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October 28, 2004
Video Syndication
Ok, this has all raced ahead in a matter of a fortnight. I haven't had time to try and syndicate video via RSS enclosures yet, and this is what I've gleaned from various places:
XSPF is an syndication format specifically for audio and video, and it has provisions for most of the features you're talking about here.
The home of our working group is here: http://playlist.musicbrainz.org/playlist/moin.cgi/
The current spec is here: http://gonze.com/xspf/xspf-draft-8.html
Quick background: An XML playlist format. XSPF stands for XML Shareable Playlist Format "Shareable" means about the same thing as syndication.
As per the discussion in the other thread, I created a MovableType plugin that generates RSS 2.0 enclosures when you add the rel="enclosure" attribute to your links. So, once installed this would create an enclosure:
<a href="http://www.hello.com/path/to/file.mov" rel="enclosure">Download</a>
This is my first MT plugin. It is derived from Brandon Fuller's MT-Enclosures plugin. I have not yet created a webpage for it with documentation, but I will soon. You can download it here:
http://www.vipodder.org/MT-RelEnclosures.zipYou made a comment about Wordpress and RSS enclosures a couple of weeks ago. If you hadn't already caught up with the news, as of a few days ago, Wordpress version 1.3alpha now automatically inserts any video, audio and image links in a blog entry as enclosures in the RSS2 feed.
Once syndication is happening, then we can worry about if it proves useful, personally I believe it is more important to be able to cite each other's work and link to it, rather than syndicate, but we can have both (it isn't about one or the other). I am intrigued though at how fast this has happened, and I'd probably argue this is because people understand syndication (after all it is what old media has done for years). The other stuff, that's harder to get your head around.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 12:33 PM | TrackBack
lookANDsee
The blog of Gordon Smith, who emailed me today about how WordPress now does enclosures for video and audio automatically. That rate of development pretty much guarantees that I'll be migrating a lot of content to WordPress in the very near future. Gordon's photo blog: lookANDsee
Posted by Adrian Miles at 12:26 PM | TrackBack
Next gen Codec
This is a piece from a few months ago on CNET about the development of H.264 and Microsoft's VC-9 codec. It does an excellent job of discussing the implications and significance of all this, of why this discussion matters and what the differences are. I know that H.264 has been accepted as the codec for next gen. DVD, and since it is an open standard I reckon that's a good thing. I don't know if and when a decision will be made about other forms of delivery (cable, satellite, etc).
Posted by Adrian Miles at 12:11 PM | TrackBack
Brisbane Ranges Two
Hot on the heels of the first Brisbane Ranges vog I've repeated the content, Brisbane Ranges Two is the result. This time with a different coloured background to the text track. In addition I've now added a couple of very simple sprites that toggle the text track on and off. I would have done this in the first Brisbane Ranges vog, but I was worried that no one would mouse around and discover that there were text tracks. So the first task was to show text tracks, the next was to make them a bit more amenable to user actions. As I mentioned in the entry about that work, since they're text tracks they're independent objects in the movie. So they can be turned on or off (you can also make them scroll, up down, left and right, change font, colour, you can even let people add their own text to the movie...).
Posted by Adrian Miles at 12:04 PM | TrackBack
Innovation in Patterns
This is an extract from an interview with Scott D. Anthony who is a consultant interested in innovation. It describes, indirectly, the curriculum changes we're undertaking in our media program, it also emphasises some of these qualities that network literacies proposes. It is about pattern recognition (configuration), not just analysis (interpretation) of gross numbers.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:57 AM | TrackBack
October 27, 2004
Brisbane Ranges vog
While sitting in Canberra I quickly put together a simple vog. It is a video and sound track with two text tracks, the only interactive element is that Jay's name and Textation are clickable in the text track. I wouldn't even really call that interactive. The footage is from April when Sean Cubitt, Jeremy Yuille, Anna and I went walking. I'd promised Sean to take him out in the bush if he wanted, and this was the trip. It's called Brisbane Ranges vog.
