Notes for a presentation at Nottingham, 11 April 2008.
Following up on previous presentations about using commercial embeddable services, this focuses on the Economics Network‘s use of embeddable video.
A video is worth more than one thousand words: Folding a Collapsible Reflector (We wasted an embarrassing amount of time in the office before looking it up on YouTube). A more relevant example: Wikis explained in Plain English (embedded on EconomicsNetwork site).
All the more important for getting a message to digital natives where you have to beware the TL;DR issue.
Complaint that video sharing sites are “not intellectual” is a myth. Issue is filtering and in some cases making intellectual content. That’s where we come in.
Embeddable video has a future (although hard to say which specific services we’ll be using).
Which service?
YouTube:
- limited to 10 minutes or 100 Megs
- Low resolution/highly compressed already looks old fashioned
- but it gets lots of hits – people seem to like the commenting/rating ability
- Text on video beats text on a web page: nearly 3 million hits for a computer voice reading out a statement over some stock footage.
- Switching off comments lowers your credibility, but some of commenters are morons. You have to be prepared for criticism or outright denigration of your speaker.
- Example: Tim Harford keynote
- Example: Captain Economics
- Example: interviews with young government economists
Google Video:
- Can accept bigger and longer videos, converting miraculously from almost any format
- Still quite low resolution
- Stats report is quite unreliable
- Example: a 1-hour keynote speech with slides
- Search engine finds video on YouTube and other sites
Veoh.com and Vimeo.com:
- Higher resolution – looks more modern
- Seem popular with students, along with French site DailyMotion (NB not necessarily for educational reasons)
- Not the cultural impact of YT yet, but that’s changing.
Resource implications of becoming a video provider:
- about 50 quid for Camtasia editing software
- some small amounts for shareware for video tweaking (EnhanceMovie has proved useful)
- Laptop, camera, firewire interface, cables: 1.5K of kit fits in a shoulder bag and makes you a mobile filming/editing unit
- Get a tripod: necessary if you don’t want to look like a home video
- Editing can take a whole day for an hour-long video (including tweaking video quality, finishing, uploading)
Some non-embedded videos illustrating JISC-funded projects:
The Ancient Geeks 
April 11, 2008 at 3:49 pm
YouTube is in the process of rolling out improved video quality options at the moment. You may already see a video quality option if you have a YouTube account or try adding
&fmt=18
… to the end of any video to see if a higher quality version is available
How this stacks up against the other sites you have listed, plus the video options available to FlickrPro subscribers, may be worth re-assessing in a few months time
I have been getting into the community aspects of YouTube since the YouStage/UpStaged experience and probably need to write them up – perhaps it may be worth doing a YouTube for fun and education session in the next ILRT Staff Dev week?
August 19, 2008 at 1:55 pm
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