CC Image - My Melting Brain - Att-NC-ND

I’ll say from the outset that I’m not going to answer the question in the title satisfactorily in this post. It’s just a something I’m asking myself at the moment.

I’m no web developer but it’s impossible to not notice the ding-dong between Apple and Adobe and how lots of people are pointing to HTML5 and saying that Flash video is doomed on mobile (and everywhere else).

I do wish they would sort it out. So undignified; like Colin Firth and Hugh Grant fighting in that film my wife made me watch.

A friend recently asked for my thoughts on what impact I thought HTML5 would have on Adobe and the quick answer is I haven’t the foggiest. I have, though been favouriting some blog posts and web stuff about it as I try to catch up with the rest of the world and I though I’d share some. It’s not comprehensive, but it’s a start.

• I liked this infographic from Focus.com (courtesy of the Guardian) as an easy route in to understanding the basics.
• This Minute Bio blog post is a bit more technical (it has a 45min video from Google which is heavy-going) but is a useful jumping off point to some other blog posts specifically…
• …this post on HTML5 competition with Flash and Silverlight from Infoworld.

On my basic, inexpert reading it looks like it would be too rash to say that HTML5 is going to kill Flash. Flash isn’t perfect but it is for the moment an integral part of the web and a key tool for many developers. It would be unrealistic to expect all those developers to down tools and switch to HTML5 when it comes out of beta. It also looks like a lot of the particularly rich web content will have to still be handled by Flash, Silverlight etc.

Implications for Education

I’d be interested to see how this pans out for our community. Further freeing up video on mobile devices can only be a good thing (although, how it all relates to H.264 I don’t yet know) and there are intriguing possibilities for how data can be presented and integrated with location information that may have implications for learning applications.

It will also be interesting to see how this affects web-numpties like me. Will we be presented with a whole new range of tools for sharing and collaborating and will it give non-experts new ways of presenting rich content for web applications? I do like that, from a learner’s perspective, having to rely less on plug ins for a lot of common content could make accessing information a lot easier, especially on mobile devices (although, as my colleague Carl pointed out just now this isn’t going to be some magic bullet that instantly makes all sites mobile friendly).

The consensus over a chat at coffee seemed to be that it’s unlikely to be a revolutionary step for us non-technical educators  but there will be benefits for the general web user-experience.

We’ll see.

What are your thoughts on HTML5′s implications for education technology? Have you come across any interesting articles that I should include?

Hallam Cascade by shanerounce (CC)

I can’t quite believe that we’re already through our first semester of the MSc at Sheffield Hallam. It’s been a challenging few months in which the learning has come thick and fast. It’s been tricky trying to get back into the mindset of a student, particularly difficult in the last month or so as the family is going through a bit of upheaval (more later – it’s all good).

The final piece of work was to do an evaluative case study on a work-based project or around 3,000 words, backed up by the literature. It was originally going to be about using Glogster as a way of improving year 9 students’ skills in examining character development in a Benjamin Zephaniah novel with a teacher from Handsworth Grange Community Sports College in Sheffield.

It looked like it was going to be quite a cool project but in the end OFSTED descended and we had to can it.

Luckily we were able to try something different fairly quickly with the same teacher. Instead we had a group of Year 11s come in to do an exercise using photo-story software to reflect on their responses to the poem Vultures by Chinua Achebe.

This sort of digital media work has been our bread and butter at the CLC for years now in lots of different contexts so it was nice to be able to examine it working in more details and get some data.

I don’t claim any great insights here but in the interests of sharing feel free to have a read and give me any constructive comments. I’m releasing it under a Creative Commons license (first time I’ve actively done this).

Link to the document here.

Digital Visual Literacy and Photostories by Chris Thomson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.electricchalk.com.

CC Flickr image by Rakka

Here’s another entry to the D-Ed Pool and it’s an interesting one as it’s a service I quite liked but also is a good example of one of the main pitfalls of using web2.0 tools for education.

Fliggo was a build-your-own video sharing site which I originally viewed way back here. The applications for education were plentiful. You could in effect create a TV channel for your school or class and protect it the same way you could protect a wordpress blog (controlling who can upload or view, add comments etc) with the added bonus that you could import videos from YouTube thus getting round most education ISPs’ filters.

A few weeks ago it stopped allowing me to upload videos and now it’s not even allowing me to login. In November Fliggo was “rolled into” Vidly a Twitter video service and the create-your-own aspect of the site was quietly put to bed. Have a read of Fliggo’s blog post – it’s quite illuminating.

Why is it important for educators?

It tells us somethings about the nature of the web2.0 at a time when it’s really taking off for teaching and learning.

1. Services like Fliggo take time and resources to build and then maintain. There is a lot of altruism on the web but it’s not limitless. People need to eat. I think I remember @dougbelshaw saying in a blog post that the web2.0 “free lunch” was a but of an illusion (sorry if that’s a misquote, Doug). In Fliggo’s case they needed to make a commercial decision and that didn’t include keeping Fliggo going.
2. The 2nd point is related. In the 11months or so since Fliggo was released the nature of the social web has changed. Twitter seems to be where the people are(and therefore, the money). Fliggo was catering for a need that appears to have vanished with alarming speed.

