Digital Video: Get with it!

Abstract

SEVEN years after the introduction of the first AV (audio/video) Mac, most educators are still oblivious of this marvelous technology - more so even than the typical household user. Why should this be so? In the mid-Nineties, began selling AV Macs. The first model I remember was a 60-megahertz 6100/AV. This Mac shipped with a video/audio digitizer and a graphics coprocessor board with twice the usual memory. If you tweaked this Mac - turned off all unnecessary extensions - you could produce quarter-screen, 320 x 240, digital videos at 15 frames per second. At about the same time, CD- recorders became readily available, and you could put nearly an hour of this size digital a single CD for less than $10 - about the cost of a good blank videotape. And with a little ingenuity, you could make the highly interactive. However, the real advantage was that you could also deliver this on demand from a server over a network. I used this trusty old Mac to produce several highly interactive multimedia CDs that I still use my classes. Today, an iMac DV sells for about $1,500 and makes the creation of digital so easy that many primary-grade students are learning to do it. The digitizer is gone, replaced by a FireWire port that takes video in directly from a MiniDV camcorder. With software such as iMovie, the result is incredibly easy to use. What's more, today you can put it all a CD for about 30 cents! recently coined the term movies, which reflects the ease and perhaps even personal nature of the production process. To begin to understand the power and myriad applications of desktop movie production education, I urge you to explore the website. Start out at www.apple.com/education/dv. After you have explored the videos this page, select the See More Desktop Movies option the right side of the page. I think you'll be amazed. Desktop movies are a part of the Apple Learning Interchange site (www.apple.com/ali), which is growing steadily and may well become the preeminent educational website. Recently, I began to wonder if teacher educators were making any appreciable use of digital and streaming teacher education or professional development. It has always seemed obvious to me that reading and writing about teaching - as filling up textbooks and magazines with words - is less effective than showing teaching and learning using video. It's tough to capture the subtleties of expert practice a few paragraphs. So to do the research for this column, I spent two long days searching the Internet for sites with digital of teachers real classroom settings. Here's a short sampling of what I found and how depressing my research turned out to be. A year or two ago, I was pleased to discover that the site at Arizona State University had posted a good number of excellent digital videos of teachers at all levels implementing the NCTM (National Council for Teachers of Mathematics) standards real classroom settings. The videos were well done, the settings real, and the teachers were talented. Unfortunately, the math-ed-ology videos are no longer available free over the Internet, but you can read more about the project at http://hal.asu.edu. Just click Projects; then click math-ed-ology?. In my research I made a few serendipitous discoveries. First, if you search the Internet for video, you'll soon discover that the porn industry has embraced (maybe a poor choice of words) the technology. (We don't have kid-safe browsing at the university, so search engines give a full report of what they find.) Second, just about every sector of the economy makes abundant use of digital and streaming - except education. And third, Internet search engines do a terrible job finding video: most search engines won't even let you narrow your search to that type of media. I thought my search hit pay dirt when I discovered the University of Northern Iowa's InTime (InTime stands for Integrating New Technologies Into the Methods of Education) site at www. …