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Electronic Education: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised ('Cause It's Being Webcast) You
will not be able to stay home, brother. You will not be able to
plug in, turn on and drop out. You will not be able to lose yourself
on skag and skip, Skip out for beer during commercials, Because
the revolution will not be televised. In
the mid-1980s, a revolution took place in the publishing world.
Before then, mass distribution of published text typically required
the services of a professional typesetter. The year 1984 witnessed
the introduction of breakthrough hardware--the Apple Macintosh and
laser printer--together with powerful new software--Aldus Corporation's
PageMaker (the first page layout software). Suddenly with just a
small investment in equipment and training, individuals and small
businesses could self-publish. Early users included many educators
who were drawn by the benefits of word processing for designing
course materials for their own students. The field of desktop publishing
was born. A
similar revolution in video production is now taking place in the
multimedia development world and it promises to do the same for
Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL). Of course, desktop video
production is not new--we all know that Hollywood's been using computers
to produce some incredible movies and special effects for quite
a long time, but obviously at great cost. In fact desktop video
production for CD-ROM and even web delivery is not entirely new
either. However, until very recently, even this "small scale"
sort of digital video production required a combination of very
sophisticated and rather expensive hardware and software. So, what's
so new? First, there's a new digital video standard format, DV,
which is supported by a consortium of over 50 companies. There is
currently a variety of consumer and professional level video camcorders
that shoot this format (ranging in price from around $700 to upwards
of $50,000). There's
also a new networking protocol called "FireWire" which
was originally developed by Apple. As explained on the Apple FireWire
website (http://www.
apple.com/firewire/): FireWire
is not exclusive to the Macintosh platform, though it sometimes
has different names on other platforms. The IBM-PC compatible version
of FireWire is known as "IEEE 1394" and Sony implementations
are called "i.LINK". The
DV technology enables video producers to shoot original footage
in a high quality digital format that can later be transferred quickly
and easily to a computer via a FireWire cable. With video editing
software, the video can be polished, narration and/or captions can
be added, as can a host of filters, transitions and special effects.
Basic
equipment requirements include a FireWire enabled digital video
camera, a computer equipped with a FireWire port and video editing
software. For those on a tight budget and for whom highest production
quality is not a top priority, a basic camera in the $700 range
should suffice. The new Macintosh iMac DV comes equipped with built-in
FireWire and a basic editing software package called iMovie for
a very reasonable price. On the PC side, a few of the newer machines
are shipping with FireWire ports and it's possible to add a FireWire
card to Windows-based machines. There are a number of basic editing
software packages for both Macintosh and PC-based systems. Recent
versions of QuickTime Pro are cross-platform compatible and have
basic editing capabilities built-in. The free version of this software
can be downloaded from the Apple website and after paying a $30
license fee, you receive a code that enables the editing features.
For
mid-range solutions, I suggest looking for cameras with 3 so-called
"CCDs" ("Charged Coupled Devices"--the imaging
devices), which currently are priced around $2,000. These cameras
produce excellent quality audio and video and come very close to
matching the quality of far more expensive professional cameras.
As such, they are often referred to as being at the "prosumer"
level. A higher end Macintosh G3, or a G4 computer is perfectly
suited for DV editing. I have found Apple's Final Cut Pro to be
an outstanding non-linear editing program. There are also several
excellent solutions for the PC side. The most recent version of
Adobe Premiere (v. 5.1c) has been enhanced to handle the DV format
and is completely cross-platform compatible. Final Cut lists for
about $1,000 and Premiere around $580, and significant educational
discounts are available for both. In any event, a large hard drive
is needed as digital video files require about 3.8Mb/second (approximately
230Mb/minute) of storage space. So you need to ensure that you have
at least 2GB of space for every 9 minutes of DV, but here again
prices have been dropping lately to where 16GB hard drives are becoming
the norm. Other
significant advances in this area include the new video compression
algorithms that enable huge reductions in the file sizes of digital
video content so that such files may be streamed over the Internet
with little loss in quality. All of which point to a trend that
is about to take the world of CALL by storm. Online Resources: Adobe
Premiere Jim Duber is a multimedia developer and principal of duber dot com, an instructional media development firm found at (http://www.duber.com). Jim has recently been appointed English Community Leader of the WebCT learning hub (http://www.webct.com/english/home/) |
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