January 6, 2009
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Video on the Learner Desktop
By George Wright, Service Architecture and Project Management, Benmorroch eLearning Ltd.
2. Digital video on the desktop invites use, not just viewing.
3. What does the user experience as different, exactly?
5. Then, what are the interactive uses of digital video?
6. Digital video changes even more when desktops get connected.
7. Babel can reinvent itself on networks: using data and metadata.
8. Interaction, “Objectizing,” and Sharing
1. Where do you start?
Best to think first of the learning model—focus first on what the video says and where it can be used. It has been normal for educators to give attention to the physical components of the technologies involved—hardware is the easiest part—but sooner or later, “What is to be streamed?” and “What do you do with what is streamed?” are questions that have to be asked.
2. Digital video on the desktop invites use, not just viewing.
Attention must be devoted to what happens when digital video resources arrive in class or the resource center because video on the PC causes change in personal and group response. It shows first in verbal reference: where we would conventionally say “viewers” for TV or analog video, we find ourselves saying “users” for digital video. A behavioral change shows within the language, too. When video gets digitized, it turns viewers into users.
No educator can put TV-like images on a PC screen and expect that the more “passive” viewing we associate with watching TV will be acceptable. Trials, pilots, labs, play, and practice have proven clearly that digital video adds little value if it is supplied to the user only as surrogate TV. But…when the inherently interactive nature of digital video is grasped and user-enabling features applied, fresh pathways open to the insight that educators seek to foster in the student’s school experience.
3. What does the user experience as different, exactly?
Consider proximity of user and playback platform as the trigger. The viewing experience changes greatly when moving images are displayed up close on the desktop with controls at hand to intervene in playback. (Small screens on portable small devices are a different story.) Perception and kinesthetic response change, hands reach for available tools, the size of the image is less important, and image presentation varies or alters with content and interaction. Sound source and perspective, just as important as pictures, alters from general “broadcast” in the room to local and intimate when headphones are worn (as they should be where multiple computers are used in class). Most of what we have considered as TV changes—except for the storytelling and modeling that makes video imaging a compelling resource in the first place. With video now delivered with digital control to the desktop, everything conspires to slide the viewer into user mode.
4. The 3 to 50 seat shift
Physical space and bodily attitude are important. When we watch a TV screen singly or in small groups at the normal (more or less) 3-meter distance, or further when in classrooms or home theatre installations with video projectors or large monitors, our bodies mark the experience very clearly — we lean back and relax to receive picture and sound delivered in a larger space and expanded ambience. We accept TV’s messaging and modeling as a kind of flow; we all know the dynamics. But when video is played on PCs, the way we as users address the experience changes. We lean in—the proximity is more like 50 centimeters, not meters—we read the small PC screen print, and we “mouse and point” and keypunch in engagement, all very different from “ relax and receive.” Sound may alter too. We have to turn it down or wear earphones to isolate ourselves and others. We engage the experience through the physical, psychological, and social actions of being up close and one-on-one. No longer “TV,” video on the PC desktop is inherently interactive: it turns viewers into users.
5. Then, what are the interactive uses of digital video?
While digital video images move and sound projects just like TV, there has been alteration through encoding and compression. Turned into bits, images rendered on computer screens can be viewed inside “windows” and manipulated. The difference shows first in playing or rendering, the end of the processing chain: users can intervene in picture and sound continuity to select and reorder according to their interests. TV cannot do that very well, but digital-video-on-the-desktop certainly can. It can pass control to users to the extent that, when appropriate choices are provided—educators have to think deeply about this part—they discover fresh opportunity to become better learners. Digital video can increase image acuity and dynamic range of picture and sound reproduction beyond conventional analog TV. Ironically, it can also diminish perceptual impact if the user chooses to reduce the proportion or quality delivered to the desktop — windows on windows, small image size, sound equalization changes, and so on. In general, though, its impact is only really reduced if the user—or the educator—does not see the differences and treats video on the desktop as though it were simply VHS or broadcast TV. It is not, and this list below shows some of the non-TV-like interactive features which enable important new learning possibilities:
- random access to any part of the program
- immediate content search-ability and “point-ability”
- user-managed control of playback, including reordering continuities
- “wrap-ability” and “embed-ability” in other software
- user-managed insertion of digital objects (e.g., personal text notes)
