Serendipity35 - Media

Using Multimedia Without Copyright Issues

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 17:06:12 -0400

Getting ready for the fall semester? You might want to avoid breaking any copyright laws by checking out the Baruch College's interactive guide to using multimedia in courses.

It has some computer animation where you follow a NYC-styled “Copyright Metro” to determine what materials can be used in courses legally. Choose the right metro line (easier than the real NYC system) depending on if how the materials will be used - face-to-face or online - or if you actually have copyright-holder permission to use the material.

More information online:
at Reed College
University of Maryland University College

All The News That Fits Your Screen

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:00:00 -0400

beeldbank.nationaalarchief.nl

There is no shortage of stories about the death of the print newspaper. For many of us, newspapers are still the main source of local news, arts and entertainment guides, community information, sports, and shopping. Now, that may include a local newspaper's online services. And if the news is across the country or the world, THAT local paper may be the best source. And, for those of us at colleges, our campus newspaper is certainly the only source for much of our "local" news. So, here is a post about how to read more of those newspapers online.

NewsVoyager.com is a "newspaper portal" to newspaper sites around the world. NewsVoyager.com provides links to U.S. daily and weekly newspaper home pages and sections, Canadian and international daily newspapers, newspaper groups, associations and other media organizations. I found 61 daily and weekly papers here in New Jersey.

They also provide a link to other sites with links to college newspapers and newspaper archives. This site is a service of the Newspaper Association of America, a nonprofit organization representing the newspaper industry and more than 2,000 newspapers in the U.S. and Canada.

Mommy, What Was A Newsweekly?

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 00:42:00 -0400

Newsweek and Time magazines have both decided to stop trying to compete with "new media" to be the first with news, and to focus on being where you turn for in-depth commentary and reporting.

I think it is a good move, but it may have come a few years too late. Both newsweeklies are hoping to avoid what U.S. News & World Report decided to do - give up with the idea of being a weekly publication entirely.

Newsweek has a circulation of about 2.7 million and expects to drop to almost 50% of that. It was at 3.5 million in 1988. Time’s circulation back then was almost 5 million, and it is now at 3.4 million.

Competition from other media, particularly online, and significant ad losses (down 20% for the first quarter of 2009 compared with the same period in 2008) in the magazine world parallels the problems in the newspaper industry.

Condé Nast's overly glossy business magazine, Portfolio, bit the dust with the May 09 issue. Its venerable old lady, Vogue, lost 30+% of its ad pages this year. (Though you might suspect that Teen Vogue would go first, if, in fact, teens are not print readers.) Even poor old Mad magazine, now part of DC Comics, has gone quarterly. And several magazines have given up on print editions but maintained a web presence. Portfolio, for example, still has a site as of now.

TeacherTube MySites

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:12:00 -0400

TeacherTube, a YouTube for teacher videos, is something I wrote about back in 2007 when it launched. Now, like YouTube, they are offering TeacherTube MySite which is a co-branded version of TeacherTube for your school's (K-12 school, college, university or organization) media content.

Typically, schools will upload class videos, school documents, or audio recordings. The school gets a lot of admininstrative controls. You decide what to remove, approve, add, upload.

Of course, it doesn't have to be for the entire school - it could be a showcase for the media of your class or organization in a safe setting. You can allow staff or students to upload media to your site to expand it. You can also customize the look & feel of your site using their designs, adding a background or uploading a logo. You will also have the choice of your own personalized site URL.

It has some privacy and security settings, so you can make your site as visible or as hidden as you want. A personalized MySite will contain no ads. And you can choose to moderate everything on your site - approve members, videos, or comments.

Here's the big BUT - it is not a free service. They have several pricing plans. One option allows you to add more than 20 members/users for just $5 per user with unlimited public views for a year.

I liked the original idea of TeacherTube - teachers uploading videos they created for other teachers to use. I like the idea of allowing schools or teachers to create their own branded site-within-a-site for their content. I have done that with a channel on YouTube for students in my grad course. It's easy and convenient. It's also free. PLus, the YouTube EDU area offers many of the same features. So, I have my doubts about the viability of the "business model" for TeacherTube MySites when there are places to host your branded content without fees.

Using Streaming Video As Prewriting

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 20 May 2009 00:20:00 -0400

I did a session this week for faculty about using video as a pre-writing activity. I'm starting to think of video - especially when it is segmented into clips about specific things - as very similar to using readings.

