Presentation is .5 of the battleHow the presentation of online video can enhance engagement and understanding.

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Who would have thought in this great age of distraction it would be video that would make us stop, look and listen. At its core video is a linear experience, it reveals its knowledge over time, so it feels at odds in with the rest of the internet. Online is a world of scanning, searching and butterfly minds ... click, click,clicking ... looking an insight or answer. Videos sit there like information traffic jams, that you have to patiently sit through to get the point.

The internet has given video new life, long gone are the days when you had to turn up at a certain time, to face a box sat in the corner of the room to watch a programme. Now you can watch a video almost anywhere. But video has had to adapt to the internet, one big change is brevity, in a world where people want instant information, video has had to get as close to instant as it can by getting shorter ... make it 2 minutes or less is the new production mantra.

But how videos are presented can enhance its engagement and understanding. Often they don’t sit on their own they are presented as part of an information buffet linked to other content (stills, text, other videos, graphics, links). Their method of presentation in its self might be part of the overall narrative ... the single video might only tell part of the story.

I have spent many years working with film and video, watching it move from the single screen in a darken room to part to part of an information experience, here is a collection of some of my recent favourites.

>>>> Presentation

is .5 of the battle

How the presentation of online video can

enhance engagement and understanding.

Video Wikihttp://vidiowiki.com/Video for education. Vidiowiki is a chain reaction TED talk. Its a neat idea but it feels like an early draft and could do with some user interface design. Vidiowiki allows people to explore a subject through videos and other content. Academics and researchers produce short videos on a particular subject (three mins or less). The videos are usually talking head style often done with a webcam. Each Videowiki has a subject area, a starting video, a short text synopsis, information about the speaker and some links to relevant information and research. The extra element that Vidiowiki brings is a web of interconnectivity, this means you can follow nodes to jump from video to video along a certain path. Each video has the same collection of content surrounding it.

You have to join to get full access to its content and its aimed at academics but you can see some example content like this video wiki on the research behind James Cameron’s AVITAR.

http://vidiowiki.com/feature/x5xphb4/

Canadian Film Board Capturing Realityhttp://films.nfb.ca/capturing-reality/Video for insight. “Capturing reality” is about the practice of making documentaries, it features over 160 clips from 38 leading film makers from across the globe. The videos are presented in a video wall, as you hover over individual clips you find out a little bit about each speaker and their subject matter. The video wall presentation immediately gives the viewer an idea of the size of the resource. It is very democratic, no one interviewee is at the start or end, everyone has something important to say and the viewer can just explore. Good use of music pulling the variety of clips together so the viewer feels like they are making a programme ... you can turn it off though and nicely designed.

The big askVideo for campaigning. Several years ago Friends of the Earth launched The Big Ask climate campaign. They set up a virtual march in the form of a website that people could upload short videos to, asking questions and expressing opinions about climate change.One of the challenges with UGC is that lots of people create lots of “stuff”. Often it can be a problem of how to present that all that “stuff” in a way that people can make sense of it. The nice thing about this site is that it made a virtue out of the amount of material they had, and the number of voices that were concerned about this very important issue.The site is no longer live  but you can see the interface here and get a bit of flavour.http://www.thebigask-avealook.com/

Video Wiki

The big ask

Canadian Film Board Capturing Reality

TED EDVideo for education. TED has been a great exponent of using video to spread ideas. TED sticks to the core idea of internet video (keep it short). People work for months pulling together their TED talk howning years of research down into quick videos. Now with its ed.ted initiative TED has expanded the idea by encouraging educators to FLIP videos. Take any video off Youtube and flip it. “Flipping” basically involves putting information around a video, so pupils “watch” the video, they are then do a quick quiz on what they have seen these with simple-multi choice questions, they then “think” using prompts to think about wider questions and then “dig deeper” through relevant links to other sites, texts and videos.

You can watch existing flips or create your own. Its a little gimmicky but for teachers it might be an easy and quick way to create a lesson which is branded as TED and TED have said they will be developing it.

Here’s an example of a flipped lesson. http://s.coop/tedatom

MICCAMhttp://your.miccam.com/#/HOME/Video for time wasting. Miccam is one of those video ideas someone had to do. People click on node points and record words. You can then put together sentences using recorded words. Feels very like the first draft of an idea hopefully someone will take it on and make something wonderful out of it. I think it would work well in a static environment like a museum.

College Click TVhttp://www.collegeclicktv.comVideo for feedback. Video would seem to be a natural review feedback tool especially for things like Amazon and Tripadvisor. I feel it would be a lot harder to fake reviews on video, but despite the technology being there, it has never really caught on so far.

College Click TV seem to have nailed it, they go out on campuses and get students to give their opinion on important subjects like Professors, Classes, Social life, Sports. The short responses gets to the important stuff quickly, that combined with a great labeling mean visitors can pull together what they want to find out quickly (although this could be improved if they turned this into a tagging system). They also surround the videos with lots of other information like fees, location, comments so you can really get an idea of a place.

TED ED

College Click TV

MICCAM

qwikihttp://www.qwiki.com/Making videos out of other stuff. Qwiki describe themselves as a technology company pioneering a “new media format” that combines the appeal of video with the interactivity of the web. Qwiki does the opposite of what lots of the internet does and takes non linear information (text, stills, maps, stats, graphics) and makes them into a linear video. Doug Imbruce the founder of qwiki describes it as an information experience like those you see in the movies when the hero asks the computer “what is earth like?” an the computer shows them a bunch of stuff about earth.

Type in a subject and qwiki makes a brief introduction “experience” pulling the information from wikipedia and other sources. For me the nice thing about qwikis is that they combine linear and nonlinear information as you can stop at any point and explore it in more detail.

Heres a qwiki on the riverside museum. http://www.qwiki.com/q/Riverside_Museum

qwiki

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