Flippin' Video for Dummies Part 2

When you're presenting a video to a formal gathering like an AGM, it's a good idea to run it from your PC hard drive rather than from the internet. So just copy it to your USB stick and remember to grab the CORRECT one as you leave home that morning...

And just in case the USB stick malfunctions - or you take the wrong one - arrrrgh! put a copy of your precious video in the cloud at Dropbox. In the unlikely event that you've taken the wrong USB stick, you can simply download your flippin' video from Dropbox.

Allow plenty of time for this download process. How much time? you may ask. About 3 flippin' hours for a 350 MB video. That's right. The download finished about 15 minutes after the end of the AGM.

When all else fails, ask someone at home to peddle over and hand deliver the correct USB stick (as long as you live within 20 minutes of your workplace). It works a treat.

Postscript: now if you absolutely have to play (another) video directly from the internet, play it through before your guests arrive, so it will play without interruption (buffering) on demand. And NEVER navigate away from that particular web page or else all that preparation was a waste of time!

Flippin' Video uploading for Dummies

Spent most of the weekend trying to upload a 'little' video to one of the hosting sites available for our work wiki.

What a smorgasbord! I felt like Goldielocks.

There's Teachtube - just for education - perfect! Except they only accept videos smaller than 100MB and there's my Latest Favourite - Vimeo a 'respectful community of creative people'. It's quick and cute but unfortunately only takes videos up to 500MB, or is that 600MB? I dunno and don't care because the video in question is 689MB.

So I cast my eye around to blip.tv which I seem to have used before (I've got videos floating everywhere in the cloud, it seems). You can grow old waiting for videos to upload at blip.tv and there is poor communication on their side when they spit the dummy after 2 hours and a big zero has uploaded.

I googled Best free video hosting sites and nearly fell for Viddler - it's got great interactive tagging and comments facilities which I might eventually use. But luckily I watched all their talking head how-to videos before going through another lengthy sign-up process and found a limit of 500MB for those too stingy or poor to pay.

Well, what about Youtube? I hear you ask. Unfortunately whilst they seem to accept anything, there's no privacy controls, and many of my students have a healthy contempt for having their faces appearing all over the net. So I think I'll just go back to the Flippin' software and split the finished product into Part 1 and Part 2, thereby getting around the limitations of free hosting sites.

Spiders, mushrooms, old ghosts and new forests

Mushrooms, spiders, old ghosts and new forests from Jill Koppel on Vimeo.

...and the story of the Church of the Lake at Nagambie.

It was delightful Autumn weather for the Easter break spent at Moyhu. The orb weavers were out in force, just like back in 1992 (?) when you couldn't walk anywhere without waving a big stick ahead to clear a path through the invisible webs.

Everywhere new, lush growth.

A few jobs were undertaken and then a trip back to Melbourne via Nagambie to drop in on a chap in Heathcote.

A night out in ACDC Lane

A night out in ACDC Lane from Jill Koppel on Vimeo.
What does a cheesy Country ballad have to do with Flinders Lane cutting-edge street art? Probably just that the audio track was one of only two that I have of Dale Watson in my itunes collection, from the compilation album Ten in Texas. And I was keen to get the photos out to those who love our Dale. Of course, being the amateur photographer that I am, I missed a golden opportunity to snap Dale chatting with his fans outside in the break: I could've got him in the foreground with one of those artworks. Never mind, I got some fresh air and a close look at the finely tailored jacket that he was sporting.

The Cherry Bar was packed with punters: the air was hot and stuffy, and the oldies were jammed up on the benches round the sides with a perfect view of the band over the tops of the heads of the smart young things with coiffed hairdos like Dale's.

I tried to keep track of the set list - jotting down scraps of lyrics from the chorus of each song so I could google them later. At least his lyrics are understandable: whether it's truckin' and texting, crying into his whiskey/ tequila or beer or sharing his love and loss with us all. And the crowd was extremely appreciative - a lot had been to Austin (or so they claimed, in answer to his query).

The band was jumping - Chris Crepps on upright bass, new fiddle player Don Raby, Don Pawlak, pedal steel guitar and Mike Bernal, drums.

While I hunt around for those song titles, I'll post this for currency...

Fun with the Flip

In the last few days I've filmed an ESL class (more on that later) and worked out how to trim (top and tail) video clips made by the work Flip camera. Here's a short video compiled with Flipshare software on the imac. I've given up using the netbook because the software started behaving badly when trying to open it there.

Yarra River in flood from Jill Koppel on Vimeo.

The floods video will be preserved for posterity: next drought we'll be able to view it again and again to admire the abundant waters. I really like the effect of the raindrops on the image.

Pan and zoom should be undertaken very slowly otherwise those predisposed to motion sickness might start feeling queasy.

Whilst I was filming Toni's Hands on English class I fortuitously worked out how to prevent the Two Touch smartboard from doing crazy things on the PC when writing on the projected image. Most of us are using the Two Touch at least to go to the internet and operate the PC by touching the board. But if you want to write something anywhere on the active area, it would inadvertently activate the PC. All you have to do is pull out the USB plug thereby disconnecting the whiteboard from the PC and Bobs your uncle! Problem solved. Just don't forget to reconnect when resuming 'touching'.