I know that students who are given a choice of viewing two 10 minute video clips on Shakespeare's language or reading about 20 minutes about it will more often choose the videos. I also know that many instructors are uncomfortable with equating doing that reading with viewing the videos.

I also know that you will encounter some of the problems and benefits no matter which one you assign. Let's say that I want my students to read or watch background materials before a class. I want to start the class with a discussion about those materials. The students who did the reading and those who watched the videos will both be bale to contribute to the discussion. Those who did not read or view will not be able to add much to the discussion. Not a big difference.

As a quick sample, I created on-the-fly a playlist of three videos that I could use to have students get some background for a discussion on how today's English shows the influences of the past. This first video I found on YouTube is a discussion of a Spanish/English connection which might be of additional interest to our PCCC Hispanic students.  "Shakespeare and the Spanish Connection" from the University of California http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBXWn00Cc-8 runs 28:10 minutes. This documentary covers key relationships between the two theater traditions of Spain and England, including materials from performances in New Mexico and California.

"Debate Over a Pure English" is from the larger The Story of English. I selected a 4 minute clip titled "The Inkhorn Controversy" which refers to a debate among English scholars over whether the English language should eliminate Latin and Greek words and return to its Anglo-Saxon roots. It is from our Films On Demand subscription collection (which is why I can't link to the actual video here). The feature I like with the service is that I can bookmark clips from a longer video and give students a link to it.

A longer video is an episode from the Charlie Rose program called "Shakespeare in Literature and Film" (PBS -57:47) It's great that is available freely on Google Video, but I can't "bookmark" or excerpt the video. At best, I could provide a time reference for students and they could fast-forward to it.

Here are some resources I suggested that are freely available. The advantages in using these are that there is no subscription, no username/password required, and, in some cases, they can be embedded into a webpage. The disadvantages are that you cannot bookmark or excerpt them, and there is no guarantee that the video will still be available online in the future.

These sources are "educational"

1. http://www.techreview.com/video/   at MIT
2. http://wws.princeton.edu/webmedia/ at the Princeton Woodrow Wilson School of Public & International Affairs
3. http://teachertube.com/ an online community of teachers sharing instructional videos The videos range over the entire K-20 levels.
4. NJVid http://www.wpunj.edu/njvid/ is a very new project that is now collecting both commercial video and content produced by NJ colleges and groups for streaming distribution. PCCC is a beta site for 2009. A sample title already there is "Newark : the slow road back," a 58 minute film made 20 years after the 1967 riots that is in the Government, Politics, Law section of the collection.
5. Many universities have their own YouTube channels, such as the University of California on YouTube and other groups such as Internet2 offer video for the higher ed community - The Research Channel

Here are a few sources that offer good "serious" video:

1. http://www.edge.org/edge_video.html
2. http://www.ted.com/   TED Talks

I would also recommend these "commercial" (but free) video sites. Yes, there is a lot of entertainment programming here (All work and no play...) but there is also g=good news, talk and documentary content.

1. http://www.hulu.com/
2. http://boxee.tv/
3. http://www.veoh.com/
4. http://current.com/
5. http://tvjersey.com/ has Jersey-centric video that might be useful to those of us here in NJ.
6. "cable channels" such as The History Channel http://www.history.com/ offer much of their content online
7. http://www.cbs.com and other networks offer many of their shows online. For example, I could see a teacher using segments (and they are segmented) from a program like CBS' 60 Minutes.

YouTube EDU

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 19:00:00 -0400

YouTube EDU (as in http://www.youtube.com/edu - it's not a .edu site, thank goodness) launched today.

It is called on the YouTube blog an educational hub - a “volunteer project sparked by a group of employees who wanted to find a better way to collect and highlight all the great educational content being uploaded to YouTube by colleges and universities.”

Right now, the site is aggregating videos from existing college and university content - lectures, student films, athletic events.

A New Business Model for Digital Music?

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:25:00 -0500

A relevant followup to my post about the demise of the Ruckus music service is this webinar from EDUCAUSE Live!

Choruss: A New Business Model for Digital Music with Jim Griffin, President
Choruss LLC. A one hour webinar on March 3, 2009 at 1:00 p.m. ET.