It is a quick response to an email where the use of text in video was mentioned and Jay responded. Text in QuickTime is trivial to make, incredibly useful, and another example of how misunderstood all this stuff is. So, a) a QuickTime text track is text, that's it. It isn't lettering that gets rendered into the video, like you do when making titles in a video editing program, it stays and is stored as text. B) it renders differently on different platforms, because it is just text. If you want text that is static, burn it in (you can do this in QuickTime but just use your editing package). c) Keeping it just text means that it stays as an independent layer in your video. Add to it, delete it, hide it, reveal it, it means it is an object available to be scripted because it is an individual layer in the movie. D) It is searchable. On an Apple click Command-R and type in some text. There you go, you now have a text track that anyone can search. (Try that with your film titles.) E) Text can be clickable, so it can load URLs and also be used to interact with other parts of the video.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 06:29 PM | TrackBack
Videoblogging with Blogger
From the very productive blog of Jon Hoem comes a tutorial on Videoblogging with Blogger
Posted by Adrian Miles at 06:19 PM | TrackBack
October 21, 2004
Tomorrow
This is what I'm doing tomorrow. What this doesn't say is that I'm writing the presentation now, then collecting my kids, getting up at around 5.30 am to get them to school and Anna and I to the airport.
I'm looking forward to catching up with Seth, and spending a long weekend in Canberra sans work. A couple of other people have been in touch too, so I'll probably see them after the gig.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 01:40 PM | TrackBack
Apple - QuickTime - Tools Tips - Tutorials
Apple - QuickTime - Tools & Tips - Tutorials:
http://homepage.mac.com/qt4web/sprites/items.html
has lots of small QT movies that you can use to add functionality to
your own movies without worrying about scripting. From the people who
wrote the bible (aka QuickTime on the Web).
Posted by Adrian Miles at 01:28 PM | TrackBack
Fresh from the videoblog
Fresh from the videoblog email list:
Vipodder is a Perl script that downloads audio and video files from RSS 2.0 feeds with enclosures. It creates iTunes playlists for the audio files and Cellulo playlists for the video files. Requires Mac OSX, Cellulo 2.0.0 Beta (http://www.cellulo.info), and a few Perl modules as described in the INSTALL portion of the script.
Download at http://www.vipodder.org
No time this week, or next, to play with this stuff, so by the time I get time the revolution will probably have begun.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 12:26 PM | TrackBack
October 20, 2004
Workshop on Blogs
Tomorrow morning I'm running a workshop with a lab full of secondary teachers introducing them to blogs. I've set up temporary blogs for each of them, and we'll run through blogging 101. I'm covering logging in, posting, editing, categories, some blog nomenclature, images, uploading files, templates, and anything else that crops up.
I've written an outline for the day, which is available below as a PDF and these are the links included in that document, in no particular order:
- First year Media Studies student blogs
- Educational weblogs portal
- EduBlog
- Sebastian Fiedler (webpublishing for learning and education)
- James Farmer
- Globe of Blogs
- Blogdex
- Bloglines
- WordPress
- Blogger.com
Posted by Adrian Miles at 07:31 PM | TrackBack
October 19, 2004
Podcasting and vogcasting
Well, podcasting is all the rage. Clients, casts, commentary (this is the main introduction, but check out podcaster.net for casts and help. and engadget for an excellent how to).
Don't have a pod, so can't really play, though obviously it works with any other content too, just make sure the mime types of the enclosure are correct, but my knee jerk (or jerk knee) reaction is in empathy with Andreas' when he notes:
Yes, it is brilliant in that it offers a very impressive and kewl way of letting people produce and distribute content that elegantly (and elegance is what is missing from those of us trying to vog, the tools are anything but), slips into things like iPods. So you can make, distribute and now people can listen in the way that they prefer to listen. But the content model is old media. The methodology is old media. A url should be, as Andreas notes, live so that it can be clickable. Or visible, or something. Otherwise it is nonbroadcast radio and the revolution is that community access is now equivalent to network access.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 05:17 PM | TrackBack
The Fictions of Deleuze and Guattari:A Fictional Poetic Biography:Clifford Duffy.
Was an email waiting for me this morning from Clifford Duffy introducting his The Fictions of Deleuze and Guattari:A Fictional Poetic Biography..
