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Why the IMS OpenVideo initiative should become literally open

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In January IMS Global announced its work on a standard for video capturing. Indeed it would be nice to have more guidance on how to capture, post process, store and deliver a video. Currently there is lack of interoperability between different platform. For instance, a set of video lectures cannot be stored in a single format in order to be republished on another learning management system. There many open questions developers are asking when they try to integrate video into the dinosaurs of learning environments – namely Blackboard, moodle, Ilias, and OLAT:

  • In what format shall I store the descriptions about video formats, sizes, and media types like segments, thumbnails, posters, transcripts, ect. ?
  • What would be the right format in order to describe a course where students get there weekly portion of video content like in a MOOC? Structuring and sequencing could be achieved with SCORM, while system features and learning outcomes can not be expressed.
  • How can we define collaborative learning activities for groups who are working on a instance of source video so that each group has its own playground for augmenting and discussing contents?
  • What is a proper metadata schema for long time archiving of video footage from educational or research fields? Currently we know about videoMD, PBCore, and METS, but all those approaches for librarians not considering learning taxonomies, didactically methods, student interactions and other relevant descriptions.

All these questions and many more could be ask in a joint standard initiative, but the way it is organized at IMS Global is questionable. While labeled as an ‘Open’ initiative the interested parties have to pay a yearly fee of $3,500 to get access to the working drafts and resources they have to pay $15.000 to become a voting member and influence the decision process. Even the discussion of the current members is not as transparent as one might expect. So fare Kaltura outed to be on of the participants (the only one?). All the others stay in the background and deciding about the future of educational video technology at our schools and universities.

However, such an initiative could be literally open and invite a broad range of stakeholders form all around the world. Defining standards should be organized like the Request For Comment (RFC) papers or a W3C working group. The participants should communicate in public mailing lists or social network circles. Furthermore, all drafts should be made available by naming the contributing authors.

Final submission of 9 interaction design patterns for video learning environments

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Yesterday I finished my 10 month work on two papers for the European Conference of Patern Languages of Programs 2014, held at Irsee Monastry/Bavaria. When submitting conference papers the number of externally triggered revisions of your paper is lower or equal then two. Once the reviewer provides a feedback you can incorporate it in your paper. Seldom the editor needs to advice you to fulfil the authors guidelines.
At EuroPLoP you get guided by a shepherd that provides you feedback on four to five iterations before submitting the paper for the conference. That means hard work on the text.
But it comes even better when you get the chance to hear others discussing our paper in one of the writers workshops at the conference. Any defence of the authors points of view or background considerations is prevented in order to obtain the message that other readers obtain from your written work.

Maybe more interesting is the resulting content of the two papers I’ve submitted.

Interaction design patterns for interactive video players in video-based learning environments

This paper is about interaction design patterns that describe common solutions of reoccurring problems in the design and development of video-based learning environments. The patterns are organized in two layers. The first layer incorporates the micro interactivity in the video player itself. Any manipulation that effects the presentation within the video or intervening its playback is part of the micro-level of interactivity. Currently, 17 patterns have been identified for that layer. Five of them will be object of that article: Annotated Timeline, Classified Marks, Playback Speed, User Traces, and Visual Summary.
The second layer of the pattern language consists of 12 patterns that describe interactivity on a macro-level. Macro interactivity comprises all manipulations concerning one or more videos as a whole. That does not include the playback but the organisation and structure of the video learning environment.

Interaction design patterns for design and development of video learning environments

This paper is about interaction design patterns that describe common solutions of reoccurring problems in the design and development of video-based learning environments. The patterns are organized in two layers. The first layer incorporates the micro interactivity in the video player itself. Any manipulation that effects the presentation within the video or intervening its playback is part of the micro-level of interactivity. Currently, 17 patterns have been identified for that layer. Five of them will be object of that article: Annotated Timeline, Classified Marks, Playback Speed, User Traces, and Visual Summary.
The second layer of the pattern language consists of 12 patterns that describe interactivity on a macro-level. Macro interactivity comprises all manipulations concerning one or more videos as a whole. That does not include the playback but the organisation and structure of the video learning environment.

Terezin 2014 – reviewed

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Since a few days we are back home from the conference Films from Ghettos and Camps: Propaganda – Clandestine Messages – Historical Source that was held at the Terezin Memorial Estate in Czech Republic. Thanks to Natascha Drubek who organized the event we got the great opportunity to introduce our project “Thereseienstadt explained” to the international audience of historians, film scholars, and people from different archives. Last but not least we could met Karel Margry – the most proven expert of the film that we augmenting to a learning resource. For us it became clear that we will need some further financial support in order to assess the content quality of our productions as well as to translate the content for a broad audience. Therefore “Theresienstadt explained” will be resided as a regular research project at the International Institute in Zittau of Dresden University of Technology.

The hand-out that we gave out at the conference.

Mendeley Analytics – part 1: Data Visualization for collected Publications in Mendeley

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Mendeley is valuable tool to organize and annotate scientific literature. As power user you can get lost in paper space because Mendeley does not offer any tools keep track with all the collected metadata. Having more then 500 articles, book chapters and books in your collection makes it quiet difficult to overview relationships between authors/co-authors, publishers and keywords.
Luckily Mendeley does not protect its local database on desktop computers. So its theoreticly possible to build an alternative to Mendeley but for the mentioned disadvantage its fare enough to collect some resonable data for meaningful visualisations.
As a first example I will present some source code and visualization that gives you an overview about the quantity of authors and co-authors. Especially co-authors do not get that much attention while they play an important role, e.g. as senior scientist that tie generations of young researchers together.

A snapshot of my Mendeley Database produced these bubbles representing authors of my collected publications.

Surprisingly I discovered some new names that seem to play a bigger role in my research filed as expected.

Technically the visualization is based on a simple bubble chart from the D3.js examples. The SQLite-Database can easily viewed with tools like “SQLite Database Browser”, available for Linux. The conversion of the data could be done with the script language of your choice. I put in php to generate some json code for D3:
< ?php header('Content-Type: application/json'); if ($db = new SQLite3('your-mendeley-sqlite-file')) { $result = $db->query('SELECT lastName, firstNames FROM DocumentContributors');
$row = array();
$i = 0;
while($res = $result->fetchArray(SQLITE3_ASSOC)){
$row[$res['lastName']] ++;
$i++;
}
$data = array('name' => "flare");
$authors = array();
foreach($row as $key => $val){
array_push($authors, array('name' => $key, 'size' => $val););
}
$data['children'] = $authors;
echo json_encode($data);
} else {
die($err);
}
?>