Per-copy charges for music and other intellectual property made sense when copies were physical objects, but that business model is ill-suited to the digital world. The mismatch has led to thousands of lawsuits against students and other consumers, tens of thousands of infringement notices sent to campuses and commercial ISPs, and millions of wasted person-hours dealing with these issues. Recently an alternate approach has been gaining momentum: voluntary collective licensing.
In this model, endorsed by organizations as diverse as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Warner Music Group, a flat monthly fee is collected covering all music access by a group of participants, generally the subscribers of a particular network. The money is then distributed to copyright holders based on the relative frequency of access of each individual work.
Griffin will talk about promoting blanket licensing, describe the advantages of this model and his plans for a series of campus-based pilot projects starting this fall.

The event is free, but registration is required and virtual seating is limited. REGISTER NOW.

Early reports on the service say that a small music-royalty fee would be into tuition payments from students. This model could be expanded to make ISPs the collector of these micropayments. Payment for the use of music is probably the greatest obstacle to satisfying the music industry and its customers.

Those unable to watch the webinar live can visit the archives after the event or browse related EDUCAUSE resources on Campus or Subscription Music Services and Licensing.

EDUCAUSE Live! is a series of free, hour-long interactive web seminars on critical information technology topics in higher education. Each seminar is delivered live using online audio and video/image presentation technology, allowing you to interact directly with the host and guests through your web browser. Because enrollment in each live seminar is limited, register early. If a seminar you’re interested in is either filled or scheduled for an inconvenient time, you can access the seminar afterward in the EDUCAUSE Live! archives, where you’ll find recordings of all past seminars.

Free Television

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 12:59:00 -0500

Lately, I have surprised myself by watching more television programs online. As a long time film buff and child of television, I like a big screen. I decried watching video on small devices like mobile devices. Lawrence of Arabia on an iPhone? Ridiculous.

Where's Lawrence?

My son gave me the first two seasons of 30 Rock on DVD for Christmas. He was surprised that I had never watched it and just knew I would like it. He was right. I have consuming episodes in small portions (not a 30 Rock marathon weekend which is just more of what is wrong with American consumption). I had avoided watching the current season because I wanted to catch up in the story arcs. Then I discovered that new episodes are available on Hulu.com.

What Hulu offers won't be a substitute for those DVDs, and it can only include "up to five trailing episodes of the current season for a limited time." What I'm using the service for is catching up on missed episodes. If I was more media-crazed at home, I could set things up to show them on a bigger screen than my laptop, but I have surprised myself. I'm okay with watching it on the laptop. 30 Rock is not Lawrence of Arabia and that's part of it.

Hulu also offers other shows past and present. I can even set up a queue that will save and remind me of episodes that are available. So, there's House and Fringe, but I also found classics that I loved like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show, and shows that might not be classics but that I'm curious to revisit (Night Gallery and Time Tunnel) or that people keep telling me to try (It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia).

Hulu also offers clips and other content (like tonight's first address to Congress by President Obama) and I can also embed many of the offerings.

TV.com is another big site. Hulu.com recently pulled its videos from TV.com and is removing their content from another site called Boxee. CNet owns TV.com and it was pretty boring when I first looked at it. But CBS bought CNet last year, and the site is turning into a Hulu type of video portal.

So, Hulu was early to start and seems to have more streaming videos from more shows, but the competitors are lining up. TV.com seems to be moving towards more emphasis on the social aspects of watching online videos as a way to distinguish their service. Of course, networks also offer some of this content on their own sites.

There is money to be made through advertising, though it certainly isn't what these networks are used to getting. According to AdAge, TV.com was getting 10% of the ad revenue from views that originated from TV.com and can probably negotiate its own content deals now.

Academic Earth

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:48:00 -0500

Sometimes it's hard to categorize a blog post. Take this one today. My first thought was that it was about MEDIA, but then I thought it could be eLEARNING or even OPEN EVERYTHING. First thought, best thought. I went with media. So what subject straddles these categories?

It is called Academic Earth and it's a collection of recorded lectures from a number of different universities in the United States. It is media and it is open and it could definitely be used for eLearning.

So far it offers lectures from Yale, MIT, Berkeley, Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford. They are all schools that have offered similar materials before (in some instances, the same material) on their own sites, in iTunes U and on YouTube.

So, what's different here? Academic Earth allows you to search across the school by university, subject, top rated professor, top rated lecture, and top rated courses. Being able to search and rate content from multiple sources is what makes this different from using a university site or their YouTube channel.

