Streaming Media - December 2007/January 2008 - (Page 37) according to Sean Brown, VP of education at Sonic Foundry—a company that makes Mediasite, an appliance designed to simplify video capture of the entire lecture experience (including PowerPoint and other digital supplements to the lecture)—is the evolution of the classroom itself, which has had a lot to do with the development of video at the college level. Now 40, Brown recalls a classroom that consisted of "a chalkboard and screen." Today's modern classroom, he says, "has a digital projector and any number of sources going into it. It could have a computer or laptop dock, a microscope or a document camera, where you can [project] a picture of newspaper or book. It’s wired for sound so the professor’s voice is projected to [the] audience. A lot of classrooms [today] have the capacity to be prewired for a camera or have a camera in them for distance learning or for archiving. They have digital/smart boards to make digital annotation instead of chalk.” All of this, he says, makes delivery of streaming video of classes easier and more likely, but how it gets delivered is another matter. Does Format Matter? With so many choices out there, from Windows Media to Real to QuickTime to Flash, the format choice depends on many factors. In some instances, the video administrators encode the video in multiple formats to ensure that students can view it regardless of their individual computer setups. Paul Riismandel, digital media instruction and support at University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign (and Streaming Media contributing editor), says that format doesn’t matter much because there are so many factors in play. “Format choice is gong to be dictated by your budget and your audience, and that seems to be a similar thing I’m hearing from my colleagues.” For example, Riismandel says if you have a Windows server infrastructure, you are more likely to choose Windows Media because your administrators are going to be familiar with Microsoft tools. But in the politically charged college atmosphere, format is more than a choice of convenience, says John Morris, director of academic technology innovation at Drexel University in Philadelphia. “Let’s start with the fact that an academic institution is typically the Wild West. Part of that has to do with the fact that along with academia comes a certain level of freedom. If we were to enforce a specific format we would probably get an awful lot of flack. We generally leave format to the discretion of the instructor, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have general preferences and for good reason.” WWW.STREAMINGMEDIA.COM 37 http://www.viewcast.com/sm1207 http://www.viewcast.com/sm1207 http://WWW.STREAMINGMEDIA.COM
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.