Here's the video from Toni's class: it was a little chaotic, especially when our student 'expert' told us we were folding wrongly. But that just gives us more 'language opportunities' for the follow-up class...

Hands on English at CNLC Making lotus flower from Jill Koppel on Vimeo.

The compilation process is amazingly simple. I chose vimeo to host these - it seems hassle-free and it's private (compared to Youtube).

By the way, did you hear that Youtube Facebook and Twitter have joined forces to make a mega company? It's gonna be called YouTwitFace...

Port Fairy 2011 Gem from Tim O'Brien

I've been away at the Port Fairy Music Festival (I think they're trying to dissociate themselves from their past exclusively 'folk' reputation). This time I took along the wonderful Flip video camera and made some (short) video clips instead of attempting out-of-focus snaps of performers refusing to stop still for even a microsecond.

The results are patchy, to say the least. I forgot to take it on the first night - missing a superb opportunity in the front row to film Shakura S'Aida and band followed by Rosie Flores.

On Saturday I started filming the French Canadian group Les Chauffeurs a Pieds (that would be the walking chauffeurs?) followed by Crooked Still - an eagerly anticipated gig only marred by the Flip suddenly and inexplicably freezing: with the battery going flat, I couldn't record, play or turn it off. So I took it home to show it who's boss, and then proceeded to have a frantic live text chat with a techie somewhere else in the world - only after first installing a Telstra moby broadband USB borrowed from a generous companion. So it charged up whilst its primary carer caught up on an hour or two of much needed sleep.

The day's entertainment resumed with Joe Pug, and Tim O'Brien and the Two Oceans Trio. I captured one of several special 'moments that bring a tear to your eyes' when Tim O'Brien sang and accompanied himself on fiddle: achieving an amazing 3 part harmony. Listen for his wisecrack at the start about how to tell if your fiddle is out of tune. (I'm still trying to master that trim tool in Flip - again, it refused to acquiesce to my wishes.)



The timbre of his voice also morphs to blend with each musical style in their wide repertoire.

Other magical moments included the phenomenal guitar licks of the young Donna in Shakura's band (eat your heart out Santana, Hendrix and Zappa) and the delightful duet of 'You are my Sunshine' with Joe Chindamo (on accordion!) and Doug DeVries, guitar. We were all bowled over by young Callum, the drummer in Blue Shaddy (is he allowed to be away on tour without his mum or dad?!)

For more on the PFFF experience (yep, one of the 'f's stands for folk) go to Annie's Cat Politics one of the blogs featured to the right.

Better go and sort out that chaotic pile of video files floating around in the virtual universe between netbook, USB stick and imac Flipshare, imovie and iphoto...

The Dance of the E-Learning Objects

It's all coming together like a great musical that many people have been rehearsing for weeks: some playing instruments, some singing or acting, some building sets.

Thanks Vlad B at flickr

Everyone thinking 'how the hell can we combine all the different strands to create a thing of such beauty and complexity as this?'

For most of this year, I cursed the imac for not doing what I was used to. But I'll postpone a situation analysis on the imac for a later entry.

The e-mentor project presented challenges to 'talk the walk' amongst the e-leaders and travellers. But what is the walk? What's the best way to use a bunch of Web2 tools with our students in an environment where access to the internet is never assured, where you never know from one day to the next if the necesssary plug-ins /add-ons are available to run audio and video. And the students' computer literacy is inconsistent and patchy.

Last year (or was in 2008?) I set up the CNLCTalks wiki to be shared by ESL and ALBE classes to both showcase students' oracy work and as an internet hub for learning resources. I drew inspiration mainly from Dale Pobega's blog and Rosa's podcasts st St George TAFE in Sydney.

We had some early modest success, mainly in uploading audios from the Communications 3 group, and storing audio/ video / screencasts for ESL classes and computer classes. We also put a pdf of the latest students' RAW Newsletter there, though I doubt if anyone actually accesses it in this way. But I really felt that the wiki is under-utilised by both students and staff. Even I have had ups and downs with collecting student-centred content and with sourcing and uploading resources.

However recently a few things have fallen nicely into place. And we're pretty close to running a dress rehearsal (returning to the opening analogy).

The adoption and integration of digital audio is a rough road to travel: operating mp3 players, file management, editing (simply) in Audacity have all presented challenges. Even now we continue to do battle with the Voice recorder in Voxopop and are considering the move to a Pro Easi-speak microphone to ease the transition (for teachers especially).

However, I'm convinced the discovery of ipadio and phone blogging is a breakthrough for generating teacher-produced podcasts and recording students both in and beyond the classroom.

And the other day I finally incorporated Dropbox so that my Netbook and imac finally share files - like a separated couple who begrudgingly communicate now via a mediator! So now I don't need to take the mp3 player home to copy files to the Netbook. And the extra memory stick I recently bought can be mothballed. With 3 copies of a particular file (doc/ mp3) in 3 different places, I can update in any of these places and know that it is quietly working in the background to update the other copies too. Wow - an app that actually works for me (not the other way around!)

It's time to revisit the question: where are we heading and with what resources and tools? And we're in a good place to re-position ourselves, our tools and resources for the future.