Program - Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Grace Agnew, Rutgers University Libraries

An an overview of the digital rights landscape for digital video, including copyright, DRM technologies for video, and the changing landscape for digital video rights, with Google's expanding digital video presence, the Yahoo portal, the potential WIPO Broadcasters Treaty, Second Life, and more.

E. George Beckwith, National University

There is no end to the number of books and articles that dwell on the poor state of affairs in education in the United States today, on the one hand, and the corruption of young by the gaming industry on the other. As I was listening to a C-Span program via satellite radio the other day as I was making the two hour drive from San Bernardino to San Diego, California to attend an academic meeting at National University, I heard a remarkable proposal by Senator Joe Lieberman which I had hoped someone at a high level would make. He said that the gaming industry should reach out to the education community and develop educational games to make learning more exciting and representative of the multimedia technology environment in which today's school children are going up. Said another away, we should "game the multiple intelligences."

For those who may need a reminder, the multiple intelligences approach to learning conceptualized by Dr. Howard Gardner (2004), holds that we learn not just in the two intelligences of verbal and mathematical on which learning techniques have historically focused but on at least five other intelligences (Bodily-Kinesthetic, Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, Musical, Spatial) which combine with Verbal and Mathematical to form a composite whole of how each of us learn as an individual. A definition of most of these intelligences is intuitive but Bodily-Kinesthetic and Visual-Spatial may need some elaboration. Regarding Bodily-Kinesthetic, Dickerson proposes that learning through gaming and technology is a highly active and interactive process when used appropriately. Computers rely mostly on eye-hand coordination for their operation--keyboarding and the use of the mouse or touch-screen, of specialized joy stick. This kinesthetic activity reinforces learning and makes the student an active participant in the learning process.
The popularity of video games is due to the total engagement of the player and skillful physical response to the challenges. Games such as "Pong" and "Breakout" were among the first to demonstrate the appeal of this kind of technology. Later, "Tetris" was designed by Alexey Pajitnov, a Russian mathematician, researcher in artificial intelligence, and member of the USSR Academy of Sciences; it is now published in Apple software. It demands fast decision-making and hand-eye coordination, along with quick testing of hypotheses. Undoubtedly, it is these action-packed challenges which engage students who might otherwise be bored in conventional math classes even though they call for the same kind of spatial and logical thinking.

Visual Spatial is also addressed by Dickerson in that today's students have grown up watching television and are highly oriented to visual learning. Slides, overhead transparencies, filmstrips, movies, and now gaming are important adjuncts to their learning. When interactive systems are also part of the learning process, students move from passive observers to active thinkers. My presentation at the conference will review the existing gaming and multiple intelligences research that indicate that "gaming the multiple intelligences" will excite and enhance student learning and may well be the education and training establishment's golden bullet that we have long been seeking.

Paul Burrows, University of Utah

PBCore (the Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary) provides a standard way to describe video, audio, text, images, and rich interactive learning objects. PBCore is the result of unprecedented collaboration between public television and radio system producers and managers, archivists and information scientists. It can also be used as a guide for a station or organization's archival or asset management process.

This session will update attendees on the recently published version 1.1 of PBCore and its accompanying XML Schema Definition (XSD), and how it is being implemented or synchronized with various content producers and distributors (such as PBS and NPR) and their content management systems. The PBCore session is of interest to people involved in production, traffic, scheduling, program selection, program distribution, and digital asset management systems. The session will also discuss training efforts and resources available to support the use of PBCore.

Erik Dobbelsteijn. SURFNet, Utrecht, Netherlands

SURFnet has previously done a pilot with several collaboration tools and decided to build a full service out of the most successful tools. The first setup was discussed last year at ViDe. New development in the area will be described in this abstract. The SURFgroepen service is expanding a data collaboration environment with synchronous collaboration tools for Presence, Instant Messaging, web-based videoconferencing, chat, application sharing and moreii. Next to that, the existing H.323 based videoconferencing service will get a SIP equivalent in the short term. The aim is to integrate all these collaboration tools in such a way, that it is possible for group members to start any kind of communication session from either a messaging client, through e-mail, or from a web browser, and make the session accessible through a wide variety of clients of the choice of the individual end user. This abstract tries to give an overview of ways to integrate these tools and what holes need to be filled to further pursue this goal.

Bob Dixon and Megan Troyer, Ohio State University

H.323 Industry-Standard video conferencing has now been extended to include high definition, just as has broadcast television. All of the major vendors are now providing HD equipment, including endpoints and multi-point control units. A special event called the Gigaconference was held recently, to determine the current state of the art in performance and interoperability. All the vendors and all people with HD endpoints (anywhere in the world) were invited to participate. It was demonstrated that there is excellent interoperability among all the vendors, and between high definition and standard definition endpoints. This was the largest-ever high-definition video conference, according to the vendors. The Internet2 Commons video service now supports high-definition conferences. Live demonstration. of HD video conferencing will be presented by the vendors.

Joseph Gaucher, Video Furnace, Inc.

Topics:
1. Conditioning/building the network to meet those requirements
2. Understanding IP video requirements
3. Components of the digital headend
4. Successful implementation to the desktops and televisions

What individuals learn:
1). How to configure the IP network for video services.
2). Successfully deploying to the desktops and televisions.
3). Aggregating and distributing content.

