Metamedia

"Neural Rights Management" and Permission Culture

"Neural Rights Management" (found via @hrheingold) is a "future video" designed in the spirit of science-fiction futurology to show us the results of the logical extrapolation of the current attempts to destroy the digital commons.

It uses the Mastercard Priceless narrative technique to show an example of what it would be like to have Neural Rights Management and so have to purchase basic bodily experiences, such as watching the sun set on the beach.

Stuart Candy, researcher at the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, on this blog the sceptical futuryst tells the story of how the video was made and put on YouTube were it remained for almost two years - until a copyright claim was made against the background music and it was taken down.

The word ironic hardly covers it. The future is almost here.

• Read the whole story and see the original video here

Scarce InfoWorld and Abundant InfoWorld

The Desert is the Eco-Info System of Scarce InfoWorld that we are leaving behind.

To succeed there, information must survive the harsh environment. Husbanding resources and using them efficiently is important. There are a few types of things and only a few unique giants that easily stand out.

The Forest is Eco-Info System of Abundant InfoWorld we are entering.

To succeed there, information has to stand out from the thousands of varieties similar to it. Exuberance and variation are important. There are many types of things and the differences between them are often minute, and the quality that distinguishes success and failure can appear trivial.

Linktribution: background photos by the one and only cogdog.

Blackboard Jungle & Visual Education

I was in the video store recently and the staff there were watching, of all things, a Dick Cavett show episode from the early 1970s with comedian Bill Cosby, who was talking about his involvement with the PBS kids educational television show The Electric Company. There was an interesting discussion about using film and television to teach.

Lo and behold, on this same topic, while going through my feeds, I find a wonderful post The "Eye Generation" by Jim Brown in the Blogging Pedagogy blog from the University of Texas about the 1955 film Blackboard Jungle and visual literacy:

But, more to the point, Blackboard Jungle was trotting out this "visual learners" argument in 1955. One of the ways that the teacher in the film reaches his students is by showing them a cartoon and then having them analyze the stories.

The cartoon the teacher, Mr. Dadier, played by actor Glenn Ford, shows is a version of Jack and the Beanstalk. It leads to an engaging class discussion of the ethics of Jack's situation.

During the scene, there are several frequent medium closeup shots of the students who are enthusiastically warming to the topic, interspersed with shots of the leader of the thugs, played by actor Vic Morrow, with a face reflecting his realization that he has lost control of his group of students to the teacher. It is an important dramatic turning point in the film.

Even more interesting is the exchange in the film by the teachers afterwards. Upon hearing that Glenn Ford had used a film in class to enliven the students, another teacher remarks,

Visual education, huh?

Mr. Dadier (Ford) replies,

Not really. I was just trying to get their attention.

Bingo! That was what really happened in that scene: it was not a question of teaching with visuals, it was an issue of: this is what it takes to get their attention. Having gotten their attention with a visual form, the actual teaching was through a classroom conversation.

The attention getting device might been a picture. Or a film. Or a poem. Or anything. Glenn Ford's character knew his students and used a cartoon.

It might have been music, too. One of the subplots of the film is another teacher who is a lover of jazz, who brings his precious and rare jazz records to school, only to have them vandalized by the thug students.

He failed because it wasn't just the form, it wasn't that it was audio, it was that it was old fashion, irrelevant, square jazz. There's a reason this film was the first with a rock and roll soundtrack, and starts with the attention getting snare drum snap! of Rock Around the Clock.

If Glenn Ford's Mr. Dadier had chosen one of those dull instructional videos made by the proponents of "Visual Education" he would have gotten his film project smashed.

But he didn't. He used an appropriate Visuality to get their attention, engage them, then shifted it to a discussion. That's the key, making that shift.

That's the difference between entertainment and education.

"What Is Your Conceptual Continuity?"

