Thu 24 May 2007
The photo above is a slide from Mara Hancock’s (UC Berkeley) presentation during the “Next Steps I - New Structures and Efficiences” session at CCNMTL’s Video, Education, and Open Content conference. See more pics from Mara’s presentation and from the conference on Flickr.
Wed 23 May 2007
Here are my notes from Brian Newman’s (ReNew Media) talk at at CCNMTL’s Video, Education, and Open Content conference:
ReNew Media is founded by Rockefeller Foundation to help media artists with funding their projects. ReNew offers Media Arts Scholarships and in this process they hear a lot about what filmmakers and media artists do not make (meaning $$) from their productions.
Media Artists and Open Content Current Paradigm
ReNew thought about how to fund media artists’ work up front. Stipulation of funding was that the work had to transfer to an alternate licensing (Creative Commons, etc.) scheme after 5 years. In asking that question, they found that filmmakers and other media artists’ are open to those ideas.
They decided to give money to artists saying, “we’ll give you money up front” to make a short piece under a CC license. They got some great works which they premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. They have a contest that allows people to remix the work.
ReNew has contracted with Intelligent Television to study the economics of distribution. With the goal of finding out how much filmmakers are actually making, because there is no information here. Brian says there are really only about 4 or 5 people every year who are making money off of independent/documentary films.
Proposals for Open Video Finance
Philanthropy needs to think about new ways to fund open content projects.
ReNew is also working on a project called The Reframe Project, subtitled, “Making our visual Heritage accessible to all”.
There’s a lot of film stuck on the shelf that educators want to use which are not open. ReNew is interested in sustainable models for funding digitization and archival projects. They are working with Amazon on the project. The deal is non-exclusive. ReNew will help with digitization and they will give sources back as a DVD. Owners can take it back and make it free or sell it all on iTunes.
They are helping people with delivery through:
All of these processes are opt-in.
Brian also talked about the new Reframe website, which will include:
They will also being doing a lot of work on rights issues. They are hoping it can become a nexus for people interested in these issues. They think this project will be a sustainable solution for long-term support.
Wed 23 May 2007
Here are my notes from Richard Lucier’s (Scholarly Communication Institute) talk at CCNMTL’s Video, Education, and Open Content conference:
Scholarly Communications Institute (SCI) is a 6 year Project, funded by the Mellon Institute and “housed” at the University of Virginia. The Institute is involved with:
SCI is involved mainly with Humanities scholars (interest of Mellon Foundation). SCI realizes that “digital scholarship is collaborative”. The overall goal of the institute is to create an opportunity for scholars to understand and embrace digital scholarship. SCI components involve summer meetings, communities of action, and real advances in digital scholarship. What they hope is to create are communities of action in a disciplinary way to create real advances in digital scholarship.
They also bring to the summer meeting 3 to 6 graduate students. They’ve found that the grad students have a significant impact on the senior scholars in terms of creating new ways for digital scholarship and analysis.
SCI is also concerned with issues of ethics across a number of different fields, including biomedical and journalistic ethics, etc.
The communities of action are created around publication and knowledge gathering. The real advances they have made include, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians Online and Architecture Visual Resource Network. This is not just an online journal, but it is a journal that seeks submissions in a variety of different technological forms. It has become a very different resource for people to access and to publish in. The Architecture Visual Resource Network will be a resource that allows people to input resources and have a vetting process that allows them to move from a big pile of info to something embedded into a database sanctioned by the Society of Architectural Historians. They have also used Flickr in their work to evaluate tagging v. structured metadata (to be able to publish, etc.).
SCI is currently interested in visual media scholars: film, video, photography, 3-d simulations and new media art. They are bringing new media scholars together to better understand the critical aspects of digital media for their work in order to understand the architectures that need to be put in place. They are interested in bringing together both theorists and practitioners. What they hope to develop this summer is a visual media scholar community to explore a community of action moving forward (something that NEH, Mellon and other foundations are interested in supporting).
Wed 23 May 2007
Here my notes from some of Josh Nathan’s (Thirteen/WNET) talk during the “Video, Education and the Law” session at Day Two of CCNMTL’s Video, Education, and Open Content conference:
Traditionally the way that we negotiate rights are in terms of manner of media and terms of use. As well as exclusivity. The bottom line in negotiation is money.