It’s one of the principle risks of using many web2.0 tools that there is no guarantee that it will be there when you want it. Many services are still in beta. Some may never come out of beta and slowly die a death as the venture capital funding runs out or you’ll find that features that were once free are now charged for.

I talked about this previously and Fliggo is a case in point. The way we as educators use web-based technology needs to take this fragility into account and we have to be more agile and flexible than some people have been used to.

RIP Fliggo (no flowers, please)

Image Credit - Tom Barrance

Film Education’s CP3 conference is a routinely excellent occasion and well worth your attention if you are involved in using digital media in education. I’ve blogged about it before.

The last event was in Liverpool (way back in July) and CP3 has now completely revamped its site and updated it with the resources from the event. Have a look…

This is extraordinarily good value! You can download podcasts and transcripts of the keynotes and the materials from the many workshops (the best bit of the conference). The quality is as high as ever.

Have a look at James Durran’s Keynote and Tom Barrance’s Image, Text and Sound workshop as good examples.

Keep your eye on the website for details of next year’s conference.

Did you attend the Liverpool conference? Review it for us…

York Minster

I was invited last week to support a creative session at the Sheffield Primary Headteachers’ Conference in York on digital imaging. It was run by Rob Walker from Playing for Success with me tagging along and throwing in my tuppence-worth.

I thought I’d share the results with you.

The aim was to demonstrate what could be achieved with a few simple guidelines on taking decent pics and different technologies. It would have been nice to give the Heads that took part a chance to try out the technology but in the end we only had 1.5 hours, enough for a pleasant, sunny walk round York.

We did a rudimentary Photostory of the best images the delegates took for the evening meal but I spent the following morning negotiating with BT Openzone to create the following (they’re just speedy sketches to get the delegates thinking so don’t expect high production values…

Animoto – an quick and easy way of stitching photos and video together with a bit of text to create something really engaging. See my previous post on Animoto for more.

Click here to see the video…

@Trip – we took along a wee GPS tracker mentioned previously so we could log the photos in Google Maps and upload to the @Trip server.
Click here to view (embedding isn’t really effective).

Photosynth – This was the first time I’d tried it and for a Microsoft product I was pleasantly suprised. But as Andy Bush, a colleague pointed out, what’s the educational benefit? Maybe not much by itself but as part of a larger project it makes for a high impact element. All you have to do is take as many pictures as you can of one location from plenty of different angles, upload them and some fancy algorithm stiches them all together. Frightfully clever! You can view it as a slide show or “walk around the semi-3D environment.

Needs Silverlight to run.

Soundscapes – we didn’t get a chance to do this due to time constraints but consider sending students out with sound recorders instead of cameras. When they get back to base, use Audacity, Garageband or Myna to create an abstract soundscape using loops and effects. The results may be a little “out there” but it’s a great way to shift your perspective on a location by thinking aurally, not visually.

Here’s a soundscape created by some Y9 students a while back in a location in Sheffield. I’ll send a Wispa bar to anyone who can correctly identify the location!

Adobe Premiere CS3

Clip Notes has been available with Abobe Premiere since CS3. I saw it demo’d when CS3 was launched 2 years ago but haven’t got around to trying it out till now. There are plenty of possibilities for using it in education.

In short, Premiere allows you to render a movie to Quicktime or Windows Media and embed it in a pdf. When you share the pdf it allows you to play the video and add annotations at specific points in the movie. Many users can add comments so you can build up a converstation about a particular video clip.

Have a look at this example I’ve put together using a video I produced for one of our schools last year.

Click to open Clip Notes

 You can download Adobe Reader here.

The comments sometimes zip past quickly but use the goto buttons and pause to catch them.

The main purpose of the tool is so that video producers can get a client’s approval on a cut of a video prior to final production but it would work equally well in an education setting. What about:

• Media – students can get detailed feedback from a teacher on their assembly, rough and final cuts before they hand the work in. Also good for digital video projects in ICT.
• PE – students can film a phase of play (in rugby for example) and then analyse patterns, outcomes and choices players could have made.
• History – download a clip from an archive site and then ask students to comment on aspects of the film.
• Science – film a reaction or process maybe using time-lapse or super slo-mo and get students to comment on what is happening.
• And so on…

It does require someone in school to have access to Premiere CS3 or 4; not cheap so it isn’t a universally accessible option (look for en educational supplieras there is a discount). Also, it’s not easy to use this online so it requires cumbersome saving and exporting on the school network.

Nevertheless, as Adobe Reader is free and already has a wide user-base it makes it a useful tool for education.

NOTE TO SELF: Include instructions on how to make it, fool!