6. Digital video changes even more when desktops get connected.
To this point we have looked at a video file on the local PC pulled off a CD or a hard drive for image processing on the desktop of a local PC. When video files are located on a distant server, and network connections permit the local PC to “talk” to that server as a “client” so that the PC can request the server to send a file for it to play (notice, we make no mention of “download”), then video streams through the network—digital video-on-the-networked-PC-desktop—and adds these features in addition to those just listed:
- on-demand distribution with multi-point to multi-point access
- central usage and user track-ability and reporting
- personalized, shareable interfaces with transferable preferences and usage data
Networked digital video is an extended, essential variation on digital video, a new medium bringing changes within the “laws of media” that Marshall McLuhan defined. Networked digital video on the desktop seems born for demonstration, research, and project use. Shared use of its indexing facilities can help meet the personal needs of teachers and students and bring content linked to curriculum outcomes to the fingertips that control keyboard and mouse. However, its replication on networks will require refinement of learning models and informed teacher and learner support, and it will challenge users first meeting networked services and the logic and practice of Information and Communications Technology (ICT).
7. Babel can reinvent itself on networks: using data and metadata.
Collecting a range of video subject matter on a server and making it searchable on a network asks for an important element to be added to the view-use equation. It is the same one that bedevils the Internet/Web: how do I find what I want? How do I know what I want? How do I recognize it when I find it?
Answers are straightforward in principle. Standardize the way we describe and name the videos and video segments that get selected. Standardize the ways that we define and store and seek information about the video; use standard language to drive the concepts and words that handle digital video-on-the-Web. But to make it all work in a connected environment, we have to tag the video file with descriptive text just as in library catalogue description—i.e., meta-tag it, to use the current technical term; and associate those metatags with the video described. These standardized descriptions—metadata—are associated with the video file to facilitate access and use. The video file, the asset to which the metadata refers, functions with metadata as content. On the Web, it is the proper handling of content as metadata and asset that finds and streams the video asset to the user’s desktop.
8. Interaction, “Objectizing,” and Sharing
Video that has been tagged and indexed assumes the same identity on the desktop as other “learning objects,” an important attribute as video joins text, graphics, and audio to be packaged, mapped, and delivered on the Web. The various methods and nomenclatures for finding and using video resources, like all digitized educational resources, are evolving because of these re-formatting and re-purposing processes. Tag-search-and-share on the Internet applies to video and “pieces” of video just as it applies to text.
The definition and standardizing of variously defined pieces of information, video and otherwise, is increasingly central to resource use in schools. Video, graphics, audio, and text have been “flattened into the same container” (Negroponte’s “atoms into bits”). Indexed and shared on networks, “video objects” embedded not as the actual program files (they are too large, too fat) but as metadata pointers, allow video to have the same kind of instructional use for teachers and students as anything else on the desktop. Video as units of meaning, not just as the complete program we know from TV and VHS, becomes a different, more flexible learning resource. New palettes of presentation—with markets to follow—open up when students and teachers understand that networked digital video streamed to the desktop provide video in “bite-sized chunks” can fit school lessons and homework right in the moment of discovery and learning.
9. Convergence on the desktop
Learner desktops are probably the real point of the “convergence” processes we have heard trumpeted in the media. It is not much like the media version because it is much more about the convergence of different kinds of utility appropriate to learning needs, not with whether or how phone companies should own TV stations. This convergence deals with things like finding, selecting, using, and accounting for right-to-use of learning video. This convergence is of transactions hitherto physically and procedurally separate now gathered practically and accessibly on the desktop. In digital environments attached to networks, the desktop convergence of software, content, just-in-time access, and personal need-to-know becomes a new and important point for enabling learning needs and services, one more point for the teacher to help the student find insight and understanding.
All of us—students, teachers, administrators, suppliers, engineers, and business people—need greater focus on content, context, and user need. We have to give priority to what video is used for—beginning with ensuring access to it as a resource; proceeding then to mapping out its fit to curriculum, not omitting the licensing of rights and the obligations of intellectual property use; then setting the context of individual and group use; and then, finally, assessing the learning outcomes it enables, not forgetting to put in place the digital means to gather feedback and report on it.
Digital video use should probably create new learning opportunities; it will likely create new learning models; it will certainly create a lot of technical confusion as long as we focus too much on hardware and software. The challenge is to adapt networked access and interactive manipulability of video-based content resources to the discovery and meaning we search in schooling.
Retrieved from benmorroch.com/wiki/Video_on_the_Learner_Desktop on June 21, 2006, and edited for publication in Technos e-Zine. This is just one of George Wright’s “tissue papers,” published at the Benmorroch eLearning Ltd. Web site. Mr. Wright is a member of AIT’s Board of Directors.