When I was teaching Critical Thinking classes during the last few years, I would use an exercise developed from Jerry Mander on how to count "technical events" while watching film and television:

To get an idea of the extent to which television is dependent upon technical tricks to maintain your interest (lacking real content), try the 'Technical Events Test':

Put on your television set and simply count the number of seconds between each cut,  zoom, superimposition,  voice-over, dissolve- a technical event of some kind.

Very rarely will you be able to count more that about eight seconds without some video-magic alteration of reality.

You can download my version of that as a homework assignment (in Word format) yourself and give it a try if you want.

Page Too

All of our students and almost all of us have grown up with television and so learn how this works before we even started to school. These techniques and the system of continuity editing that makes it work goes back to early film pioneers like Porter and Griffith.

Continuity editing is a highly artificial skill to learn: akin with the artificialness of an alphabet or a highway system. And through the 20th century the audience's (vid-ience?) tolerance for ever denser -- both more numerous and more complex -- technical events has grown appreciable, especially since the advent of television.

Which leads me to a note about Griffith's film Intolerance and a new site called Cinemetrics which is dedicated to measuring such technical devices in films for analytical purposes.

The analysis of Intolerance is a wonderful example of how such techniques can illuminate the subtle issues of rhythm and narrative pace.

Let’s see what happens if we gather the shot length data about Intolerance as a whole, and about each of its stories separately, and assess their fluctuations within the duration of the film...

Eyetracking: Text versus Graphics

Link: Eyetrack III - What You Most Need to Know.

Overall, we observed that participants were more likely to correctly recall facts, names, and places when they were presented with that information in a text fo[r]mat.

However new, unfamiliar, conceptual information was more accurately recalled when participants received it in a multimedia graphic format.

So what does this mean?

While overall we did see a slight, although not statistically significant, increase in information recall from text stories, we should note that most of our recall questions were about facts, names, and places.

Story information about processes or procedures seemed to be comprehended well when presented using animation and text.

Hhhm. Not so sure about that. But it would be interesting to test. So, here's a way to do that.

Take two sections of the same course and make two Powerpoints:

1) Facts, names, places info in text; unfamiliar conceptual info in multimedia graphic

2) Facts, names, places info in multimedia graphic; unfamiliar conceptual info in text

Then quiz them. See what happens. (You could do this live or online in an LMS.)

FunFridayFind: zoomFox In On Images

Today I have for you a screencast of how to install and use a nifty tool called zoomFox. 

It's an add-in for the Firefox browser that allows you do to something wonderful with images: zoom in and out, and pan around inside of them.

That may not sound like much, but if you are teaching Art or Art History, or any sort of Humanities or culture class, or any sort of class at all using pictures or photographs in a web browser - and who doesn't these days - you can do that very easily with zoomFox.

Being able to zoom in to see detail is useful, sometimes indispensable: landscapes, faces, maps, paintings can often benefit from zooming in on detail.

And don't underestimate the occaissional ability to zoom out of busy images to gain perspective.

zoomFox does about 80% of what much fatter and proprietary applications do.

And while you over in the Firefox addons section, you will find other applications that do similar things, but for perfect simplicity, zoomFox is my choice: it does one really useful thing really well.

[Firefox Nerd Alert: zoomFox has some issues with Greasemonkey, so check the details of the zoomFox page.]

Saving YouTube Videos

Link: Metamediawiki Saveyoutubevideos.

At the request of of some faculty, I have put together a wiki page with information about how to save YouTube and other videos locally, so if the online copy disappears, you will still have a copy to use in your curriculum.

Right now, a stumbling block for normal people (in so far as teachers are normal, in a technological sense anway ;) is that the usual media players don't seem to have very good support for FLV files stored locally on the computer, unlike browsers which generally have Flash plugins that work fine.  Though I have listed some free clients that are FLV friendly, expect the major media players to start supporting it soon.

The Two Golden Triangles

I stumbled across this, though it is a little out of date, from 2005. I suppose what arrested my attention was its nickname: The Google Golden Triangle, the result of a study using eye tracking to find out where and what people look at when they see a Google page.

