Good News for Clip Rippers

Posted on September 12, 2010 by Baynard Bailey

by Baynard Bailey

This past summer, the Library of Congress issued a number of exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), one of which made it legal for academics to rip clips from DVDs, for use in their teaching or publishing.

Since June of 2009, Vassar has had a streaming media server that can deliver video clips to Moodle (and more recently to WordPress). The Wowza software streams video content quickly and beautifully anywhere on campus (best if using a wired connection). We were very excited to share this technology with the faculty, especially faculty members who work extensively with video. Faculty members who used our streaming server delighted in having the resources available via Moodle. The videos look great viewed on laptops or desktop machines. Streaming from Moodle during class made for a convenient teaching situation as there was no need to switch video sources or fumble with DVD or VHS controls. ACS envisioned a radical transformation of the Library Reserve desk where students could watch and re-watch films for class, on demand, and at their leisure. Students would not be tied down to three-hour reserve deadlines (or finding the video already signed out). Faculty members wouldn’t be troubled trying to arrange screenings for classes. The on-demand streaming video revolution that has transformed the outside world via Netflix and Hulu would now come to our campus!

Unfortunately, our fanciful visions melted to clouds of despair as UCLA came under attack from the Association for Information and Media Equipment. AIME’s accusations of copyright violation caused UCLA to suspend its streaming video service while they worked out the legal dispute. Educational institutions from all over the U.S. paid close attention, including Vassar. ACS had to reconsider how to inform the faculty about Vassar’s streaming media server, as our new policy restricted how we stream copyrighted material. There were more than a few awkward conversations with faculty members who had grown quite fond of our Wowza server, not to mention their concern about the time and effort put into curating video resources for their classes.

Since this summer, when it comes to clips, ACS can once again legally stream video ripped from DVDs. The Library of Congress exemptions impacted a number of areas, but the proviso that impacts scholars ripping DVDs reads as follows:

(1) Motion pictures on DVDs that are lawfully made and acquired and that are protected by the Content Scrambling System when circumvention is accomplished solely in order to accomplish the incorporation of short portions of motion pictures into new works for the purpose of criticism or comment, and where the person engaging in circumvention believes and has reasonable grounds for believing that circumvention is necessary to fulfill the purpose of the use in the following instances:

(i) Educational uses by college and university professors and by college and university film and media studies students;
(ii) Documentary filmmaking;
(iii) Noncommercial videos.

In summary, clip-ripping portions of DVDs for academic fair use is legal. All previous laws and guidelines about the sharing of copyrighted material remain; what is new is that educators are no longer banned from the act of ripping materials from a copy-protected DVD. It is also legal for documentary filmmakers and creators of video not intending to make profit. If you are interested in learning how to rip clips yourself, I recommend this great guide for ripping DVD. You can also contact your ACS liaison for assistance in curating clips and how best to use them in your teaching.

If you’d like to learn more about how the recent exemptions impact the flow of information and pedagogy in the 21st century, I recommend this interview with Abigail De Kosnik, Gary Handman and Mark Kaiser of University of California, Berkeley.

A ticket to Anywhere

Posted on September 10, 2010 by

by Matthew Slaats

In my first week at Vassar, some three years ago, I attended a meeting with one of my colleagues in ACS and a faculty member to discuss some options for incorporating digital material into his teaching. The faculty member had been collecting images, audio and video during multiple trips to Asia as a part of his research. The reason he had come to ACS was to think about ways in which both he and his students could use this material as a way of expanding their knowledge and experiencing distant places. My response came in the form of a question: “So basically you want to give the students a ticket to anywhere?” Meant more as a rhetorical comment than as a criticism, I was thinking about the possibilities for providing meaningful experiences to students. In this case, the goal being to give them a sense of place, modeling a lived experience, or providing something that establishes a deep memory. This experience has remained vividly present even to this day with ideas of a contextually based pedagogy continually evolving.

Since the turn of the century, Art Historians have been using images as a way of addressing the visuality of the material they teach. Long at the vanguard of using media, they have established a tradition through sustained experimentation. This is a tradition that values the balance of decoding the semiotics of visual material with rigorous texts to provide a broader context for the time period, artist thinking and influences. In this mode of learning, the instructor provides a broader, more comprehensive understanding/picture to situate information. Now with the pervasive use of images by historians, economists, and even English professors, an understanding has been built for the value of an image to reference and support the information that is being provided. With the explosion of other forms of media (video, audio, the web) and viable options for interactivity, these experiments will only continue to grow.

So, I return to this idea of Contextual Pedagogy. If I had to define the term, it would be a form of teaching that takes students outside the classroom they are sitting in and allows them to access vast worlds in radical new ways. It is highly dependent on digital media and interactive software, which takes a tremendous amount of time and effort on the parts of both faculty and those supporting the development of the technology. Yet it produces a much more expansive mode of comprehending material.

