Sunday, December 04, 2005

Video Activity: Editing work continues on the Storytellers' Conference videos.

The weekend was full of documentation: a housewarming and a furniture showcase, both events featuring different nighttime views of Singapore. One video will have a shot or two of downtown Singapore as seen from the Holland Village area and the other will show snippets of skyscrapers and Christmas lights as seen from Odeon Towers, across the street from Raffles Hotel.
Most interesting though, was the shoot on Friday morning at the International Conference on Computers in Education. Working with Michael Hanning from Studiocode, a lecture was recorded, coded and analyzed on the spot and was ready to be uploaded onto the internet within minutes of the finished lecture. Additionally, a clip was loaded into the CDK as soon as the video team returned to the blacksteps booth. Watching the Studiocode software in action was very interesting. Michael wrote short scene descriptions on the spot. As an occasional editor, I assumed he would only be writing down phrases and headings from the speakers presentation. He did do this, but he also described scenes in terms of the speaker's body language-gestures, facial expressions,movements etc.
Studiocode is used by educators to study and label classroom activity so it is advantageous to describe scenes in terms of body language. This also reflects Studiocode's roots as a video technology originally developed to help athletes coaches and trainers better analyze the bodies of athletes as well as team formations and activities.
The keynote speech by Jeremy Roschelle, the Director of the Center for Technology in Learning, SRI International was filled with studies and examples of how teacher/student/computer approaches to learning are being used to improve testing scores. "The democratization of mathematics" was a great phrase he used. The term was originally used by Arthur Jaffe (I think..I just googled and his name seems correct...Later I will check the tape, but my player is now at the editing house). Great phrase..The democratization of mathematics.
Also, it was quite coincidental that Mr. Roschelle had previously written about a system of analyzing and labeling video data ....in 1989, before video had entered the digital world...very visionary!
As webcasting becomes more and more important, I look forward to more experiences like this. The software was flawless and the opportunities to use it are many.
www.studiocodegroup.com
the CDK in action! http://blackstepsmonjacdk.blogspot.com