cut class is a prime objection. Thus, I was surprised that Singer would be so blunt.
Read the rest at StreamingMedia.com

What video camera should I buy?

One of the most common questions I hear from educators looking to start producing video is one that I suspect a lot of readers have heard: “What camera should I buy?” On the surface it’s quite an innocuous query, seemingly simple to answer. Yet, bundled up in there is a very common and pernicious assumption, that the key to good video is all about the equipment you use.

Read the rest at OnlineVideo.net…

What Use Is Educational Video If You Can’t Find It?

My latest column for Streaming Media Magazine is online. In it I focus on the importance of being able to search through the mountains of educational video being produced every day:

That’s the next crucial step in educational video online: developing a common standard for cataloging, organizing, and sharing content, regardless of platform. We already have a model in libraries, which have common standards for cataloging physical assets such as books and discs. The successes and failures of this decades-long process should provide direction and insight for educational video.

In a similar vein, fellow SM writer and columnist Tim Siglin reported on discussions about time-based metadata for video that happened at the recent Open Video Conference:

Chris Jackson noted that URIPlay, an open-source project that MetaBroadcast has been working on with the BBC’s backing, started as an interface project but has ended up as a metadata play.

“Our core goal is to help people find moving images,” said Jackson, “but we’ve found we had to move well beyond user interfaces to the creation effective metadata tools and interfaces. We compared ‘closed code’ and ‘open code’ and realized that the pain threshold would be about the same initially for either type, but that the data range/quality of metadata could increase significantly if our open source code was used by the larger open source community. Our open software code revolves around metadata scraping and parsing.”

Although it all sounds a little technical, what’s at hand here is creating, storing and sharing data about video files so that the media itself is easier to find and use. The real trick is being able to search based upon more criteria than just titles or filenames, which often doesn’t result in much when video files are given names like “video01.mov.”

Searchability is accessibility and is truly one of the next most important steps in the development of online education, especially a more democratic online education.

I’ll be writing about more educational topics here at mediageek as that is what I do for a living and because I think the world of educational media is very connected to independent media and media freedom. Like so many disciplines, these worlds are too often siloed into their own self-contained universes, without a lot of cross-pollination. It looks like the Open Video Conference was one venue where the boundaries were crossed. I wish I could have gone, but I hope there will be more conferences like it.

What Makes for Compelling Educational Video, and Predictions for 2009

I have two recent columns on educational media posted over at Streaming Media Magazine. The most recent one is the “Futurewatch” for education in 2009, which will be published in the upcoming Industry Sourcebook 2009 issue. I’m predicting a greater emphasis on mobile-accessible media along with greater convergence between communication platforms like videoconferencing with streaming and downloaded/pocasted media. I also have some hopes for a more open and interoperable future.

The other is my regular “Class Act” column from the Dec. 2008/Jan. 2009 issue, “What Makes for Compelling Video?” In it I take up some thoughts I had while picking up a video production project here at NU, and what I learned by trying to view the product as a regular websurfer. I think there should be something of interest for anyone producing video, educational or otherwise.

Spinning Indie, a College Radio Blog

Once in a while I get comments here on the mediageek blog, and it’s especially great when they aren’t grammatically disastrous ads for v1agrA. So imagine how glad I was to receive a comment on my post about college radio from Jennifer Waits, who writes the Spinning Indie blog which is all about college radio.

Jennifer is on a mission to visit or do virtual visits and interviews with college stations in all 50 states, and it makes for great reading. Apparently she made an in-person visit to my backyard at WNUR last month, interviewing the general manager, Taylor Dearr. I’m sorry I wasn’t around for her visit.

Thanks to Jennifer’s virtual tours I’m learning about lots of stations I’d really never heard of that are bringing great radio to places like Fargo, Fairbanks and Stony Brook. It’s helpful to be reminded of the common challenges that college and noncommercial stations face, whether it’s managing music libraries or the vagaries of streaming, and possibly picking up some new approaches.

I hope Jennifer keeps up the posting.

Saturday Is Home Movie Day

Dig into your closets, attics and garages and rescue your old home movies. They deserve better than that. They need to be preserved, archived and seen!

Home Movie Day is an annual event in service of celebrating and educating people about the cultural and historical value of their old home movies, especially ones on film. With a little bit of care and proper storage analog film home movies can last generations, possibly outlasting the digital photos, VHS videotapes and web movies that have come to supplant this medium.

The day is celebrated with viewing and educational events in cities around the world. Here in Chicago the Chicago Film Archives are hosting three hours of home movie inspection–where you can get your old films assessed for damage and preservability–followed by a viewing program with live musical accompaniment at 6 PM.

My pal Jimi Jones organizes the Home Movie Day in my old home base of Champaign-Urbana, IL. This year it will be held at the Urbana Free Library. Beginning at 10 AM they’re having a film clinic, where you can get your film looked at and learn how to preserve it, with screenings beginning at 11 AM.

Jimi has made two appearances on the radioshow to talk about Home Movie Day and the important value of preserving these cultural records.

I can’t stress how critical I believe it is to invest just a little time and effort into preserving the media we create, both to honor the act of creation, and for the sake of history and record. As an educational media technologist I have worked with too many faculty, students and researchers who have lost forever important media works that could have easily been preserved with a little bit of planning and time. Don’t let you memories fade away.

Conference Video: Making Effective Online Video for Education

I moderated a panel on educational video at the Streaming Media West conference this past November, and video of that session is now up for viewing online at ScribeMedia.org.

I was very impressed by the panelists, each of them bringing a unique perspective on the question of what makes effective online video for education.

I already knew John Tubbs, who also works at the University of Illinois. I invited him to participate because of his passion for good quality audio and video. Beyond aesthetics, John has been researching the physiological reasons why good audio matters and why bad audio might impair comprehension and retention. He brings up some of his research in this session.

I shared a panel last year with Richard Bloom, who is the coursecast administrator for the excellent Webcast site at the University of California – Berkeley. I was glad Richard could make it because Berkeley is really emphasizing the value of publicly sharing their videos along with using as many open source tools as possible.

I met Chuck Allen from CSU San Marcos and Scott Szczurek from the CME Group in Chicago for the first time the evening before the panel. Chuck has the distinct privilege of having built the media capture and distribution infrastructure at San Marcos, since the university is less than twenty years old. He shares some choice wisdom based upon his experience there.

I was glad to have Scott on board for the panel to bring us the perspective of someone producing video for internal training and education, demonstrating that educators of all stripes share a lot of the same challenges and can benefit from sharing solutions.

The Future of Educational Video? or The Blair Witch Podcast

My latest education column for Streaming Media Magazine is now online:

You’re watching an online video. The scene is dimly lit. There’s just a single harsh light on our subject’s face in extreme close-up. The sound, while understandable, is full of popped Ps and distorted peaks.

Is this a sequel to the Blair Witch Project, or a video podcast for Political Science 101? Or is this the future of educational video?

The do-it-yourself approach to video has taken the internet by storm, and more instructors and students are taking up the call to use digital media to enhance learning. As both a media producer and educator I think this is a great trend. Yet, like a weary English teacher at a slam poetry competition, I can’t help but think that the quality could be a lot better with some attention to the basics.

Read more at StreamingMedia.com…