Over the next year, I will be speaking with faculty members, researchers, and technologists who are aggressively exploring these avenues. May it be Google Earth, image-based VR, mobile gaming, or the iPad, I want to further explore possibilities for engaging in these dynamic moments of learning. It is my hope to clarify further the boundaries of these practices, the theory behind their use, and their relevancy on the liberal arts campus.

The Teaching and Technology Forum

Posted on September 8, 2010 by Steve Taylor

by Steve Taylor

Though it’s not a recent event, I thought it would still be worthwhile to write about last spring’s Teaching and Technology Forum.

In its eighth year, the forum is a poster session in which faculty members display and explain teaching initiatives (or in some cases, research initiatives) that make interesting use of technology. A new feature this year was the inclusion of some student-initiated projects as well.

Keynote Speaker
A special feature of the forum is its keynote speaker. This year’s keynote was Prof. Paul Ruud, of the Economics Department. In his address, he proposed a new blog, in which Vassar faculty members would regularly post brief descriptions of their class activities. With a high participation rate, this blog would let any instructor know what his or her students were doing in their other classes; then the instructor might adapt some lesson plans to complement what students were doing in some of those other classes. It might also encourage faculty members to communicate more with each other, based on a greater awareness of what each other was teaching. The result could be a strengthening of the cross-discipline integration that is the core of a liberal arts education.

The poster sessions, while quite diverse, covered topics that might each be considered to be one of two types: those that used technology to visualize information and those that use technology to increase social networking.

Visualization Technologies
Some poster sessions show ways in which technology could be used to give students greater access to images of what they’re learning about. Lucy Johnson, with Anne Sando (2010), showed how they are building a database of photos of the archaeological artifacts; Arden Kirkland and Holy Hummel showed how they are building a database of photos of the costume collection; Andrew Tallon showed his growing collection of digital 3D panoramas of architectural sites; and Sarah Kozloff showed how she is using streaming technology to provide students with anytime/anywhere access to film excerpts. Jane Parker showed a novel use of video for skills training: projecting video of a skilled squash player onto the front wall of a squash court, for players to mirror in real time.

Visualization is also used for getting a new perspective on scientific data. Alicia Sampson (2012) and Rebecca Eells (2012) worked with Kate Susman and Jenny Magnes to build visual models of worm behavior; Joe Tanski and Bona Ko (2010) used x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy to analyze the elements of art objects.

Social Networking
While these projects used technology to bring students closer to their learning materials, others used technology to bring students closer to other people. Kelsey Forrest (2011) and others in Saúl Mercado’s class created a social networking site to benefit the Vassar community, while Leslie Williams and Adalake Barnwell created a site to facilitate communication between local high schools students and the Vassar student mentors. Students in the Bioinformatics program created their own support group for fellow students. Some people used technology to collaborate on their work: students in Leonard Nevarez’ class used a wiki for collaborative writing, while Tracey Holland used a wiki to co-write with her own collaborators; Natalie Friedman’s class did their writing assignments on a shared blog site. Zeynep Gokcen Kaya, an exchange student from Turkey, presented her research on social interaction in virtual worlds.

Hybrids
Interestingly, two exhibits showed uses of technology that enhanced both visualization and social interaction: students in Jeremy Davis’ class used Skype to interview authors whose articles they were studying, while students in Hiromi Dollase’s class used videoconferencing to speak with students in Japan.

More information, along with photos and reproductions of each presenter’s poster can be found at <http://pages.vassar.edu/facultyforum>.Watch for the announcement of next spring’s event— you won’t want to miss it.

Welcome

Posted on September 7, 2010 by Steve Taylor

by Steve Taylor

Welcome to Techademia, a site where the Academic Computing Consultants at Vassar write about technology and teaching.

This blog will be about our teaching and your teaching. We envision this site as a place where we hope to do a little teaching, about things that may be too new or obscure to have caught your notice. At the same time, these writings will focus on teaching at the college level, while highlighting ways in which technology can enhance— or even revolutionize— that teaching.

Every faculty member that I’ve met at Vassar is wholly committed to his or her teaching. Many tell me that they’re really interested in one technology or another that might help their students to understand their course materials better. But they’re also really, really busy and can rarely find the time to take workshops or tinker around with new devices or programs.

We hope that his blog will provide a way for you to fit a little bit of this learning into your busy schedule. We aim to generate new postings each week, on various topics related to teaching with technology. Those topics will range from descriptions of very specific gadgets to discussions of pedagogical approaches. Some will be specific to Vassar, while others will be more generic.

The primary contributors will be the four members of Vassar’s Academic Computing Services (ACS) group. (If you’d like to know more about us, see the authors’ profiles, in the sidebar.) We may have occasional guest contributors as well, and we invite anyone in the Vassar community to comment on what they read.

Looking forward to some interesting discussions,

Steve