NMC 2006: The Impact of Emerging Technologies on Information: Learning by Immersion
June 9, 2006
Mary Alice Ball, from the School of Library and Information Science at the Indiana University at Indianapolis presented. She teaches information policy there, which includes issues, stakeholders and influences. She wanted future librarians to understand that technology is a catalyst for change. The nature of content is changing. Content is moving away from text, for example. Our roles are changing. Librarians have been intermediaries between content creators and consumers. Not anymore. And policy always lags behind the technology.
Students have had a passive approach to their education and she wanted to change this. She wanted students to experience content creation as well as consumption. She wants students to take risks, and to be open to the unexpected.
There was a good mix of students, and the class met half-online and half in the classroom. They used Breeze and their course management system. There were two teams, into which students self-selected. Policy team and technology team. Students felt safe to risk joining the technology team even if they felt it was their weakness.
She added podcasts and streaming media. She'd been promised iPods for the class, but it ended up not working out in time (death by committee). There were traditional readings and non-tradiitonal readings. Lots of discussion online and in the classroom. Guest speakers in person and online (MSN Messenger)
A student proposed a podcast project, and she turned it into a vodcast (keeping up with Purdue). Collaboration was also key to the course's success. One student had real problems collaborating, and left the class. The remaining students created a web site (Joomla CMS, discussion forums & IM, papers, abstracts and weblinks). Close interplay took place between the technology team and the policy team.
Students were challenged with limited contact and limited structure for the class overall. By having students create information content while learning, the class was recursive. Students opted to restrict access to their content. They also learned that technology rules over policy – the code determines what can happen, not the policy. They also learned that consumers are overwhelmed by the amount of content to be consumed. Consumers also feel intimidated by the lack of control. They learned that authority is unclear and that librarians need to assume more responsibility to educate themselves and others.
Question: did you use wikis or blogs? No. The students didn't feel that wikis would give them the type of control and structure they wanted (while our presenter said they understood wikis, I seriously doubt this is the case based on this comment). As for blogs, she thought the students would put a blog up, but the technology team was overwhelmed with the amount of work they had, and it didn't happen. Mary Alice has decided not to try using wikis or blogs this next time she teaches the class.
I followed up on the reasons not to use a wiki, and without explicitly discussing the matter, she felt that it was too much for them to learn. Videos were captured and edited by Mary as well, so the student work for the course essentially was content in the Joomla CMS.
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NMC 2006: Stream It! Download It! Podcast It!
June 9, 2006
It was a big audience for this session, presented by Michael Beahan and James Bartholomew at the Jones Media Center at the Dartmouth College Library. The Jones Media Center has 17 multimedia creation stations, and 2 project rooms. It seems to be a combination of the TLC and MRC at Richmond.
They've had class lecture recordings posted to the network, but IT will be working on implementing this on a campus-wide program. Like our TLC, they loan out equipment for media production. Training is also available, including some training videos.
Dartmouth is redesigning their home page (due July 1), and it will offer many more videos of campus events. Dartmouth has an Internship in Digital Media Technology.
Responsibilities include:
- One year, full time, paid with benefits
- Assists students and faculty with multimedia projects
- Leads workshops
- Automated process for streaming and podcasting
They wanted a centralized source to simultaneously create:
- Streaming Video
- Video Podcast
- Audio Podcast
- DVD Video
Goals:
- One file for streaming and video podcasting
- One encoding for audio podcasting
- Three delivery methods
MPEG-4 Part 12 (mp4) was the format they chose to use as the “container”. Two codecs: MPEG-4 Part 2 has better compression efficiency than MPEG-2. AAC audio was the only choice for podcasts. MPEG-4 Part 10 Video / h.264 / AVC has high playback processing requirements. h264 is smaller on the screen too, so MPEG-4 Part 2 makes more sense. Data rate is the same for either.
Their choices then were MPAG-4 Part 2 Video (Advanced Simple Profile, and the MPEG-2 Part 7 Audio (AAC). They do hint all of the vide and audio. Only a little bit of data is required, and it facilitates streaming.
Why automate? They had 61 encoding requests for the spring 2006 term, and more requests are coming. Encoding media one at a time is not feasible.
They have a server running Linux, with open source tools, with scripts to link tools together (shell & php). Other than the MPEG royalties and the server itself, everything is free.
Video is submitted via SFTP. The video file and the metadata are both needed. They prefer RAW DV format, but will take many formats. The metadata file includes which outputs they want (streaming video, video podcast, etc.). Scripts read the metadata and send the file to be processed to the appropriate programs.
They use PHP scripts to generate XML RSS feeds, and will assist in getting the feed set up in the iTunes Podcast store.
Their JMC Flix program podcast highlights items in the JMC collection. So vodcasts are being used for promotion in addition to lectures. Items to be streamed are moved over automatically but the one manual step is to put an entry into the library catalog. Dartmouth uses Millennium for their catalog, and there is integration between Millennium and Blackboard. They plan to use course reserves via Blackboard to provide access to streaming media this fall.
For DVDs, they use the highest possible data rate up to the 4.7GB capacity on a disc.
THey plan to expand into public lectures, performance podcasts and Library education programs. The system is getting used. There are 118 subscriptions to the JMC promotional vodcast. Students are subscribing to vodcasts and podcasts, in addition to streaming access. They had 893 uses of streaming reserve material in the spring of 2006 (this number is well below what our Music Library has done with streaming audio this past semester with just our Music department, but still encouraging).
Several questions came up regarding copyright and authentication. Dartmouth has a good scheme overall, which will be improved when they integrate with Blackboard this fall. People submitting files sign off that they have copyright on the media, and this information goes into the Library catalog. James did all of this media work and programming on his own.
Accessibility, including captioning, are also on Dartmouth's horizon.
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