I think I remember Clifford from several years ago on the Deleuze-Guattari list, which I gave up on many moons ago (there are only so many raves parading as lines of flight you can endure). It is a fictional philosophy blog (now that could be an interesting genre). This is from the opening page:
Posted by Adrian Miles at 05:04 PM | TrackBack
October 18, 2004
Self Assessment Outcomes
I routinely (these days) require all my students to assess their participation. Everyone contributes ideas about what things they think they will have to do to learn through the semester, and I collate these, tidy them up, and this forms the basis of an assessment diary that they complete each week. At the end of semester they use the same form to determine their participation across the semester, and to award themselves their final mark.
The list of things is pretty constant, with interesting variations. For example my third year students in an applied research subject just completed included "getting grubby" as one of their activities, by which they meant they should get their hands dirty in thinking, making, that they should get out of their academic comfort zone.
Once they've decided their final mark they present to the class, briefly noting what they've done well, what they've learnt to do better, and what they could have done better. One day I will videotape this exercise, as the results are just outstanding. They are articulate, even, and do a brilliant job of describing what they have been able to develop and why. The highlight is, I think, that the terms they use are entirely their own, what has been significant for them, not me.
An activity like this supports the sorts of teaching we need to do for those who are going to work in the creative industries. It lets students learn how to identify what tasks may need to be done, how to evaluate their relative importance, and to then be able to reflect on these in contextually appropriate ways. I've done this in my first year teaching this year, and in their second year this will change so that rather than the entire cohort defining what counts as participation, it will be done individually. It encourages confidence and independent learning.
Finally, and this should not be underestimated, activities such as these reduce my assessment load, as students are defining and assessing their participation. This is sensible, largely because unless I introduce quite a few different activities any attempt by me to judge participation can only become little more than making participation equivalent to attendance, and possibly saying something in class. This is not participation. Individual's know what is required and what they've done, and they're the best placed to judge this.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 09:26 AM | TrackBack
October 16, 2004
Dogs and Daughters
We've got an addition to our family. Jersey, rumoured to be a fox terrier, Chihuahua cross. Rescued from a local pound as an 8 week old puppy.
She's now 14 or 15 weeks old, pretty much has decided she owns us, so there is not quite enough training going on. This is a snap from puppy school. It's a whole different world out there. The vet sends reminders for vaccinations, the puppy school teacher remembers all of the dog's names but owners never introduce themselves.
Next we'll become one of those people in the park who knows all the dogs by name, and has conversations with other dog owners about their dogs, and I'll refer to them as "you know, Rover's mum".
Posted by Adrian Miles at 02:43 PM | TrackBack
October 14, 2004
MT-Enclosures, vogs and RSS
To start audio blogging, you have to do the hard part first — record the audio file. Be interesting. Let’s say you recorded as an MP3 file. Then upload the MP3 file to your web server so that it is available for download. Then create a new blog entry that announces your post and has a link to the MP3. The link should be a standard <a> tag with the HREF pointing to the MP3. Save and rebuild your index files. Your RSS 2.0 index will now have an <enclosure> tag in it pointing to the MP3. You are all done!
Blogging and personal publishing was the first wave. The second wave is syndication, aggregation, and viable metadata.
This is a plug in for Movable Type (the blog system I'm currently using, though WordPress is starting to tempt me) that lets you add audio enclosures to your RSS 2.0 enclosure, presumably it works with QuickTime too (my Dad's in hospital today and has just had a stent inserted after an angioplasty, other more important things to do in a couple of minutes).
What this enables is for people to view your video via their rss aggregators, it also means that others can collate video more easily to do more interesting things with it (all the video's today that are about joy...).
Posted by Adrian Miles at 02:29 PM | TrackBack
RMIT - Academic Operating Procedures
RMIT - Academic Operating Procedures:
http://www.rmit.edu.au/course-admin/operating-procedures
Well, dull but I guess it would be good to document this somewhere for when I need it.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 02:13 PM | TrackBack
FOUND Magazine
FOUND Magazine:http://www.foundmagazine.com/
Got this via a student who emailed it to one of our subject lists. Basically it is a site where you send images of found objects and annotate them when you submit them. It is a bit basic, and the use of frames is appalling, but it is a good idea with an OK start.