But I have to say, I have been sampling lectures from iTunes U and other sites since they launched and one thing that has made an impression on me is how boring some really well known profs from big name schools are in front of a class. No naming names, but there are a good number of lectures available on these sites that really do not make me want to be in the actual class.

That also includes the generally unedited nature of lecture captures - profs discussing grades & assignment and administrivia for 5 minutes before the lecture, lousy audio, questions you can't hear - and, as always, someone reading their bad PowerPoint slides isn't any better at an Ivy League school.

Can you help us sort through what's out there? Have you watched or used with your students a lecture or series from iTunes U, YouTube or Academic Earth that you highly recommend?

Snag Films

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 00:15:00 -0500

I just discovered the site snagfilms.com that let's you watch full-length documentary films for free.

They have a library of over 200 documentaries which you can browse by topic or by titles from A-Z. There is a widget for every film, which is what they consider to be snagging a film.

The first one I watched (and will now take off my NetFlix rental list) was SUPER SIZE ME. That's Morgan Spurlock's look at the American obesity epidemic. He interviews experts nationwide and then put himself on a “McDonald’s only” diet for thirty days straight. This is a Sundance award-winning feature that is entertaining, frightening and informative.

Not that this site is designed for educational media use (there are commercial breaks), but you could use that particular film to talk about corporate responsibility, nutritional education, health issues, school lunch programs and other issues.

You can also put films on the web. You can embed a widget on your web site, which they call "opening a virtual movie theater" and become a "Filmanthropist" (since you are donating your pixels and supporting independent films). When you click on "info" on any widget, you learn more about that film and a related charity you can also support.

The End of Educational Media

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:24:00 -0500

Perhaps this post should have preceded my post about "Bringing Back Video to the Classroom," but it came to me as I was writing that earlier one.

I started teaching in the 1970's in a junior high school. I taught English and a course called "Film & Video." The latter was a course that was half film appreciation and half film/video production.

I had a great time teaching it and students seemed to enjoy it. It grew so popular at one point that I was teaching eight half year sections of that and only one English class, so the principal put a cap on enrollments.

When I started the course we had three Super 8 film cameras, cut & splice film editors and a half-inch reel-to-reel Sony TCV-2010 video tape recorder. (A VTR before there were VCRs.) The blank tapes were about $35. You looked at the monitor to see what your were recording (no viewfinder on the camera). Incredibly crude compared with today's technology, but incredibly magical back then.

My second year we got a Sony Portapak where you could sling the VTR part on a strap over your shoulder and go mobile. Everyone wanted to leave the classroom to record.

We used the Super 8 film cameras to make two minute (one roll of film) animated films.

We did an abbreviated history of film from the first silent films, through classics of the 40s-60s. The county had a huge lending library of 16mm films that I could borrow - Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Nosferatu, Citizen Kane...

Yes, students would groan early in the course at "another black & white movie" but I also recall classes drained at the end of On the Waterfront who would compare the film favorably in their journals to the current Rocky films. M*A*S*H was a very popular TV series, but even the fans in my class were wowed by the original film.

We studied editing, lighting, camera angles. We knew what people in the credits like a gaffer, a grip and a Foley artist actually did for a living.

There were teachers all over the building using films and later videos (when VHS took hold) in their lessons. (I admit I was a little smug about what was then my own Media 2.0 course - not just students as consumers of media, but as creators.)

If you were a teacher in that period from the 60s through most of the 1980s, you just had to know how to thread a 16mm projector and fix a loop to get past torn sprockets. Kids who would have been computer nerds if there were computers were on the AVA squad (audio visual aids) delivering and fixing projectors, record players, overhead and filmstrip projectors and cassette recorders.

But something happened when the computers hit the classrooms. Media seemed to disappear. And it wasn't as simple as saying that teachers were doing the same things digitally.

Yes, we traded our VHS copy of Romeo & Juliet or The Outsiders for a DVD eventually, but classes were not making animated films, mini-documentaries, audio recordings - and recording podcasts was 20 years away.

Right now at my college, I'm trying to get faculty that I work with on writing courses to use video, and there is very little interest. They have access to streaming media (with resources like FMG and Intelecom) and media supplied by their textbook publishers that they can slice, dice, bookmark and annotate. They can have students view the video on their own from home (something I would have loved to have done in 1975). They have media creation tools available on the computers in their rooms. But no one wants to use it. Too much material to cover to have time to show things. Not enough time to learn how to use it to produce media.