• In Premiere, make sure the correct sequence is highlighted in the timeline
• Click on File – Export – Clip Notes
• Use the following screen to change the compression settings (QT or WMV, screen size, frame rate etc) click OK.
• Choose a location for the file
• Click Save

A further point is to make sure that you’re not running another pdf reader. Only Adobe Reader has the video codecs embedded in it (as far as I know). See my reply to Catherine’s comment below.

A recent Guardian article pointed to the decline in literacy skills of new recruits to the media industry. I thought it was interesting that Skillset talks about competence with  multiplatform media being important but that “traditional skills” like literacy and communication are part of that.

It struck me that studying media can be quite an attractive proposition for young people as its usually associated with technical skills like graphics, video, audio, web-design etc but all these things are basically empty containers for words.

Media studies is foremost an extension of creative writing. You can argue that choices about images, camera angles, film edits, sound design can be achieved without recourse to words buy they are all part of the narrative and so come under the creative writing banner.

The main question is “what is my message?”. Without any narrative substance then content is meaningless and will not survive (and so will not be paid for) and that has to come from words.

When I started this job 4 years ago I assumed that students were going to be quite media-savvy and be able critically read what they come across in the media, wrongly as it turned out. What the majority are good at is recycling cliches.

I reckon I’ve helped students produce around 70 short films for media and given the choice most of them choose to make a trailer for a horror movie. About 5 of those have been truly creative.

Considerng audience seems a minor point to most of them so they don’t ask “how can I tell this story in an interesting way?” or “how can I subvert this cliche to make it interesting” which is all about creativity.

The majority of the films our students make are technically competent and get good grades. I just wish that there was more of an emphasis placed on originality in the syllabus.

To finish with a quote from Gail Rebuck…

“To take advantage of the great opportunities to create and deliver compelling content to educate, engage and entertain readers, the industry needs a workforce capable of combining traditional skills with a new digital and technical capability underpinned by a renewed emphasis on creativity.”

Am I mispresenting this? Tell us your stories…

Image – adambowie on Flickr

I thought it needed sharing. Please have a look and let Catherine know what you think.

Now, go and look at the Sheffield South CLC blog for more ideas and a showcase of the work they’re doing.

CP3 2008 - Brighton

If you are interested in using digital video as a teaching and learning tool then this conference by Film Education comes highly recommended. It’s in Liverpool this year.

I’ve blogged about it before and have been to 3 of them although I haven’t quite got over the shame of weeping over Ian Wall on the final day in Leicester (I was ILL! OK?)

They’re down to their last few places so move quickly…

Image Credit – Tom Barrance

I feel the need to be mean and uncharitable. It’s been that sort of week.

With a few exceptions, all the videos of school productions I’ve seen have been unwatchable tosh. It’s a shame because you know that it’s been a labour or love for staff and students and they’ve thought “let’s preserve this, let’s film it” but what you end up with is mess that doesn’t really do the production justice.

Actually, there is a point to this. I was having a discussion with one of our partner teachers about documenting work done for their Arts Award submission and it got me thinking.

Filming a stage show well is REALLY tricky. You have problems with bad light, dodgy sound, audience noise and the like. Most schools  either stick a single camera at the back of the hall and let it run or try to use a few cameras. We’ve helped one of our schools do it using a 3 camera setup but it’s time consuming to sync the footage then edit it together (the students used Adobe Premiere CS3). The editors just got bored wading through what in the end was 5 hours of raw footage and it wasn’t really a great use of their time.

So what other options do you have?

Assuming your aim is to have some sort of record for posterity of the event you can use loads of different tools.

Learning Platform – use your platform to create a mini-site for the production. Most platforms will allow you to blog, have discussion forums, display media and keep tabs on relevant dates. It will also give you the opportunity to link to web pages on the play itself, sites that talk about acting/singing/dancing technique. It gives a great opportunity to widen the community involved in the production.

Photo-sharing – having good quality images of the rehearsal process and the maybe from the tech rehearsal as well is actually a much better record of the activity. Most of the fun and enduring memories come from the rehearsing anyway. Use Flickr or Picasa Web Albums for starters although there are loads of others.

Blogging – why not have people involved contributing to a group blog about the production from day 1? This will give you a great reflective record of the highs and lows of the whole process. Use your school’s learning platform blogs, Edublogs or WordPress. (Edublogs actually runs on the WordPress engine but is set up for school use). Alternatively, for UK schools, your regional grid for learning may have a system for setting up blogs for you.

Video – I’m not dismissing video out of hand; there are alternatives to just sticking a camera in the hall and hoping for the best. Why not try do a “Making of…” documentary using some footage of rehearsals, video diaries and photo slideshows. Alternatively, link up with your school’s media department and get their students to do a proper film of a small section of the play using a few camera angles and properly edited. I’m having a bit of fun with Fliggo at the moment for hosting short videos in a reasonably secure environment that I can access for embedding in blogs or sharing with people.

How has your school or college used ICT alongside your production?

Image – DavidQuick on Flickr