Time-to-Adoption: One Year or Less

Already common among consumers, the sharing of informally produced personal audio and video content is rapidly moving into academia as a form of personal expression and as a means of information delivery. The basic concept of sharing personal experiences that began with text as the medium (personal websites and blogs, for instance) is extending into other media as the tools to capture and create audio and video are maturing.

Recording devices for both audio and video are small, portable and relatively inexpensive, the quality of captured media is high, and the process of publishing video and audio is becoming easier and easier. Already it is possible to drop a video clip onto a web page, trim it, and upload it in minutes (see VideoEgg, www.videoegg.com, for one example; there are others). The clip can be embedded in any web page with a few lines of provided code. Audio is equally easy to share: a podcast can be quickly published to the iTunes music store, for example, where it is easily retrieved.

The most interesting possibilities introduced by this trend center around the sharing aspect. Social networking tools which cater to a specific community and allow users to generate and share content are increasingly popular; consider Facebook, which is aimed specifically at high school and college students. As a place where students can connect with agemates in their own geographical area, Facebook became incredibly popular almost overnight. This trend is expanding as social networking tools incorporate video and audio. Imagine how it will take off when cell phones can capture high-quality audio and video: everything you need, in one device you already carry.

Relevance for Teaching, Learning & Creative Expression

• enhances learning in oral and auditory fields (foreign languages, speech pathology)
• encourages creative synthesis of audio or video resources from a variety of sources

Examples

• Drama faculty at the North Carolina School for the Arts are using iPods to record accent and dialogue for students to study. A faculty member from design and production uses iPods for several things, including creation of weekly "listening lists."

• A Women's Studies Course at California State University, Fullerton includes an assignment for students to "sign up for one of the following development teams: vblogging (video blogging), blogging, podcasting, class website, video, cell net. Each team will be responsible for developing a project that uses one of these technologies as an intervention into gender inequality."

For Further Reading

Publishing a Podcast to iTunes
A single page of instructions on distributing podcasts and other recorded media via iTunes, using RSS. http://phobos.apple.com/static/iTunesRSS.html

Vlog Map
How many video blogs are there in the world? Well, this map will give you an idea. Click a pin on the map to view a blog and find out who keeps it and where they live. http://www.vlogmap.org/

SixApart Simplifies Video Blogging
(Shelly Solheim, eWeek, October 26, 2005) One blog service provider makes it easy to add video. http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1877776,00.asp