Korsakow update being flagged. Some interesting new features. Am using this with 100 odd students this semester. We begin in a couple of weeks.
Tags: practiceAuthor Archive for Adrian
Now online. Check out http://escholarship.org/uc/ace_dac09. (My blog posts are becoming twitteresque in their brevity.)
Tags: practiceTama left a comment round here expressing disappointment with the iPad. The name sucks, a rare misfire I guess (I mean, what kool aid are they on to not see how silly that is?) but this is something that has enormous interest for me. So, to answer Tama, why?
I’m not one of those who think the product has problems because it is missing stuff. Like the original iPod it will evolve over time, so let’s not expect it to be everything to begin with – there lies the path of Word and Windows. If it is going to work, it will work as it is, with or without a camera or whatever other thing you really wish it had. Then they can play with what may or may not be added to it (my gut reaction is a camera is silly, it is not something you’d wave around to take pictures with, so video would only be for conferencing).
I also believe the iPad Touch and iPhone have shifted the ground for us not because of the touch screen sexiness, but because of the apps. Just as the iPod worked because of iTunes, it is not just the hardware but the experience design and integration between managing your media and the device. With the touch devices the apps exploded all this so that it was dead easy to get apps on your device, and they would work. Period. They could use a map, GPS, the phone, to let you call a nearby hotel then show you how to get there. But what also happened with the app store is that in amongst all the carryon about Open Source and so on Apple have produced a (problematic but sort of working) model to let any maker, of any scale, make an app and sell it for peanuts. I mean paying $1.30 an app is nothing, a third of a cup of coffee, it is an entirely new financial model (though familiar from the sale of singles in the iTunes store) that works because of the scale provided.
Scenario One
Now, apply this to something like the iPad. I don’t care about buying books, all this technology – perhaps beyond listening to music – is about letting me make stuff and share it. So, the iPhone and iPod Touch has a pretty simple XHTL, Javascript and CSS structure to make media rich works. As far as I know this will port to the iPad. What this means is that, just as with apps (when any one could make something and get it distributed, and even generate an income from their labour and intellectual property) on the smaller devices (and with the original web) we can make the content. Imagine writing, whether collectively or individually, your course readings for the iPad. Links that will work, a screen you can read, you can embed video and audio examples. Text, images, links to published papers. You can distribute this as you like. It is just like the web, except for a particular platform, a platform that is sort of like a book. All we need now is for some simple to use bits of software that will do this for us, an inDesign for iPad and the touches. Design, export, package up, distribute. Don’t know if it is there but add the ability to address different documents (so that this essay or book can link to and know about that other one over there in the same collection) and some cool things can be written. Better yet, get this bit of software and invite your classes to write a media rich essay on something, and share that around.
Scenario Two
iPad is out there, not a lot going on right now except it is a fancy big screen iPhone. But the app developers are busy, building yet more hundreds of these nifty things. This one reads PDFs. It lets you annotate them. It can search and build an index. It can search and build a concordance with user definable attributes (the sentence that contains this term, the paragraph…). That’s version 1. Version 2 notices that you are annotating stuff around a particular term and using that term a lot, so it asks if you’d like the entire pdf library to be searched for this term, building a concordance for you. Sure. And then that concordance is exported as its very own PDF or document of choice. Contains all the mentions of the key term/phrase, where it came from, page number. So here I have my professional library on the device, just like I have my music collection on my iPod…
Scenario Three
I take my iPad to the lecture (or not, doesn’t really matter). The audio and video feed is via the network so I pick that up and use my iPad Lecture thing tool (yet to be made) to view it. I touch the image for the bits that I want to keep, not bothering with the rest which will be archived elsewhere anyway if I actually need it. Sometimes I just get the whole lecture and annotate it. Voice comments, links to relevant readings, or even links to other lectures.
Now it can’t do these things. But it can play video and audio. You can touch it. Lets see what you can do with it in 12 months. If it is just a device for playing back existing media, nah. That’s just a tricked up first generation iPod, sexy, sleek, benchmarks in use and experience. But if we can start writing for this as a platform (in the way the printing press helped create the possibility for the novel, by way of example), then we get that little bit closer to what our hypertext pioneers always wanted to see.
Tags: Network LiteracyMy research is now in a new site. All the old stuff that used to live at vogmae.net.au/drupal is now gone and lives somewhere inside vogmae.net.au/research. So, research and projects and teaching by Adrian Miles now at http://vogmae.net.au/research. Some gaps but being filled.
Tags: practice, teachingWell, I’m in the thick of several self initiated projects right now. One involves the rebuilding of my videoblog site. This is progressing well and will be available shortly, though I won’t have migrated all the content across. Another is the development of a new writing project, again in Tinderbox and exported to HTML, which is where I want to develop some ideas. It is informal, blog like, writing but I don’t want the serial structure of a blog. It will be closer to what Mark calls a Fagerjordian structure for precisely the reasons he outlines. There’s a lot of good stuff in my blog, but I never find it, read it, see it. Hardly anyone else does either. This is not a problem of categories or tags. If I use lots of tags then I still can’t find stuff, because the tags are either too specific so I have to scratch and peck through too many, or I only use a few and then it becames a case of trawling through hundreds of entries. And that’s describing me trying to find stuff so how would anyone else? This is probably a generic problem with blogs. They’re great for reflection, for serialised content production and distribution, but they aren’t so good at being a usable archive. Finally, there’s the video project that I’ve started using Korsakow.
The video project is online, the other two should be up in early form next week.
