[learning on screen - day 2]

1st speaker of the day: Paul Maidment, BBC Worldwide, BBC Motion Gallery

check out: https://jisc.bbcmotiongallery.com (but this is the corporate site although there is a 30 day free trial), the accessible version is here.

(nb: am struck again how un-googleable some of these speakers are...)

One of the pros of using the bbc motion gallery is the ability to view a video (which are tagged with key words but the tags are more or a taxonomy rather than folksonomy as it is the bbc who ass the "search related keywords") and then choose the key words which allows an "intuitive" way to search.

Interesting is the ability to choose the "inspiration" link which provides a *concept randomiser* "spawning new keywords as fast as you can click."

500 new BBC clips added each month, feedback from establishments to dictate future content addtions, more content collections to be added each quarter, including both broadcast and niche archives, showcasing of student work, competition to encourage students to creatively use BBC material (winning entries will appear on BBC tv)

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Professor Sean Street, Bournemouth University speaking about Online Access to the Archives of Independent Radio




Challenge: how to make available radio archives: radio.bufvc.ac.uk


(just tried to access the site but, sadly, my athens account doesn't give me access...so is this really accessible?)




We're being shown a radio documentary on Albert Pierrepoint called "The Hangman." Though a sound piece they're using windowms media player and have the image randomization turned on so we're all feeling slightly hypnotised.



Sean decides to show us how the search function works on this radio archive and decides to search for "suicide"..funnily enough: "no clips match your terms." The archive is still under construction. What is available is Brodsky and James Stewart, The Glen Miller Story (with some typos but we're told "it's a work in progress"). The idea of making independent radio clips available

The problem: the digitisation of clips. sticky-tape syndrome, some take was left to oxidise and that means part of the tape would be unreadable. The British Library figured out a way to *bake* the clips which could then be played ONCE and digitised then, if not the clips would be lost. This is restoration as well as access.

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Nipan J. Maniar, head of advanced interactive multimedia research group (what a great job title!) at Uni. of Portsmouth. He's talking about the university's use of streaming media.

• there are security issues, DRM
• right now the database has to be updated manually so out of 3000 uploads only 380 are available
• available in different kinds of quality because "bandwidth is not an issue" hrm...I think it's a huge issue in this country, some parts don't even have the possibility of broadband (lack of providers or inadequate lines etc..)
• they track the usage of any media that *leaves* portsmouth
• how to combine the teaching with the showing of streaming video? it shouldn't be a case of spectatorship but should be interactive
• look at www.lifesign.ac.uk and stream.port.ac.uk but nanonet.org.uk seems to have a really useful tool that allows people to upload ppts and video so on one side of the screen there is an image (ppt or page of text) and on the other side of the screen is a video of a lecture or presentation.
  

Here is a sample of Nipan using streaming media in his lectures:

• One stop media shop


• securing media
http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

• log usage


• tools for teachers - helpful way of encouraging/enabling academics' independency
  access to streaming media server


"it is good to give academics some weapons to make media interesting"

Nipan's idea to have educational media online for people to download as and when (like any other kind of video store but online and for educational media): www.sourcelearn.com.

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Chris Lane: "Presentation of DVD player/text commentary software (DPTCS)


This seems to be an idea that allows DVD content to be re-edited and integrated with other media such as text etc...

as teachers, we are moving from film educators to film makers, enacting while teaching

why is more sohpisticated DVD control important - prepare a teaching presentation, embed production in student learning

There is a really great idea - add GIS information to films so that students can literally track not only the shots but how the events/timeline unfold - the actual physicality of the more ephemeral film.

They have also created a massive database of their films that means all film files are searchable by character (how many shots and types of shots, close up etc...), by mood, by lighting...a major taxonomy behind each film but how great a resource would this be in any classroom?




We've just been shown a little clip of how users can add commentary to a dvd: AMAZING! I wish I'd had this software for my thesis. It means I would have been able to annoted web fictions with my different points of view. The clip we've been shown is a "traditional" reading of Vertigo, then a commentary employing theories of the male gaze and finally a third commentary with suggests a feminist interpretation.

