Open Source Video Player marches on

Miro, the open source video player and subscription tool continues its growth in popularity (with over 3,400 channels available, including increasing numbers in HD quality) and is beginning to be adopted by national TV broadcasters in Germany (Deutshe Welle) and Norway, for example. This is in stark contrast to the UK, where the BBC have instead opted for their own proprietary system built in association with Microsoft, the iPlayer. Many have argued that such a decision from a state owned public service is a real pity, if not questionable, given the potential of open source solutions such as Miro. However, the BBC has decided that DRM (Digital Rights Management) is a key issue for them and they are closely protecting their content through this approach. In Ireland, no download service up and running yet from our national broadcaster, just access to some streamed video samples of news, etc.

Educause Conference

The Educause Learning Initiative's 2008 Conference is currently under way in San Antonio, Texas and the keynote presentations are being broadcast live and made available to view afterwards. You can catch up on these by following this link.

Educause (of which NUI Galway is a member) is a major organisation that focuses on the implementation of learning technologies and other IT systems in higher education. It is also responsible for the .edu domain name.

Berkeley (US) Law and Policy Podcasts

One of the top copyright academics, Prof. Pam Samuelson (wikipedia article), is to podcast her course of 16 lectures on Information Law and Policy delivered at UC Berkeley.

"This course introduces students to copyright and other forms of legal protection for databases, licensing of information, consumer protection, liability for insecure systems and defective information, privacy, and national and international information policy."

A link to the podcasts can be found here. There is a three day delay, so the first podcast should hopefully be available from Thursday.

double vision and 3D specs

Well, the BBC's technology pages are fairly upbeat about the improving prospects for 3D movies and television given the capabilities of modern digital cinema projection systems. A pity our current lecture recording systems are only 2D! Perhaps something we can look at in the future.

ITAG's Technology Tips for Parents

This list Breach the great technology divide with ITAG’s Top 10 Technologies for Kids was published in the Galway Advertiser yesterday and is also available from the ITAG website.

In the interests of being actively involved with their children, parents need to have at least a basic understanding of the ways kids use technology. ITAG has put together a "cheat sheet" to educate mums and dads and to help them get more involved in their kids' leisure activities.

It includes short explanations of YouTube, MySpace, Google, Blogs and Wikipedia, as well as SMS , iPods and (legal) Downloads. Tips are given as to how parents might use these technologies to interact with their children and get more involved with their activities.

The best tip, in my opinion, is the one related to Google:

Sit down with your kids and tackle a tough homework assignment with them; help them search for images and relevant news articles to make the project top-notch.


What better way to teach them to evaluate online resources and use Google in an effective way?

Banning Google?

I've just read the Guardian's interview with Tara Brabazon, Professor of Media Studies at Brighton University. She describes how she has banned the use of google by her first year students, by refusing to grade anything based on material she has not prescribed for them. From the article: "I give my first-years a good curriculum based on 200 extracts from refereed journals and books," she says, "and I'm happy for them to use those as sources exclusively."

At first this seems a little bizarre. Shouldn't the students be looking for reference material themselves? Emma Duke-Williams, on her blog, remarks "I'm assuming that she would allow them to use Google to locate other academics websites, to use Google Scholar to find new references..."

On one hand, I'm quite persuaded by Prof. Brabazon's explanation: "I'm not asking them to be independent scholars at this stage. Rather, I'm building what I call an information scaffold. I'm guiding them through complicated ideas, and getting them to read high-quality materials. Young minds are like diamonds. They need sharpening and polishing. Too many assumptions are made about their ability to manage the transition from school to university."

So, her first year students are not yet mature enough in their scholarship to make judgements about sources of information. I tend to agree with that. But I have to ask, when and how do we expect them to learn this skill?

The 1.3 kilogram computer vs the 3 ton computer?

With the launch of Apple's new MacBook Air this week, "the world's thinnest notebook", it might be worth reminding ourselves of how far technology has come since, say 1935?

The MacBook Air weighs a tiny 1.3 kilograms compared to the 1935 ballistic computer which weighed 3 tons!

Boing Boing published an interesting post citing part of an article published in the 1935 Science and Mechanics magazine, about the "Ballistic computer of 1935: the 3-ton "Big Brain" that could give a "not necessarily physical picture of the movement of one of the heavenly bodies, but a mathematical picture of it", in (eventual!) answer to the following problem: "... three or more heavenly bodies (like Earth, Sun, and Moon) are moving in their orbits at different rates of speed and varying distances, attracting each other. What will be the combined result of their forces, in changing the positions of each, in a given period?"

The Library of Congress Pilot Project on Flickr

Announced yesterday, The Library of Congress has uploaded more than 3,000 historical photographs to Flickr, the online photo sharing website. These are shared under a new No known Copyright Restrictions category, which means that the library is not the intellectual property owner. There are two possibilities:

1. There was a copyright and it was not renewed
2. The image is from a late 19th or early 20th century collection for which there is no evidence of any rights holder

The aim of the project is to invite us, the public, to tag the photographs, thus categorising them and making them searchable. Clever, eh?

There are two collections: 1930s-40s in Color; and News in the 1910s.

David Gallo: Underwater astonishments

Another great video from TED talks. This 6-minute presentation shows some incredible underwater creatures. I especially like the disappearing octopus at the end.

Digital Libraries & JeromeDL

Digitial Libraries have been growing in number and strength since the term was originally popularised in the early 1990s. There is something intrinsically human about our desire to catalog and organise our intellectual work into meaningful and sharable collections. More recently, many universities and indeed countries are building academic repositories of books, papers, theses and teaching materials.

Sebastian Kruk has been working on a semantic digital library within DERI for the past while, and recently has put together an evaluation version of their JeromeDL system. If you wish to check out what this system is all about he also has an introductory presenation that outlines how library resources can be enhanced for browsing and retrieval with various semantic empowered services inclucing social annotations.

There is also a guided evaluation available on http://q.digime.name/ which steps you through some tasks, prompting you to provide feedback at various stages. This is probably the best place to start, and will give you an opportunity to reflect on what you think of digital repositories and to contribute some thoughts on how they might be improved, along with getting to play with the system using the accompanying guided instructions.

Facebook and neocon libertarianism

Tom Hogkinson, writer of "How to be Idle" and "How to be free", comments on the ownership of Facebook in the Guardian yesterday. He provides details of the political/philosophical outlook of the three major funders/owners, painting a somewhat disturbing picture for those who are keen to upload their lives onto Facebook's server farm. Of course, two of the owners are major players in new technology investment and Facebook isnt their ownly 'finger in the pie'. The question of whether their attitudes matter or not, is a valid one, since many of us buy products and services from other companies without questioning their political standpoint. One of the main differences, though, with technologies such as Facebook is the gathering and harvesting of personal data and information and to make this point, Tom summarises some interesting paragraphs from the Facebook use agreement.

PS(3) I pod you

So, you've just installed your new flat-screen digital TV and Santa brought you an iPod, but all of that is, I'm afraid, so "last year". The must have technologies for the home of the future (remember the Jetsons?) are listed on the BBC's website today.