The Auricle

In On the video: a reflection on YouTube and friends (part 1) I considered some of examples of online video usage some explicitly intended to be relevant to Higher Education and some originally created for other purposes. In part 2 I consider some of the hills and valleys of using – and not using – online video services of the YouTube ilk.

YouTube Affordances?

But why bother with YouTube? Why not upload your own video material to your own server? That’s certainly an option but there a few key afforances worth considering.

First, imagine the following scenario. You produce a short video and publish it on your institution’s server. By virtue of viral marketing it becomes an internet ‘hit’. Great! Fame, or at least recognition, if not fortune awaits you. Unfortunately your ‘killer’ video is also causing an unwelcome run on your institution’s bandwidth and the Director of IT Systems is starting to ask questions. Hosting a popular video service can consume a lot of bandwith. Uploading to destinations like YouTube means you can offload that problem to a service whose business model focuses on the task.

Second, while we would like to think the University of Poppleton or whatever is a frequent point of access, popular online destinations like YouTube are going to knock even the most prestigious University into second place in the first point of access for video material stakes. So establishing a presence would seem wise. The University site could then point to the YouTube channel. (N.B. see the Channel Ownership section below).

Third, YouTube solves the interoperability dilemma. All video material uploaded to the service is automatically converted to the Adobe Flash format. The free Flash plugin for all mainstream browsers and the fact that it can be accessed by all the mainstream operating systems including Windows, Linux and Apple which is one of the reasons it has come to underpin even the BBC’s iPlayer and other broadcaster’s streaming video services.

Fourth, creating and editing video material has never been easier. The number of relatively cheap capture devices, whether that be dedicated micro video cameras, digital cameras with video capture functions, or mobile phones, means that acquiring material is not difficult (although acquiring quality material may require more thought and be more challenging). Some such devices even have a YouTube mode. Software like Apple’s iMovie (or Windows equivalents) even enable direct upload to YouTube.

Fifth, viewers can leave comments on videos. Ok, being a public forum is likely to attract the trolls et al but, as with the Michael Wesch Students Today example, some comments add further value of the primary resource, albeit they are sometimes discomforting. Indeed, it’s interesting to reflect on what the outcomes could be of combining YouTube with other web tools, e.g. instant messaging?

Alternatives to YouTube and TED?

There are other video destinations apart from YouTube and TED.

Some publicly available. but insitution-hosted. provision is making interesting uses of online video material. For example, the following press article caught my attention recently. Oxbridge interviews – the right response (Sunday Times, 12 October 2008) describes how the University of Oxford is using video interviews of dons and candidates to both reduce the mystique of this form of selection and to enhance the interview skills of the dons (free registration required).

The BBC as we would expect is a major actor in the online video arena. As well as its 7 day “view again” iPlayer service for previously broadcast material, it also supports the lesser known BBC Film Network which showcases new British film making. Included on this BBC site is a short by the University of Glamorgan’s Keziah Bailey then a second year student on the BA(Hons) Computer Animation course. Again, this demonstrates that an effective video message can be conveyed in the absence of a talking head.

But back to the BBC iPlayer service for a moment. As is well known the BBC and the UK OU have a relationship that goes back to the 1970s when specialist OU productions were the norm. Fast forward to 2008 and the relationship is currently realised via BBC/OU co-productions for mainstream broadcast, e.g. Coast, Timewatch, James May’s Big Ideas. The iPlayer service, however, does not currently make it easy to identify what these co-production programmes are. For that information it’s necessary to access the BBC/OU Open2Net site. I would like to see the iPlayer service offer a BBC/OU co-production category in its search engine rather than forcing such a tortuous process of identification on users.

There are similar models to the BBC iPlayer service beginning to appear, e.g. the US Hulu service (www.hulu.com). Some would argue that we are probably looking at the future of ‘television’ in such emerging services particuarly, as looks likely, easily usable devices to enable viewing of such material on standard domestic televisions instead of on a computer (as is the situation at the moment) become available.

