Fun at ADEC, VideoAnt, and OER In Mexico
April 25th, 2008 by Ken UdasI just got back from the annual meeting of that American Distance Education Consortium (ADEC). Don’t let their web site fool you, it is an organization with a lot going on in some very relevant areas. I am not going to give a run down of the whole meeting now, although I might a bit later. I do want to mention two of the interesting activities presented at the meeting.
On the first evening, we were joined by colleagues from the Tecnológico de Monterrey who told us about an OER project that they launched recently. They experimented on a pretty large scale as users of content and reported back on their lessons learned. I hope to have them tell their story as part of the OSS & OER Impact in Education Series. So, hopefully more on that later. I think that examples of how OER are being used effectively at an institutional level is an important part of our dialog that should help inform institutions and individuals who are making OER available.
I also want to point you to an interesting Video Annotation technology that was demonstrated by David Ernst, who serves as the Director of Academic and Information Technology at the University of Minnesota’s College of Education & Human Development. VideoAnt is a web-based video annotation application that is still in early development, but shows a lot of promise. Right now it only deals with FLV (Flash video) files and it has a relatively small development team working on it, but it shows great promise. I hope that this project goes the OSS Community route and supports more non-proprietary file formats to maximize its impact on education. To learn more and have some fun, visit the VideoAnt site and try it out. Feel free to tell us what you think.
