In this video, Jennifer Riley Campbell discusses the University of Denver Writing Program’s use of student-produced video projects at the 2010 Education and the New Media Conference, hosted by the Center for Teaching and Learning. She touches upon the use of inexpensive Flip Cameras, found media, and free editing software to produce projects that let students reach their rhetorical goals. This is an innovative “multimodal” pilot program that incorporates the contemporary media landscape while teaching DU students essential writing skills. Follow this link for more information on the Writing Program’s multimodal courses. Kathy Keairns of the Center for Teaching and Learning conducted the interview.
Aviary, Inc makes seven lightweight, powerful design applications that can be accessed through the browser. By integrating directly with Google Apps, Aviary is extending the productivity of the Google Docs suite by adding collaborative multimedia capabilities including image editing, audio editing, color management and more. Aviary will have free introductory pricing for Enterprise users. To learn more, visit www.aviary.com/googleenterprise.
Lee Keller kicks off a short series on video conferencing with two versions of Adobe Connect. The first, ConnectNow, is part of the free service at Acrobat.com and allows interaction with up to 3 people. The Pro version of Connect is shown with more robust tools and features.
The most recent release of Handbrake (http://handbrake.fr/) has brought in some new features as well as removed some functionality (like encoding to AVI or to certain devices). Overall, it seems to work more efficiently and produces some very high quality video. There are some updates to the GUI as well as some settings that should be updated. You should continue to use DU’s Video Encoding Standards, as outlined here: http://ctl.du.edu/staff/josephlabrecque/standard/ for the best results. The Handbrake settings, however, have changed a little bit. For this entry, I am using the Windows GUI, which is slightly different from the Macintosh version.
Let’s start out with the settings on the Picture tab (click image for larger size):
Note that the cropping is set to automatic, anamorphic is turned off, and that “Keep Aspect Ratio” is checked. This will help preserve the original picture quality and prevent distortion when you change the video width to 512 pixels.
Next, let’s look at Video Filters (click image for larger size): Read more…
As the CTL implements Flash technology extensively in our applications, there is potentially a lot of exciting news for the DU community coming out of Barcelona, Spain at the Mobile World Congress.
Firstly, Adobe has announced that Flash Player 10.1 is coming for almost all mobile operating systems including Android, the BlackBerry® platform, Symbian® OS, Palm® webOS and Windows Mobile®. Flash Player 10.1 is the first version of the Flash Player released through the cooperation of over 70 organizations including 19 of the 20 top mobile providers through the Open Screen Project.
View an excerpt from the Google Keynote:
It was also announced that AIR 2.0 would be coming to these same platforms over the next year, allowing Flash Platform developers to create applications distributable through application stores such as the Android Marketplace.
See what Nvidea has to say about Flash and AIR:
A plethora of new tablet devices were announced, all of them supporting Flash and AIR runtimes. Many of these devices allow open development, full multitasking, and extensive hardware configurations.
What perhaps may be the most important long-range announcement is that the world’s largest wireless operators (Verizon Wireless, AT&T, NTT DoCoMo, Deutsche Telekom, China Mobile, and Vodafone among them) are uniting to create “an open international applications platform” in an effort to tap demand for mobile applications. As things stand right now, the mobile world is fragmented across different operating systems, runtimes, networks, and application distribution mechanisms. This new platform would provide a single point of entry for application developers and meshes well with the open, cross-platform application distribution environment made possible by Flash Platform technologies.
Mobile is huge right now and will only gain greater momentum in the years to come. The fact that so many mobile players are collaborating on these various runtimes and initiatives should be heartening to anyone invested in the future of mobile application development.
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