The BBC Motion Gallery JISC Service deserves to be better known. As do the the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC) publications and information services (with their associated audio-visual databases) and the Off-Air Recording Back-Up Service. One such BUFVC publication, Viewfinder, offers a supplement titled Media Online Focus. The article Accessing the BBC MotionGallery (pdf) in the March 2008 edition of Media Online Focus describes the BBC Motion Gallery archive as:

… an Aladdin’s cave of footage – from classic television moments, historic news items and scientific discoveries to beautiful scenery, great sporting feats and terrific landscapes – and the available material is to be constantly updated.

As well as a leader articles each edition of BUFVC’s Media Online Focus also offers information about video gateways, catalogues and subject specific news to do with the moving image so if you are interested in moving image news and reflections I would certainly link to the BUFVC web site.

A visit to the JISC Digitisation Programme blog may be worthwhile for those wishing to build up a picture of national and international collaborations in digitisation (including the moving image).

Other JISC sponsored provision included the EDINA hosted sets of collections Film and Sound Online (requires OpenAthens authentication). I find this site rather depressing, however. Why? First, the sample video material presented only in QuickTime and WMV formats rather than more open or interoperable formats, e.g. MP4 or Flash. Second, perhaps I am mistaken, but I get the impression that this has become a static archive as the collections all appear to have been catalogued in 2005 when the joint BUFVC/OU Managing Agent and Advisory Service (MAAS) part of the initiative came to an end in July 2005. Static archives are perhaps useful as historical artefacts but their usefulness to the day-to-day life of the community decays with time.

Dedicated subject channels appear to have a lot of potential mileage. For example, in the US there is The Doctors Channel which describes itself as “Internet TV for Doctors”. The Reuters’ news item The Doctor’s Channel Launches New Videos from Three Top Hospitals (Reuters, 27 May 2008) provides useful background about this specialist site. I’m unaware if there is a UK equivalent to The Doctors Channel, if not there should be.

Some video material, however, remains hidden behind virtual walls. For example, the Einstein Network (aka En-Power Academia). is the antithesis of YouTube. Its archives of videos for architects, civil engineers, surveyors, lawyers, planners and general business are protected by Athens authentication in HEIs.

There is also TeacherTube which the Intute service describes as:

… like an educational version of YouTube. It is an online community where educators can upload and share their educational instructional videos. All subject areas are covered including the sciences, humanities and social sciences. Social science subjects range from history to economics and politics. Materials are also graded by level. Much is designed for school children, however there are also channels for higher education which feature materials from some US colleges and universities.

Back in the UK we have Teachers TV a digital television channel sponsored by the UK government’s Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF). Nearly all of the programmes broadcast on this part-time digital channel can be streamed or downloaded from the web site.

But what about Creative Commons (CC)? For those wishing more information about CC a visit to the About section of the CC site is worthwhile. This part of the CC site offers videos and even comics to explain its mission.

CC has spawned a number of projects and divisions that should be of interest to all interested in the sharing and dissemination of knowledge by whatever media. I find ccLearn a division of CC particularly interesting. It described itself as:

… a division of Creative Commons which is dedicated to realizing the full potential of the Internet to support open learning and open educational resources (OER). Our mission is to minimize barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials — legal barriers, technical barriers, and social barriers.

ccLearn sponsors a number of projects one of which is Universal Education Search. This is only a beta search engine. Entering “video” into its search field offers 3,913 resources at the time of writing only some of which are videos whereas others are article about videos so not particularly helpful at this stage. A Teacher Training videos link from the ccLearn site looked as though it could prove more profitable. The link leads to work by Russel Stannard principal lecturer in Multimedia/ICT at the University of Westminster in the UK. Russel’s speciality appears to be exploiting the ‘screencast’ genre of video, i.e. “show and tell” by capturing computer display output, annotating it with text callouts and overlaying an audio tract.

Over on Archive.org the ‘moving images’ section offers access to some 138,917 movies. As well as video Archive.org also offers access to audio, music and textual material as well and describes its mission as:

… building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public..