But, right now this software seems only available for DVDs.

[reading images]

An interesting article on the reading (as in interpreting) of images and development of point of view. If the image appears alongside a narrative, people will wait to read the whole story before coming to any conclusions. If, however, the image appears with a list of information (rather than a narrative), people are quicker to form conclusions, basing their opinion more on the image rather than the verbal description. This has pedagogical and new media theory implications (among others).

"As our results indicate, pictures can have directionally opposite eVects on the impact of the verbal information they accompany, depending on whether this information is conveyed in a narrative or a list. These diVerences are largely traceable to the inXuence of pictures on the processes that individuals use to compute a judgment and the representations that are formed. When the information about a person describes a sequence of temporally related events, participants with the goal of forming an impression of the person are unlikely to compute an evaluation of the protagonist until the entire sequence is complete. Pictures provide perceptual symbols that both facilitate the formation of images of the individual events and permit the events to be perceptually linked, thereby leading a more coherent mental representation of the information to be constructed. When the information is conveyed in a list, however, participants attempt to form an evaluation of the protagonist on line by integrating the implications of the individual events as they encounter them, updating their impression as each new event is received. When pictures accompany the event descriptions, however, they appear to interfere with this integration process, resulting in a decrease in the impact of the descriptions. This interference largely occurs when pictures directly accompany the verbal information. Thus, as indicated by the supplementary data obtained in Experiment 2, presenting pictures separately from the verbal event descriptions had similar effects on participants’ evaluations regardless of the format in which the verbal material was presented.

Experiments 3 and 4 provided more direct indications of the processes and representations that underlie the judgments we observed in earlier studies. Experiment 3, for example, indicates that pictures are recognized both more quickly and more accurately when they are conveyed in a narrative than when they are conveyed in a list. Furthermore, verbal descriptions were also identified more accurately in the former condition, whereas the time required to make these identiWcations was longer. This latter effect is consistent with other evidence that when the features of information are represented in memory in a temporally related sequence, people engage in a mental search of the representation in order to identify these features, and the required time to do so is a reflection of this search.

Experiment 4 confrmed these implications and the nature of the representation formed more generally, showing that when event information is presented in a narrative
and, therefore, stored in memory as a temporally related sequence, exposure to one event description increases the speed of identifying the event that immediately follows it in the sequence. This eVect is not evident when the events are simply listed. Further results from this experiment indicate that pictures increased the time to identify statements when they were contained in a list but not when they were conveyed in a narrative. These results further strengthen the assumption that pictures interfered with the processing of the verbal information they accompanied."

"The impact of pictures on narrative- and list-based impression formation: A process interference model, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 43, Issue 3, May 2007, Pages 352-364
Rashmi Adaval, Linda M. Isbell and Jr., Robert S. Wyer"

[multimodality, representation, and new media]

I had to chuckle when I came across this presentation given by Gunther Kress for the IIID Expert Forum for Knowledge Presentation in 2003:

"But of course even though I don't see myself as working fully in the new media I speculate about what difference they make..."

[web 2.0 in pics]

Apparently (I've been told) web 2.0 is like *so* yesterday. I must be into retro things as I think this cute rendition of the web 2.0 scene looks more like a Where's Waldo (or "Wally" for the English readers....) rather than a who's who of new web/social software techy developments. However, can you spot any (1?) visible minorities?

Although already enrolled in a research degree and not really interested in Management, I am tempted to apply to the Singapore Institute of Management based solely on their amazingly game-like website (play the "play hooky" game or try the course wizard) and web 2.0-type ad (by EBoy like the posters above):


What is it about these images that I find so endearing? Perhaps there is something innocuous about all the rounded shapes that adds to the utopian outlook of web 2.0 and associated offshoots. According to Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli there are two main facets of contemporary (filmic) Londinium - posh and chaotic. Eboy's images seem to intertwine the the two which is probably why I'm drawn to these images, they are portraits of a city rather than floating fragments.

Click here for a little taste of the world beyond web 2.0.