The market and the price of those rights are driven on how we monetize viewership of video. Either a pay-to-view, or DVD sale, or rental, or preview supported by ads or sponsorship. And technology is changing viewership radically and quickly. The internet is now a high end video portal. iPods are offering a whole new format.
This change in viewership is changing how we monetize viewership. Print is spending 6 times its share on ads compared to the viewership of print. The internet is half. It’s going to be equal in the next 6 months within each category of media.
What’s happening in the commercial world is (going to help define) how we are to think about rights. With convergence all media will come into the home with one click. With these new models we are going to have really interesting new deals. A combination of pay-per-view and ad supported models.
No one is really quite sure how we are going to make money on all of this.
The web doesn’t tolerate borders. Territory over time is going to disappear. We’re going to think about defining rights in terms of end users. Are they at home, are they in the classroom, or in the theatre, etc., and how are they paying for it?
What does it mean for best practices? It’s a little early to tell. The bottom line is to tag and track our content. This ties into the educational market, because we need a way to have an archive and a way to manage an archive. That’s the big challenge for educational institutions and public broadcasters.
How are going to archive in the future? We need some changes in the law.
The law gives us free music for public broadcasting. How are we going to think about what public broadcasting means within copyright moving forward?
Classroom use of public broadcasting media should be available free of copyright restrictions.The critical thing is to remember that the big mover in the market is always money. Whatever we do, what are the commercial models and how can we take advantage of those models, as long as no one feels ripped off by those models?
During the Q & A, Josh responded to the question, “Is there a reasonable timeline for approaching Congress on this?” by saying it’s too early - because we don’t know what we want, yet. The whole notion of changing the copyright law (is a good idea for the long run, but not in the short term).
Rick Prelinger (in the audience) added, “This could be a world changing thing in the way that Google announced” its Book digitization project. “They changed the world and the world has been struggling to catch up. So, there’s that. This could be a world changing mission that could change expectations. How do you spin that?”
Rick went on to ask “Who makes it? The big changes don’t get made without disobedience. Google didn’t ask to start crawling the web. Permission v. forgiveness thing. The issue is did it force people on all sides of the issue to think about business models?”
Josh said that the important thing to remember in all this is that educational institutions’ needs should define how the law works.
Tue 22 May 2007
Here are my notes from Rick Prelinger’s (Prelinger Archives and Internet Archive) keynote at CCNMTL’s Video, Education, and Open Content conference:
Title: “Remarks from a recovered archivist” - The promise of educational media.
There have been 1/4 million of (audio/visual) works produced for educators.
1. Leverage existing resources - we need to free educational materials from obscurity. We need to free educational and public media archives. Can we try to de-monitize an area that is truly import to our culture (to make it more available).
2. Segmentation - cutting the archive into little pieces will make the archives much more accessible. It’s really hard to touch a 12-minute rich media object. Hour archives are filled with lots of content. If we break them into short logical segments with human intervention, we gain a tremendous amount a value. As a result, items (will be) more suited to fit into an encyclopedia
3. Openness - the concept of open production is tremendously exciting. Openness in education is conceptually and practically tied together. But if we want to avoid doing public/educational tv over again we need to strongly conside the idea of openness. We need to think of it as a broad spectrum. Openness means not just seeing the book page, but the text too.
Openness on the web means everyone can crawl, naviagte and index what they find on the web. Also, it is the freedom to remix in an open domain. Everything needs to be editable. Openess is freedom to annotate and share the network with others. We really need to integrate editing tools - the swiss army knife for video, etc.
Openness enables interoperability. People are starting to think about this in the library world. Quilting is an early form of sampling. It relies on interoperabilty to fit into a matrix, etc. Interoperability rests on openess. We need to default to openness and share cultural materials.
4. Moratorium - we need new models and giving them space to flourish. Let’s declare a moratorium. Let’s see what sticks.
Points of departure - There is an opportunity to bridge archiving, video, and education.
Archives are lost to YouTube and we need to figure out how to recoup. If people look at archives as obstacles to access, then we’re in serious trouble.
We always think about re-purposing. This should give us pause. There is a long history of this.
. . . Let’s leave this to the viewers to decide.
User generated content enriches the libraries, but produces a dialogue and will have a profound impact on their shape and design.
