Video, Education, & Open Content: Best Practices

I returned from a conference on Video, Education, and Open Content at Columbia University in NYC yesterday. Some really amazing projects were presented, and there was a lot of stimulating conversation.

The following are my highlights from the conference:

Day 1

Creative Commons Video:



Yale's CMI2 group - Open Education Resources project to make around 40 courses freely and publicly available over the next 4 years!

Microsoft's Curtis Wong showed off an astronomy product sort of like Google Earth for the Universe under development at the Redmond software giant. The key difference is that the renderings are based on both a dataset and images.

Wong also showed off a tool called codescope used in an interactive CD-ROM on DaVinci's Codex Leicester. It's basically a really slick slideover window which seems to "peer through the document" to reveal an English translation.

There was a brief presentation by the senior VP of content strategy for Joost, an internet video (TV?) service developed by the creators of Skype. This product couldn't have come soon enough as I have been looking for a new way to clock-watch at work!

Good friend and former colleague Obadiah Greenberg presented on education and YouTube and the role it can (and will, knowing Obie) play for video in the .edu domain.

Throughout there was a lot of talk about archiving as well as IP and copyright issues...

Day 2

John Dehlin, director of MIT's OCW initiative talked about MIT's OCW initiative. It was a good presentation that ended with a suggestion that a video capture best practices "toolkit". I think Berkeley can do him one better than a toolkit with its open-source enterprise capture and delivery system currently under development...

UC Santa Cruz's Abram Stern presented on MetaVid a killer project that captures audio, video, close caption and ocr on-screen text from cable broadcasts of the house and senate. It has intense implications for making educational video more discoverable and search results more relevant and meaningful. Respect.

Colleague Judy Stern gave a great presentation on best practices for video in Teaching and Learning.

Colleague Mara Hancock rocked the house with a rousing call-to-arms for community and open-source development in education. She really seized the opportunity to evangelize for building an intelligently architected framework to develop within so various projects from the education community can be better leveraged to help each other and be more easily integrated into enterprise systems.

Dean Jansen from Participatory Culture Foundation (makers of the Democracy Player) & Colin Rhinesmith from the Berkman Center, Harvard Law School talked about Broadcast Machine an application you install on your website to easily publish video, audio, and images. These folks have a great concept and are just plain cool. I am really looking forward to further conversation and thinking about ways in which we might be able to incorporate the Broadcast Machine into our open source enterprise capture and delivery system.

Lastly, I had the opportunity to check out the various projects and products that CCNMTL has developed over the years. They are an inspired, educational, and forward thinking group and it shows in projects like Vital, Havel, and an amazing project that I can't seem to find online that aims to breakdown the barriers for educating couples where one of the two is HIV+ about the disease and how to prevent transmission to the uninfected partner.

The CCNMTL group was really terrific and I have to say that the event was killer. So killer, in fact, that it was jam packed and difficult to pick-up on everything that was put-down. Everything from registration, to AV support, to catering was first rate. The only change I'd suggest is a little more down-time so that folks could gather and communicate on a one-to-one basis about their projects and potential collaboration. I can't even begin to express how much I appreciate the opportunity to attend and participate.

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