The full article Did-it, Enquiro, and Eyetools Uncover Google’s Golden Triangle is definitely worth a read, even if it only tells us in specific detail something we already knew from advertising school or guessed from being a consumer: the environment is designed on purpose to elicit certain kinds of behaviors. Layout design is a well known commodity as is its subliminal effect.

Usually when I teach web layout, I use mock ups of magazine advertising space, but this image, color coded for targets based on eye-tracking measurements, is an informative visualization and I'll use it in the future as a source of comparison.

Of course, there are other interesting studies (1, 2, 3) of how various layouts are read by web surfers as well.

Remember, Google is not in the search engine business, or the software business.

Google is in the attention business.

So, it is a triangle, but is it golden?  Yes.

Google had earnings of $3.5 billion in the first quarter of 2007 alone, with an estimated yearly earning of $15 billion. They recently bought DoubleClick for 3.1 billion. It has bought a lot of stuff recently (cf. this timeline.)

Meanwhile, the its real life geographic namesake, The Golden Triangle area of Southeast Asia, centered principally in Burma, production of poppy and heroin peaked about a decade ago but even in the 1998/1999 season, the estimated total worth of those crops for the entire Third World was roughly $5 billion dollars (burma details),  though the extended secondary economic effect via money laundering may be as much as $100 billion dollars.

I wonder what the estimated secondary economic effect of Google services is throughout webdom ? The internet attention tracking business (aka advertising) business was worth about $16.5 billion in 2005.

There's a lot of money to be made in making people feel good, there always has been, but there is also a lot of money in the apparently subtler business of attention management.

Or as the poet says,

“Pleasure is the carrot dangled to lead the ass to market; or the precipice.”

If you think that isn't funny, well, maybe you do need some drugs to help you along: a 50s cartoon of Felix the Cat showing us how he uses a mind-altering chemical sprayed on unfunny comic books to make them appear funny.

Count Him Not Among Your Friends

"Count not him among your friends who will retail your privacies to the world."
    -- Publilius Syrus

There’s a site online called Swivel  http://www.swivel.com/ that is a rather quirky combination of social network and data set visualization tool.

It allows you to upload or reference existing data sets, then visualize them in various ways, compare them to other data sets already on the site, share them, tag them, comment and get comments on them.

It just started earlier in the year, but already has rather wide range of topics. For anyone doing visualizations of statistics, for either the social or hard sciences, this site could be a useful adjunct to class, as well as a lot of fun.

Here's a nice example of a graph made in Swivel by seema, illustrating an interesting instance of traditional politicians' continued misunderstanding of the power of social software in the recent Obama MySpace debacle:

Map of the Internet Found!

Finally, a useful and accurate map of the Internet from xkcd. 

I never thought I'd see that day again, at least not since about 1993 or so, yet here it is.

The key is this compass, of course, which is a guide to the orientation of the map.

By figuring out which things you use on the net, you can probably figure out your personality more accurately than a Myers-Briggs test. Are you a IRL-Noob (focus on real life-practical) or more of a .COM-π ? Or perhaps a IRL-π ? Hey, can't I be an Noob-π ? Oh, those dichotomies.

There are many and wonderful details on the map: can you find Stallman's airship, the tiny peninsula of "Attractive My Space Pages" (exaggerated for effect, I think: it can't be that big!), Third Life, and rather intriguingly, Sulawesi ?

Sulawesi ?!

And better yet, it is soon to be available as a poster. Now, if someone would only put in some hotspot links into it.

Thanks to Paul for the reference.

Footnote

Seriously, though, if you are interested in visualization of large scale data, especially of social networks, I highly recommend taking a look at Matthew Hurst's Data Mining blog.

Also quite interesting is Swivel, a data visualization site combined with social networking tools like comments and tagging, so you can share and comment on visualized data.