Video, Education, Open Content

Morning Sessions -

// Cathy Casserly from the Hewlett Foundation is speaking. World is changing, how are our institutions keeping pace? Education is not absorbing and adapting technology as quickly as the external world. Participatory media has not been integrated into the classroom. Many institutions are investing in open educational content – how do we make it more available? How do people find the educational “gems” that would facilitate their activities. Working with Google. Archive will be created with CC Learn, compiling a database of open URLs. Want 10,000 within two months, creating an Open Educational Resources search. Inviting people to populate the database.

// Peter Kaufman from Columbia is now speaking. Discussing how much video content of only general interest is available on the Internet. Five points:

1. Demand for online video has exploded. BitTorrent is the number one format on the internet. Largest video streaming sites stream 7 billion sites a month.
2. Opportunities to produce video are exploding. What used to only be easy for text, is now easy for video. Quoting Lessig, text is the Latin of our age; video is the new currency for communication. Perhaps almost half of all video online is user produced. The democratization of distribution is underway.
3. Moving image archives are digitizing.
4. Personal storage, portability are exploding. The vision of the iPod as portable Library.
5. Laws and economics are changing.

Shows a video of a neuro-biologist speaking about the impact of a visualization of Alzheimer’s on nerve networks.

// Peter Brantley, DLF. [Presentation in PPT]

// Murray Weston, British Film & Video Council. Promote production distribution of use in UK Higher Education. Non-profit organization, funded by JISC and others. More than 230 member institutions. Also undertake R&D. What are “moving images” used for? As instrument – for illustration. Enrichment – diverse or contrasting views. Primary or secondary record – capable of use in research and scholarship, or cultural record. Science – time-based recording. Live communication – for collaboration. Creative medium – informing and entertaining.

Problems – no statutory deposit. No unified national catalogue. Poor research access. No ILL. No fair use [fair dealing] (yet). No culture of reference or review. No integration with text sources. Poor teaching training for use of video.

Importance of context and provenance. E.g. discussion in UK of memo released on lead-up to the Iraq war. Video has poor linkages to other resources. Metadata is terribly poor, so creating a skein of content is very difficult.

Teachers and students want what they have already achieved for textual resources.

Working on digitizing newsfilm – site is BUFVC “newsfilm online”. ITN permitted them full access to their archive. Searchable repository.

Also, film and sound online available through authentication via Athens, for all UK higher education. Using progressive download in at least two formats. And 7.8 million records of UK TV and radio. Recording 44,000 hours p.a. of UK television. TRILT: Television and Radio Index for Learning and Teaching.

Murray Weston carries 5 million pounds of personal indemnity insurance to protect against judgments relating to rights suits.

Most stare the rights monster in the face. Increasing sense that content creators are interested in dialogues. Paid $100/hr (??) as token payment for perpetual access. There is a growing understanding of educational needs. Formal reviews are working to clarify exceptions. New licensing arrangements are being offered; sharing licenses such as CC more prevalent. What is needed: international harmonization and clarification for CR exceptions and underlying licensing arrangements.


// Paul Gerhardt, BBC Creative Archive. BBC opening up its archive for reuse. Created their own license – Creative Archive License. Ran as a pilot project, 500 content items; generated over 100,000 registered users. Committed that it would have limited impact on the market for new content. Released from factual and news areas to simply rights clearances. Discovered only two possibly infringing uses of the License. Obviously a huge public appetite. BBC is heavily regulated, perhaps over-regulated. The new BBC Trust (replacing Board of Governors) regulates BBC and has few broadcasters among trustees. Every new idea has to go through a Public Value Test, a multi-month review process.

How to engage the audience in a post-broadcast world? Stymied by governance. BBC is primarily funded through a licensing fee; funding tightness has forced a review of activities. Debate between past and future is a debate over resources. BBC committed itself to making its content more open and available for read/write/share. The BBC Trust made a confounding decision relating to BBC classroom content to suspend and then kill the digital curriculum project, even after an expenditure of 75 million pounds. Now subject to Public Value Test.

British Film Institute is now using the Creative Archive License; possible that other institutions may take the lead from the BBC. BBC has not given up on its archive. BBC’s program catalogue is now online. There is also a new archive trial, which is read-only, that will be starting in the next few weeks. 1000 hours of content, and closed to trialists, only 50 hours will be fully open to the public.

Discussing the Scientology subversion of the BBC Panorama Program. Suddenly overwhelming the traditional model of broadcast agenda setting and production. Will BBC have to adjust in a dramatic shift to the revolution in open content production?


// Rick Prelinger, “Remarks from a recovered archivist.” Board president of the Internet Archive. Film goes back 113 years, but visual arts and education goes back many hundreds of years. “Visual education” as a term goes back to 1906. Edison, 1923, “Books will be obsolete. Scholars will soon be instructed through the eye. It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture.” Discussing evolution of AV in education. University production has a long history, as does educational TV, which itself transformed into Public TV. Much early production is lost.

Best practices. 1) Leverage existing material. Overly deferential to potential rights holders. Free archives of educational and public video. How do perform a buyout of all the rights for educational and public TV? Can we de-monetize this content? 2) Segmentation. Subtraction is growth. Make content available for re-use, perhaps by breaking longer content into shorter segments. Media objects that are easier to touch; queries respond closer to hits; smaller pieces are more easily mashable. 3) Openness. Production is continual, not one-shot. Openness is not binary, but a broad spectrum. Openness is not just an image of page image, it is access to the actual text of the page. For video, it is being to use material along the lines of the BBC Creative Archive. Openness is the ability to crawl, navigate and index whatever can be found. Touch the code, editable for display, capable of annotation. Openness is interoperability. Think of quilting: primitive sampling. Merge past and present. Default to openness. Online archives are tremendous assets for computational exploration. Open video archives are particularly rare. 4) Moratorium. Declare a period of experiementation for educational video. Moratorium for enclosure by restrictive copyrights. Enable Paris in the 20s, not Silicon Valley in the 90s. Apply copyright homeopathically, not as a weapon of shock and awe.

Points of departure. Moving images privilege preservation over access, traditionally. Archives have faced unprecedented demand for the content; archives have gone retail. Media archives take only baby steps to opening up their repositories due to fear of rights claims. Youtube opened up the world in a way that archives cannot match; archives lost. Can entertainment video be repurposed as education? Do we really want to digitize all the lectures? Is that useful? Maybe we need to rethink our past priorities.

Q (Jeff Ubois): How do we do the Great Rights Buyout? A: Just beginning to figure out how to proceed on this. Do we need legislative help to clear this? Even rights holders have trouble negotiating secondary rights clearances? Q: Can we create an open rights indemnification fund? A: Both users and content holders would need to be indemnified. Stanford has done a slice of this for documentary filmmakers; it is a limited-risk indemnification for filmmakers who accept certain practices in production.

Can we create a vision of what we want to see in copyright, and how we envision people working with content? Create an affirmative vision.

Transcript of an older BBC talk of Rick Prelinger’s.