What could you do differently? Well get rid of the frames to begin with. Some metadata and RSS feeds like flickr has been pioneering. This would mean I might view material collected by time, place, or key terms. Imagine all the love letters found. Or broken shoes.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:27 AM | TrackBack
Magnatune: MP3 files and music licensing (royalty free music and license music).
Magnatune: MP3 files and music licensing (royalty free music and license music). :
http://magnatune.com/
Got this via the videblogging email list (thanks Mr Gilligan). It's a shareware music label and so it applies the shareware licence model from software to audio. Listen, if you keep listening and like it, then pay for it at a nominal cost. If you listen and don't like it, don't worry about paying and don't worry about keeping it.
I don't think it will be long before quite a few books are published electronically on this model.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 10:44 AM | TrackBack
October 12, 2004
Lugano Variation Three
Another Lugano Variation, joining one and two. Lugano Variation Three continues the same series of three repeated clips. This time they're arranged left to right, though now with more dead space above and below. It works the same as the previous clips in that mousing in to the clip area toggles the soundtrack for that clip but it now also toggles the video itself. Mousing in makes the sound audible and the video visible, mousing out reverses this. As you mouse across the movie you get each of the clips visible then not.
What I was interested in making in this work was something where what you did disclosed the video. It isn't as elegant as I wanted it to be, though I might return to that for another variation, so for instance mousing in would allow the video to fade in, and fade out, so that the experience of the disclosure would be much more grounded in an experience of being revealed and disclosed. However, at this point just making this one is a step and sketch along the path.
Technically this is done just by using a black jpeg as a stage to the entire movie and all three video clips are playing in the background behind this black image. Mousing in to the relevant sprite simply shifts the layer of the video to the front so that it now appears over the black (this is on the mouse in event), and mousing out returns the video to behind the black layer. It does not perform as well as I would have anticipated, so I've dropped the idle rate to half a second. This just means it only checks to see where the mouse is every half second, so it will 'respond' slolwy.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 01:28 PM | TrackBack
New Media Poetics
New Media Poetics is a journal of theory and practice. It is concerned with the work of many communities of artists, communicators, designers, activists and academics.
Its approach is historical, analytical, critical, propositional, practical and political.
Found this while talking to David about electrofringe, looks interesting and also potentially a good place to publish.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 01:09 PM | TrackBack
October 11, 2004
Millennium Film Journal, No. 28 Interactivities
Millennium Film Journal, No. 28 Interactivities:
http://mfj-online.org/journalPages/MFJ28/MFJ28TOC.HTML
This issue has some early but significant and valuable essays on interactive cinema. Read them a couple of years ago and somewhere I need to return to for the research I'm doing.
Essays by Andrew Cameron, Malcolm Le Grice, Grahame Weinbren, and Richard Wright.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:25 AM | TrackBack
IT and education journal
The inaugural issue of Innovate, a peer-reviewed bimonthly e-journal featuring cutting-edge research and practice in using information technology to enhance education is now available at http://www.innovateonline.info.
Got this via the Humanist email list, but what I particularly like is that I posted this via ecto using ecto's services support (under the application menu in OS X select services, select ecto and hey presto).
Posted by Adrian Miles at 09:03 AM | TrackBack
October 08, 2004
Where Would We Be Without A Good Binary?
This week I gave a research paper to colleagues in my school. Largely the work I developed and presented at Lugano (would link to the conference but the url only ever points to the forthcoming event) earlier this year. Got bitten by a couple of peers, who took reasonable umbrage at my evangelical posturing. The paper is about pedagogy and blogs and basically moves from essays as 'closed' epistemological systems to blogs as 'open' epistemological systems. I discuss problems with the former and benefits of the latter. Something that the criticism helped focus for me is that what I'm writing about is not blogging but a broader literacy (more akin to Ulmer's electracy for example) which blogs model.
