Open Media Publishing in Online Learning Environments
Eric Gordon (Emerson College), Dean Jansen (Berkman Center/Participatory Culture Foundation) and I convened a one-day working group session last Thursday (4/26) at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society to discuss the potential of open source media publishing tools within online learning environments. Around 20 people were in attendence from a variety of academic and public media institutions, including Harvard, Yale, MIT, USC, Emerson College, WGBH, Manhattan Neighborhood Network, Cambridge Community Television and the Public Radio Exchange.
Here’s a bit of the session description from Eric Gordon:
Why are so many academic and public media institutions attempting to create alternatives to YouTube? What needs do these institutions have that can’t be satisfied with existing commercial applications? What then are the imperatives to construct an open source media system?
Wendy Seltzer gave a wonderful overview of some of the copyright issues and other legal challenges within open educational media sharing. We all agreed that the Center for Social Media’s Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use and Berkman’s Digital Learning Challenge paper are two useful documents to build upon in looking at academic media publishing and distribution within an open source framework.
Eric, Dean and I were pleased with the discussion and contributions from the group in working towards a set of principles and a technological framework with which to build upon in this area. The working group will be continuing our combined efforts in the lead up to IS2K7, where we will be holding another working group session on day two of the conference. In the meantime, we hope to learn from and connect with others working in this space.
Dean and I have been working together with the help of the Berkman Center & Participatory Culture Foundation towards fundraising efforts in building an open media library platform. (For a demo/mockup of Dean’s Open Media Library presentation visit this link). We hope the Berkman Center’s Media Library will provide a possible testbed for the project with the hopes of making this software available to other individuals and institutions once it’s up and running.
I’ll also be looking at this subject more closely for a directed study at Emerson College in the fall.