I'm not involved in K-12 classrooms as I was in the past, but the teachers I do talk to say that they too are using less media in class.

Is it the end of educational media?

Norbert Elliot and I claimed it was the "End of the Essay" in a podcast series back in 2007, but we are still teaching the five-paragraph essay in our classes.

Frogs and other amphibians are disappearing. The honeybees are disappearing. I think educational media is dying out too, and I can't figure out why.

Bringing Back Video to the Classroom

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 00:14:00 -0500

Fritz Nordengren's post has me right at the opening by saying, "I’m not an evangelist of tools. I am an evangelist for how tools empower learners."

The post is about the Flip video camera B001HSOFI2 which I have seen written about online, but not paid any attention to as far as a purchase. That's odd because my MA focused on film/video and I taught video production courses for a few decades. I have a museum of video cameras in my own basement from VHS, to VHS-C, to mini-DV and early digital video cameras that I never really bothered to use for anything meaningful. I even saved my half-inch reel-to-reel student projects from the pre-VHS/Betamax period (though I have no way to play them).

So, why have I been ignoring video both in and out of the classroom?

If Web 2.0 was about being a creator and not just a consumer of web content, part of that is creating video. Students are doing it using their cell phones and web cams and posting it to Facebook, YouTube and other sites. What I don't see is that much video coming out of classrooms. (I don't see as much video being consumed in courses as it was in the late 20th century either - but that's for another post.)

Back to the Flip video. I saw the Educause “7 Things You Should Know About Flip Camcorders” report that says:

For educators, these small camcorders facilitate visual learning, which is frequently more engaging than other kinds of instruction and can transcend language barriers. A video artifact can be a highly effective tool for assessment, and the Flip camcorders offer easy access to this medium.

And I agree. But - I have not seen any compelling use of video in the classroom lately. I think it's because I have been away from K-12 where I suspect the most innovative applications of video to teaching are probably being done.

via Educause:

Those struggling to provide classroom technology on limited budgets may find an inexpensive digital camcorder offers more educational impact per dollar than a new laptop. A Flip could be used to record simple lab procedures for training purposes, such as clinical tasks for nursing or microbiology. The Flip functions well in low light, and students recording field trips, campus life, and peer interviews find the Flip’s low profile doesn’t act as a barrier between interviewer and interviewee. The Flip allows users to create video stories and essays, document procedures, interview experts, and record other activities, even as the technology itself becomes invisible.

FLIP BASICS The Flip MINO HD runs about $200. There are less expensive models too like the Flip Video Ultra. The camera attaches to your computer with an attached USB port (nice, no cables) and doesn't need an external battery as it also charges via the USB port. They are small digital camcorders, easy to use, have about an hour of recording, come with software (built in to the camera, no installation) to not only create (mp4 files), but edit and post the video to a site like YouTube. The software is not "pro" but you can copy and do some basic trimming of video and basic edits. (What is known as assembly-edits, not the fancier inserts where you move pieces of video out of order - like dropping in a later closeup to the master shot which we are so used to from TV and movies.) Of course, if you have the time, software and talent you can take your raw footage and copy it to your computer and get fancier.

As Nordengren says about having students use it:

They can edit at home, in class, in a shared lab, at Aunt Tillies….the need for dedicated editing platforms becomes a thing of the past.

This is not professional video camera for documentary work, or commercial work. It does not produce “broadcast quality” video. However, I hesitate to use that phrase as a reference point as it is a descriptor of quality that has decreasing relevance in today’s media world. The Flip does deliver very attractive images and reasonable sound that — on first glance — exceeds what we have previously seen in camcorders. The email function is probably easiest — in that it sends the video to a Flip server and sends a message to the recipient where they view the video on line as a flash video. This would be an easy way for students to turn in work. A more public display and potential source of peer critique is the built in posting to YouTube.

What probably interests me the most is summed up pretty well in this from the ducause document:

To the extent that media including video become accepted formats for academic work, devices like the Flip will open other avenues for student assignments. This will draw attention to the importance of developing new rubrics for effective evaluation of multimedia and will raise questions of fair use and appropriate attribution. Finally, students who use the Flip in academic exercises that begin as lifeblogs or citizen journalism may find that their learning opportunities have expanded beyond the classroom and into the wider community.

"Become accepted formats for academic work" is a key to this idea. It reminds me of my earlier attempts with Norbert Elliott to get "The End of the Essay" into motion.

OK people, show me the videos...