Afterthought. I knew there was another project. I’m moving all my research content that currently sits in a Drupal installation to something much simpler and more lightweight. That one is also nearly finished and will be live real soon now too.
Tags: practiceWhile I am actually on research leave today finds me in the new office. Yes, it is quieter here than at home, but the reason is that I’m getting a new hard drive put into the laptop today (500MB) as the existing drive is chockers, as a consequence slow, I suspect a bit unstable, and I just can’t do any video work since there’s no room to actually grab and compress what I need to be working on. Now that is a short job, but I haven’t done a back up using Time Machine for nearly a month so need to get that done first. Except Time Machine seemed to be caught in the eternal “preparing…” loop of hell, which usually means the last backup was interrupted so it is rebuilding all its tables. This can take hours. So in lieu of that I found a spare 1Gb drive, reformatted that and am doing a new backup of 180Gb of data to that, if only because I now have a progress bar of actual data being backed up so have some idea of how long it will take (a long time). So, instead of a quick drop off, pick up and restore, it’s going to be all day. That’s OK. I’ve started a complete rebuild of the vog site, as well as my online publication. The vog I’ve been remaking using Tinderbox, the archive of published work etc using Stacey. This takes a lot of time, but since all I”m really doing right now is watching a progress bar it’s a good opportunity to do some more on each. I like the idea of Stacey, it is very easy to use, doesn’t need a database to host it, and will be very easy to customise. Tinderbox requires a bit more time, but once you get it doing what you want it’s real easy to use, publish, export, and just maintain.
Now, my rationale for rebuilding the vog is pretty simple. First of all my online video work is spread across at least three sites, with duplication, mess, and frankly no ability to see the whole lot as a body of work. As someone who, in their middle age, is realising that my reputation is going to rely more on more on my video work, this is not a good thing. Now, I did buy a video specific theme and start to add material to a WordPress installation, but a) the theme is just too unattractive, and b) I still remain subject to other systems just a bit too much. When WordPress is upgraded, when plugins no longer work, or whatever, things just break (and not to mention just how clunky it is to add material). So Tinderbox lets me have it all on my laptop, can run it here, test, check, prototype and then just publish online. The format is XML, and I can work easily and quickly without being online, or without worrying that Dreamhost has burped. I can also easily design pages using plain vanilla HTML and CSS, and it will be trivial to use HTML 5 when I want to.
However, as I was busy tinkering with Stacey I saw there was an update. So install that, all is good, but ah ha! It now supports video. This is seriously impressive and useful and makes it a stunning simple tool for anyone that wants a video portfolio site. Of course I immediately went, hey, why don’t I use Stacey for my vog and not use Tinderbox. Yeah, that’s a few days work gone, but there’s a certain elegance to how it works and it’s real easy to add new material. So that moment, you know exactly what it is. A simultaneous pit of your stomach dread and anxiety of “oh, this would be better but what about all the cursor sweat so far?” and excitement of “hey, cool, a new system to play and tinker with and you know it probably will be better in the long run”. I sat with this for a bit, then backed off and remembered that one reason I’ve gone with Tinderbox for the vog is that I don’t want to get mucked around if code changes somewhere else. I might use Stacey for other things with video, but for the vog it is Tinderbox. I have control over the content, and I can also very easily do things (like add related videos, or videos from a year ago) that I just can’t in Stacey. So I’ll keep trying to finish my portfolio site in Stacey (writings and projects), and get more of the video into the new vog and get it online, even before all the material has been moved.
That’s pretty much been my first 4 hours today.
Tags: Network Literacy, practiceSo, been experimenting with fragments. Have added some more material, removed the text over the preview images (much better), and tried different compression options within Korsakow. At the moment I’m using the highest quality H.264 compression, but quite a few people have video that stutters (though it doesn’t happen for me, which is odd since the server is in the States), so have tried lower bit rates. The flv settings all generate horrible video. Even the highest setting, which produces larger files than the best H.264, is not nearly as sharp as H.264, while the next quality down has some clips where the pixellation is closer to the more experimental low res video that I do. I think the next steps in experimenting will be to move the preview windows around. At the moment they get populated sequentially, the first n, then the next n, and so on. But this is just a bit too much. I think if I moved them so that 3 got populated, but not in a row, then more, again not in a row, that things would look better. The only downside which might be a real breaker is that I can’t change the layout for each request, so whatever the pattern is it will be the same for every screen. It might just end up looking silly. I’ve also started adding duration information for the clips, though I’m not happy with how it appears, and have also started trying to limit the number of previews displayed for each keyword search, so that if a keyword has 20 matches it does not fill all the preview windows below the main video panel but will only fill, say 4, so that other keyword searches can populate the rest of the previews. This helps keep access to the library quite open and leaves room for the novel (and means you generally don’t get 10 preview images of just children).
Tags: practiceFor those who may be interested in how I go about adding and making content for fragments. After I built the first version it is easy to keep adding new content. In this way I’m not treating the Korsakow System as a tool for making a single whole work, but more like a blog project where material is continually being added. To do this I do the usual shooting and editing, compress it down to a pretty high quality h.264 QT file, make a thumbnail graphic, and then add the thumbnail and the video to the Korsakow project. Add keywords to define the clip, keywords that the clip should search for, write any text I want associated with the clip, save the project and export. Korsakow is pretty smart when it comes to export so you have the option of only having to encode/transcode new material, so by choosing this it only transcode the new added video. Then I can use a FTP client that has synchronisation to just sync the local copy of the files to the server, and since it is sycning it only uploads the new material. This makes things pretty fast, and so it is viable to use for ongoing projects.
Tags: practice