Jane Johnson, Library of Congress

This paper provides an overview of MIC (Moving Image Collections, pronounced 'mike'), a partnership of the Library of Congress and the Association of Moving Image Archivists. The MIC website (http://mic.loc.gov) integrates a union catalog, archive directory, and informational resources in a portal structure delivering customized information on archival moving images, their preservation, and the images themselves to diverse constituencies, including archivists, researchers, educators, and the general public. Facilitating union catalog participation is the mapping utility, which allows archives to map their own local metadata schema into the MIC core registry for import. A cataloging utility developed by Rutgers University Libraries and a service providers directory in development at Georgia Tech are scheduled for launch this year.

MIC allows users to search across multiple repositories to find current, detailed descriptions of moving images, and the images themselves, for the first time.
Moreover, MIC enables collaborative preservation decision-making and management on an international scale. Archivists can identify past preservation work and emerging critical need, reducing duplication of effort, preventing loss through deterioration, and ensuring that titles are preserved from the best surviving footage. MIC seeks to raise awareness about preservation issues and risks to our film, television and video heritage by educating readers as to the care of home collections, the role of archives, and the preservation process. MIC's expert contributors have created and gathered hundreds of informational resources to illuminate these issues and fulfill the daily informational requirements of working archivists.

Emerging from the National Moving Image Preservation Plans, MIC began as a preservation initiative. MIC's innovative architecture and community-driven development have allowed it to address the practical requirements of preserving analog artifacts as it evolves into an R&D platform to explore the leading edge of non-textual indexing, digital rights management, and educational use. This presentation will focus on MIC's strategic objectives and ways in which MIC enables preservation of moving images of all kinds.

Michal Krsek, CESNET, Czech Republic

The DistillerGrid System was developed at the beginning of 2006. Processing metadata from multimedia files on the Internet is not an easy task, as millions of URL entries need to be processed, and the sheer amount if information couldn't be handled at this time. The presentation will highlight some of the features of DistillerGrid as well as use computers in student labs for large scale computing tasks.

Robb Lindgren, Roy Pea and Joe Rosen

In this presentation we describe DIVER (Digital Interactive Video Exploration and Reflection)-a web-based video collaboration software environment developed at the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning. DIVER was developed to support fluid and coherent conversation around a video record by multiple distributed participants, a process that we refer to as computer supported collaborative video analysis, or CSCVA (Pea, Lindgren, & Rosen, 2006). DIVER works by allowing users to view digital video clips inside of their web browser, and to add text annotations to specific points in space and time within the video; it's an authoring process we refer to as making a "dive" (Pea, 2006). By controlling a viewing rectangle that is overlaid on the video, a user can direct the attention of other users to the specific areas that support the point or claim they wish to make. Additionally, DIVER allows users to integrate commentary on multiple video sources into a single dive and also to "remix" a dive into a stand-alone presentation showing only the parts of the video the user has selected and the accompanying commentary. Most importantly, DIVER gives users the ability to share their video analysis by inviting others to make contributions to the same dive, or by sending specific dive segments to others using email. The goal of the DIVER project is to make video as fluid of a medium for supporting conversation and making references as text.

We believe that DIVER can support a wide-range of video-based activities; however we have been especially interested in using DIVER in research settings and higher education. Several different academic institutions and research projects are currently using DIVER to support their video-based activities. A few examples: A group at Tufts Medical School has been uploading video of doctors-in-training explaining to patients their medical condition so that faculty members can make online evaluations of their communication skills. At Stanford University a research team has uploaded over 40 hours of video from interviews with families about their use of mathematics in the home. The Institute of Education in Singapore has been using DIVER to facilitate teacher education, and a resource center for foreign language teachers in Viterbo, Italy has used the platform to support the teaching of conversational English.

This presentation will demonstrate DIVER and its features for supporting collaboration with video. We will show examples from some of the applications of the software and we will discuss the theoretical challenges of CSCVA and how DIVER has sought to address these challenges.

Pea, R. D. (2006). Video-as-data and digital video manipulation techniques for transforming learning sciences research, education and other cultural practices. In J. Weiss, J. Nolan & P. Trifonas (Eds.), International handbook of virtual learning environments. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishing.

Pea, R., Lindgren, R., & Rosen, J. (2006). Computer-supported collaborative video analysis. Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS). Bloomington, Indiana. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Debra Piecka, Duquesne University

This session will describe a series of workshops designed to train K-12 educators about teaching with interactive videoconferencing. While participation in distance based learning classes has swelled in higher education, opportunities for distance based education in K-12 classrooms is still relatively novel. Despite the growing usage of distance learning technologies, K-12 teachers are slow to embrace the benefits of this technology. Many teachers are unsure about how to use the equipment, search for programs, plan for collaboration sessions, and assess their experiences. During a series of three workshops, teachers receive "hands-on" training about utilizing the equipment. These workshops aim to change the teachers' beliefs and understanding about the advantages of using this technology for achieving lasting reform. Teachers begin by learning about the benefits of interactive videoconferencing for their classroom and make Internet protocol (IP) phone calls. Next, they learn about planning considerations and online resources for programming and content searches. Teachers collectively participate in an interactive session. Lastly, teachers receive an assessment rubric to gauge their proficiency when teaching with interactive videoconferencing.

Last updated: February 19, 2007