Tue 22 May 2007
Notes from Peter Gerhardt’s (BBC Creative Archive) talk at CCNMTL’s Video, Education, and Open Content conference:
They determined a portion of the BBC archive to release for re-use by the people who pay for the BBC in the UK. But before setting out on the project they had to prove that it would have an impact in the market. They ran the project for about 18 months. They had about 100,000 registered users. It was completely free for them to do so. The people using the site were educational folks and learners, people interested in local history and natural history. It was all from the factual and news areas. They were more restricted when it came to the entertainment.
As a pilot, it was a reasonable success. It provided a lot of data that proved there was a strong public appetite to engage with the BBC archives.
The BBC is a heavily regulated institution. The new BBC trust is the regulator appointed by the government. The function of the trust is to simply approve what the BBC does. The trust has been in operation for six months and its only had time to approve one new idea.
The debate is about the old and the new. It’s about allowing people to interact with the media that people grew up with.
Tue 22 May 2007
Here are some (brief) notes from Murray Weston’s (British Universities Film and Video Council) presentation at CCNMTL’s Video, Education and Open Content conference:
Metadata is king (not always content).
There is something giving in the rights clearance process:
What is needed?
Tue 22 May 2007
Peter Brantley’s (Digital Library Federation) presentation at CCNMTL’s Video, Education and Open Content conference was titled “The Library interface”. He began by showing “A Fair(y) Use Tale” a video mashup by Eric Faden. Here are some notes from Peter’s talk:
There are not many books on music in the music library at Berkeley (where Peter works). Libraries have been physical things where people consume items and then return them. Libraries have been offline and not on a network. The fact that we can find things on the network has impacted the library in really profound ways.
Libraries assume that users can find things in a library and utilize that content. But, the world is changing. People make their own media in a way that librarians have not fully understood. There is not an understanding of the shift in production styles.
One thing that libraries have done is that they have become cafes, where they serve coffee and provide spaces for people to use their laptops. Even as people have their laptops, people are collaborating.
But, these new media have challenges. Many new media are ephermeral.
Because video should not be passively consumed. Video can teach. Libraries should deeply engage in understanding how to use video resources to provide educational enrichment for student and faculty.
Video is didactic. Video is an exchange, not just a form of consumption. And libraries need to be part of the conversation. There is a conversation going on between faculty and students, and the library needs to become a part of that conversation.
Libraries can tell stories. A new library is about parterning in a much deeper way with scholars and information technologiies and media creators to find new ways to connect with people in communities. (Goals include to) Engage and make content available.
We’re half way there. Libraries have lots of video content available. But, libraries need advisors from the outside communitiy to help them find ways to make it available.
Tue 22 May 2007
Notes from Peter B. Kaufman’s (Intelligent Television, CCNMTL) talk at CCNMTL’s Video, Education and Open Content conference:
The demand for online video has exploded. 100+ million videos watched on YouTube everyday. Fox interactive, Yahoo, Google/YouTube, Viacom, etc. now stream 7 million videos a month. Opportunities to produce video have exploded. FT (Financial Times) has declared that the democratization of video distribution is now underway.
Moving image archiving are digitizing. Personal storage, portability are accelarating. The legal and economic constructs are changing too. Chris Anderson’s new book will be released free and he’s asking people on his blog which title they like better for the book.
It’s time to take the temperature of rich media. At the heart of this meeting is education. There are challenges to educators using new media in the digital age. This meeting features 45 speakers over two days. We are fortunate to have the greatest speakers speaking on these topics (including) University educators, educators outside of the university, people working on best practices for those producing video, technological issues, archiving best practices, teaching and learning best practices, finance best practices, etc.
Tue 22 May 2007
Here are my notes from some of Cathy Casserly’s (William and Flora Hewlett Foundation) opening remarks here at CCNMTL’s Video, Education and Open Content conference:
How do we integrate new media technologies with new methods for teaching and learning? Right now they seem like two separate tracks. How do we make that much more pervasive? The goal is to be able to not only put out great content, but it’s about searchability, whether audio, video or text. There are many gems out there, but they are difficult to find. Hewlett has been working with Google and other search companies to address the issues of discoverability. CCLearn (Creative Commons) - focus on teaching and learning
Hewlett is working on an open URLs database with an OER search to help people find opencourseware, lesson plans, audio, video, etc. These databases will be open. They are looking for folks to help them build out the list of open URLs, as a way to find the high quality content and educational resources.
