Beginner's Guide to Vid Blogs

peter allen

13 October, 2004

VBlogs and VidBlogs – the next wave.

I think we have all seen the hackneyed statistic that our children watch 7 hours of television a day. And there is no doubt that we live in a digital world, yet we still persist in using the written word to convey thoughts and ideas, when sometimes a moving picture would be so much more expressive and engaging.

Since 1990 the standard business computer has been multimedia compatible, but its only been with the convergence of entertainment technology, communications technology and computer technology have we been able to capture and use video information easily. The internet has moved from text only, to text with pictures to text with full multimedia in a relatively short time.

With this evolution has come new ways of doing familiar tasks. We have seen Blogs, wikis, shared workspaces, and a raft of other collaboration and communication tools, and the latest I have stumbled across is the VBLOG.

Vblog, Vidblog or Video Blog is (as you guessed) an evolution of the Web-Log (blog) only the medium is video instead of text and pictures.

And just like Blogs they are used by people in a myriad of ways.

Some uses are:

Vblogs as a personal diary or journal, (www.vidblogs.com )

Vlblogs for digital story telling, (http://za.creativecommons.org/movies/ccsa.swf )

Vblogs for community activism, (http://exposed.org/unamerican/unamerican56.swf )

Vblogs for filmmaker exposure, (http://www.tropisms.org/ )

And surely Vblogs for education and training.

As with a lot of new ideas on the internet, Vblogs are riding the crest of a new wave of technology capability.

Editing video, and creating a video-based presentation is now quite achievable on a standard PC. And with software such as Video Communicator, (http://www.seriousmagic.com/newvcdemo.cfm ) - creating engaging video suitable for web delivery is a simple task.

Nor do you need to spend $2000 on a digital video camera. Solid state video cameras are available (http://www.aiptek.com/ ) or consumer digital still cameras now usually have a video mode allowing you to record VGA quality or “email” quality video complete with sound. (http://www.digitalcameras.com.au/product.asp?productid=2827 )

Indeed even mobile phones are becoming video capable – I’m sure you’ve seen the advertisements for mobile phones that can take still photos, - it seems now that the cutting edge of mobile phone technology can capture video and store it on a 256MB SD RAM card (http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news.php?id=27871 )

The access to (very portable) video recording devices means that this is a medium that could be used in an educational setting quite effectively. - Instead of trying to cram meaningful information into a TEXT message, video can be captured on a mobile phone downloaded into a standard computer, edited and then sent to a recipient or uploaded onto a website for all to see.

So what are the educational implications and opportunities that come with easier access to video resources on the Internet?

There are users in the USA that are complaining that they cant get the fastest broadband connections, while here in Australia we have people that can only get 56K dial up connections in the suburbs. And some rural and remote users would love to be able to get connections that went as fast as 56K.

Yet high compression techniques allow us to get 6 minute video snippets down to 1.4mb – ie the storage capacity of a floppy disk. A blank CDR which costs less than 50cents can hold 2 hours of highly compressed video. And a DVD-R can hold at least 4.3 GB of data. So although we might have trouble moving large amounts of data we can certainly store it.

Video and vidblogs can be made accessible using high compression techniques, so that even users that are limited to a 56 K connection can participate in this exciting medium, and as wireless broadband becomes available, people denied access to broadband will be able to participate.

See ( http://www.unwired.com.au/index.php ) ( www.iburst.com.au), (http://www.linkinnovations.com/ )

The use of Vidblogs in the classroom (virtual and physical) is something that flexible and Elearning advocates must consider. For those that are trying to build more reflection into their teaching strategies, VBlogs will be easy to adapt to.

Other innovative uses of Vblogs to teach skills or techniques, are also achievable. And certainly if we wish to engage students such as the Nintendo generation or generation WWW, - we need to be thinking of the digital lifestyle that our students now work, play and study in.

Oh.. and yes, I am well aware that to prove my point this article should have been presented as a Vidblog. 8^)