Reflecting on this afterwards, via a kernel planted by Stuart Moulthrop's essay in First Person I think what I'm describing in different terms is the shift that Stuart describes. This shift is significant, and sits alongside and is as important as the changes to communication wrought by contemporary information networks.
To sketch this shift I have used a series of simple binaries. The left side is what was, the right is what is coming to be. These distinctions express a possible generational divide, and at the moment they coexist with considerable tension. My own academic history has not been so much a move from one side to the other as the increasing understanding that I think and work in modes that complement one side of this.
More significantly my understanding and use of information technology is, and has always been, that it's 'logic' is of the right column, and this is how and why it should be used. This is problematic.
Here's my current list of 'categories'. YMMV, mine certainly does.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 02:19 PM | TrackBack
October 07, 2004
Writing Your Essay Hypertextually
A problem to help students writing essays at the moment in Network Media.
What is a footnote. It is usually commentary that is considered marginal to the main body of the essay, but still important which is why it is present. Of course, what often happens in footnotes is that the material is important, but you realise that it moves away from the central theme of the writing. In some cases (Jacques Derrida is infamous for this), the footnote may run to several pages!
In a genuinely hypertext writing (anyone that uses the word 'genuine' in an argument is usually trying to 'naturalise' something that may not be 'natural') footnotes should not exist. It is all about margins, or as Nancy Kaplan once said, "pages are just slow links" (in other words it is only about connection and flow), and so a footnote should be a page like any other and its ideas just like others.
But imagine this. You think of something that is footnote 'like'. Write a blog entry and put it in there. In your essay link to your blog entry so that if someone wanted to read more, they could. At that point you have made something that is approaching hypertext. Where now does your essay begin? End? What is 'in' it and 'outside' of it? This fluidity is one of the major ideas to understand this semester. The same fluidity now applies to all media online, not just text.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 02:16 PM | TrackBack
Computers and Composition
Computers and Composition @ Michigan Technological University
This is the online archive for this international journal. Handy to reference come bookmark.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 02:07 PM | TrackBack
Advanced Seminar docs
These are the four major documents to do with Advanced Seminar. They are the course guide, the self assessment diary, the outline of the project requirements and the journal assessment description. They are available below as pdf (Adobe Acrobat) files.
Advanced Seminar assessment diary
Advanced Seminar Course Guide
Advanced Seminar journal protocol
Advanced Seminar project description
Posted by Adrian Miles at 11:08 AM | TrackBack
October 06, 2004
sketched notes for why postgrads should blog
I'm presenting a 15 minute introduction to university postgraduates this afternoon. They are attending an information session on how to get work published, and I've been invited to talk about blogs.
Several off the cuff reasons: contemporary academics need to be networked academics, in all senses of the word; blogs allow you to establish a research identity in the public sphere; blogs allow you to establish and participate within appropriate communities of practice; blogs allow you to document your research as a process; blogs provide an avenue for publication.
Some local blogs by postgraduate students and academics are by Seth Keen, Melissa Gregg, Jean Burgess. If you look at their blogrolls you'll find others.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 04:59 PM | TrackBack
October 05, 2004
Assessing Collaboration
One of the subjects I'm co-teaching this semester is a closing final year thing called Advanced Media Production. It is where students spend a lot of their year developing projects that are required to have three media outcomes: video, audio, web. We're quite flexible about how each of these are interpreted, but our students have three years of a production major in TV or radio, and so these projects should showcase and develop their abilities. The web component is to force these students to think outside of the professional practice 'boxes' and to at least think about the media ecologies they are graduating into.
This semester an emphasis has been on collaborative practice, with various reflective exercises undertaken to support this. A substantial issue though has always been how to assess collaboration. As staff we don't know what actually goes on during the collaboration processes, and so assessment has historically fallen on the finished product as somehow indicating quality of collaboration. This is unsound, and certainly dissuades students from experimental risk taking (aka 'creativity') as they will stick to their conservative ways to make sure the finished work is as polished (and 'professional') as possible.