Of courses there are other international digital archives which offer video and other learning materials as well. Merlot.org has a respected provenance and its discipline community orientation may prove attractive to those seeking specific material.

In the UK we have the JISC sponsored Jorum service which describes itself as:

… a free online repository service for teaching and support staff in UK Further and Higher Education Institutions, helping to build a community for the sharing, reuse and repurposing of learning and teaching materials.

The Jorum site describes the resources it encapsulates as ranging from:

… simple materials such as Word documents or Powerpoint presentations, to complex learning packages that combine various multimedia formats such as video, audio and animation.

At the time of writing, however, Jorum is a protected service requiring authentication which assumes the putative user is registered with a participating institution. In its next phase of development, however, the service appears to be planning to move towards a more open model. In my view this would be a wise decision since it would align more closely with the open content/courseware movement and Creative Commons type licensing and would help to establish Jorum on the national and international stage.

But all of the above are anglocentric offerings. Other cultures have also embraced the online moving image to a level that could exceed that of the West:

Tudou – China’s answer to YouTube – was started in January 2005 (a month before YouTube) by 35-year-old Gary Wang. Nearly four years later, Tudou has some 12 million users a day and 75 million unique users a month. It serves 100m videos a day, numbers that make it the biggest video-sharing site in China. As for growth, Tudou has nearly three times more user visits today than a year ago. (Movie star in the making: China’s answer to YouTube, Guardian 6 October 2008).

Channel Name Ownership?

What I find a bit surprising is that many HEIs don’t seem to view ever-growing services like YouTube as an important part of the virtual landscape. When that perception is compounded with a lack of naming convention then there is some risk that others will occupy the space. For example, a visit to http://uk.youtube.com/OxfordUniversity will not illuminate any aspect of the Oxford University’s brand. In that case the University of Cambridge’s, as yet unpopulated, YouTube channel may be a wise move. So what to do? It took me just 5 minutes to register the following YouTube accounts:

• http://uk.youtube.com/UniversityPoppleton
• http://uk.youtube.com/PoppletonUniversity
• http://uk.youtube.com/AuricleDotOrg
• http://uk.youtube.com/AuricleOrg

I really wanted the Auricle channel but someone from Romania has beaten me to it. I note also that someone from Malaysia has claimed http://uk.youtube.com/JISC and that http://uk.youtube.com/ALT has already been claimed. But I’ve just done the same to the University of Poppleton, that fictional UK HEI so beloved of the Times Higher Education humourist/columnist and BBC/OU Thinking Allowed broadcaster Professor Laurie Taylor. Sorry Laurie but if you decide you want the University of Poppleton channel because I’ve already staked my claim on this bit of virtual space. Of course we can always discuss this like gentlemen should you really really want it 🙂

The message is, I think quite clear. In an age of major Web services it is important for HEIs to think beyond the boundaries of their own domain in claiming their bit of cyberspace. Of course had I “cyber-squatted” in another University’s brand name then they are quite within their rights to ask Google/YouTube to eject the squatter. But that means time, and potential expense and Google/YouTube may not choose to comply with your request. Of course we could call a “plague on all their houses” and just ignore services like YouTube but meanwhile that bit of cyberspace with your name/domain is doing what? And what if viewers of the channel assume that the material is originating from you? But YouTube’s business model is based on user uploads so it wants to make the channel registration as easy as possible; at the moment, however, apparently anyone can apparently register any channel name. The YouTube Terms of Use and Community Guidelines focus on user uploaded content but I can find nothing referring to ownership regarding a channel name. Consequently, I smell the potential for eventual conflict with “brand guardians” here. For the sake of comparison I looked at how Facebook approached account names. Interestingly, as well as a facility for creating a personal account Facebook also has the concept of the ‘brand’ which it realises through Facebook Pages. The Facebook site states the following about pages:

Facebook profiles are meant to represent a single individual. Organisations of any type are not permitted to maintain an account under the name of their organisation. We have created Facebook Pages to allow organisations to have a presence on Facebook. These Pages are distinct presences, separate from user profiles, and optimised for an organisation’s needs to communicate, distribute information/content, engage their fans, and capture new audiences virally through their fans’ recommendations to their friends. Facebook Pages are designed to be a media rich, valuable presence for any artist, business or brand.