Hence this year I've developed an assessment strategy that goes some way towards being able to identify and assess the collaborative process in itself. 40% of their final mark is to be self assessed. This self assessment is comprised of two separate activities. The first activity involves a qualitative questionnaire that each student completes individually. It contains 8 questions which are answered on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being strongly not the case, 5 being strongly the case). The questions are:
- I have met project deadlines and milestones
- I felt comfortable in being able to initiate ideas in this project.
- I feel like my contribution was valuable and recognised.
- I felt like I was given the responsibility to do what I said I would do.
- As a team I believe that we have successfully completed the project as outlined in the original proposal.
- I believe the completed project will express professional excellence.
- I believe the completed project will be innovative.
- I would characterise the collaboration process as successful.
After ranking their response to each of these an overall mark is assigned following the university's ranking system (Pass through to High Distinction).
The questions are designed to help students reflect on what actually happened during the collaboration, without having to remember specific examples. They are also intended to be indicators of what would constitute a successful collaboration.
The second activity is simpler. Each team member in the collaboration is 'worth' $10,000, so that if the project had five members there is a budget of $50,000. On an individual basis the total budget is to be distributed amongst each of the team members where the amount given is to reflect their contribution to the collaboration.
At the end of this the students reform into their project teams and swap notes, discuss what criteria they've used for assessing the collaboration, and to discuss agreements and discrepancies.
The point of all this is to facilitate reflection on collaboration as a process, and to be able to evaluate the collaboration as this process, and not in terms of how polished the completed project may be. Ideally a trial run of the entire assessment should be undertaken with the students so that they're familiar with the terms and to work through any issues that may arise, and then to run the final assessment at the end of the course. Variations that are possible include not letting groups reform, so that some privacy around the assessment is possible. In our context we didn't do this because we wanted to develop skills in discussing the problems that collaboration generate. The two activities are used because the second is where the students generally allocate the budget in an equitable way, but the first is where differences appear. It is these differences that make a difference.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 12:25 PM | TrackBack
new literacies
In Network Media, as the semester draws to a close, students are beginning work on their final academic piece. Basically they're to choose one of three extracts I've chosen from the theoretical readings and they are to write an essay derived from, or based on, the extract.
The work is all in HTML, can include mixed media, and is inviting students to consider what or how their expression of knowledge might appear if HTML and the Web were the native writing environment. This is prompting them to think past using the Web as a publication environment and to conceive of it as an authoring and publishing medium.
One of the issues this is raising for the students is the problem of 'complete' reading - "what if people don't read all of my essay?" (because I've written it as a series of web pages). I am constantly bemused by this. As I point out in their own practice they rarely, if ever, read anything comprehensively, and by that I mean cover to cover, and one of the things they can explore in this assignment is to develop a writing genre and method that (might) facilitate such reading. Readers will follow those links that interest them, and ignore the rest. If they're interested they will read all, if not, they won't.
This anxiety of comprehensive reading is one of the legacies of print literacy. Print nurtures a culture of comprehensive reading, beginning to end, all the bits between. Finish the text. Start another. It is a culture of discreet parts where beginnings and endings are finite and, more or less, fixed. This is deeply taken for granted, this ideology of print.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 09:05 AM | TrackBack
October 04, 2004
Lugano Variation Two
I've mave made another Lugano vog. This one is identical to Lugano Variation One, except instead of being a vertical alignment of the videos it is now horizontal. Mousing in to each of the video panes toggles the soundtrack for that clip. As is usual in most of my work the point is to touch the video and for something to happen. More or a caress than a click. The "click to do something" seems to me to be training a generation of Pavlovian something-or-others. Just watch someone trying to use something new and watch the click-click-click that goes on. Touching, not hitting.
Posted by Adrian Miles at 05:35 PM | TrackBack
Week Away
We've just had a mid semester break (a misnomer, it is week 11 of 13) so I've spent the last week with Sophie (9) and Jasper (5) going to movies, playing in parks, arranging play overs, and the like. Was a refreshing change from desks, desktops, and insurmountable conversations. On the weekend managed a couple of nights at Venus Bay in a friends holiday house. Distant wash of surf, flocks of galahs and black cockies, and long drives through the rolled green that is South Gippsland. So, I'm back, ready for the end of semester then an intense few weeks of writing to finish some overdue papers.