Despite the above statement all that is apparently required to create Facebook Page is an email address and the registrant can apparently create ‘brand’ pages to their hearts content. I repeated my University of Poppleton/Poppleton University experiment on Facebook without apparent difficulty.

But back to YouTube. It’s possible, however, to get an advertising-free own-branded channel as YouTube has a special scheme for non-profit organisations; but there are some caveats.

Content Ownership?

Who “owns” videos submitted to YouTube? Section 6 of the YouTube Terms of Use states:

… you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions. However, by submitting User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube’s (and its successors’ and affiliates’) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the YouTube Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels.

So, basically, if I’m interepreting the above correctly, once video material is uploaded to the YouTube site they and Google can do pretty much what they want with it.

I think, however, we should perhaps not get too neurotic regarding the above. The open courseware/content movement has perhaps demonstrated that HEI ‘brands’ as well as users can benefit from offering well designed content online to the world for non-commercial use.

At the other end of the spectrum is when third parties have uploaded material to services such as YouTube without the approval of the rights owner(s) although the public nature of YouTube tends to mean that blatant transgressions are going to be removed pretty quickly once YouTube is notified. There are many less public routes for those of such a picaresque inclination. Some broadcasters, however, appear to have grasped the indirect marketing potential of uploading to the service. For example, the Medieval Helpdesk I highlighted earlier was produced by the Norwegian Broadcasting service (NRK) in 2001 and the ‘More From’ section of their YouTube page invites viewers to sample more from their stable of productions. I suspect that, in common with most UK citizens, NRK would otherwise not have permeated my conciousness had it not been for this particular upload to their YouTube channel.

In conclusion, the moving image is a rich data source whose dissemination has until relatively recently been constrained somewhat by the need for a physical vector like DVD, videotape or film. The growth of broadband combined with high quality compression solutions now means that moving image data is becoming as accessible as text and audio; that represents exponential possibilities and challenges, most of which we probably have not yet conceived of. My view is that it would be foolish to ignore these possibilties and challenges. Others wont.

Factoids

Professor Dina Iordanova, Scotland’s University of St Andrews’ first Chair of Film Studies has been awarded a £240,000 grant by the Leverhulme Trust to undertake a 2.5 year investigation into how the now diverse routes of film dissemination can facilitate access by an increasingly diverse and global community of viewers. Professor Iordanova study will include an assessment of “the impact that new internet-enabled channels such as YouTube, online forums and download sites, have on the changing dynamics in world cinema.”

JISC supports the TASI service for still images, moving images and sound advice. The TASI blog is also worth a visit for digital imaging news and views.

Further Reading
YouTube, Digital Literacy and the Growth of Knowledge, John Hartley, Queensland University of Technology, Media, Communication and Humanity Conference, London School of Economics 2008)

Video Vision, Victor Edmonds, EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 43, no. 5 (September/October 2008)

Web 2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a New Genre, Bryan Alexander and Alan Levine, EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 43, no. 6 (November/December 2008)

All Educause Review articles considering YouTube.

ALT-C 2007 abstracts search including references to YouTube.

YouTube research shows picture is changing rapidly, The Age, 16 July 2008. See also http://www.cci.edu.au/profile/jean-burgess.

The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Jonathan Zittrain, 2008 (YouTube Video)

Will a YouTube Platform Matter?, MIT Technology Review, 14 March 2008.

Online video ‘eroding TV viewing’ , BBC News, 27 November 2006.

Video Research in the Learning Sciences, Ricki Goldman (Editor), Roy Pea (Editor), Brigid Barron (Editor), Sharon J. Derry (Editor), April 2007, Routledge.