Friday, April 9, 2010

Kollaborative Video Editing

When I first heard about Kaltura, I refused to believe my ears. I remember thinking "There is no way that someone can make an online video editor that lets different people upload different pieces of footage into a single project and edit it asynchronously. Impossible." thankfully my curiosity got the better of me and I clicked on the link and had a play around. It's literally what is says on the box: if you've got some footage and I've got some footage we can both upload it to the same project and edit it into something greater than the sum of our parts. The editing process is just like the wiki process: pendulum swings that eventually arrive at a middle ground: if you think we should chop the first 10 seconds off and I think we should keep it in, we discuss it on the discussion page of the wiki and eventually agree to a compromise. You can add titles, audio, transitions and still clips like any decent video editor. It's quite amazing technology and it's really easy to set up on a range of different platforms; it has plugins for Wordpress, Joomla, Moodle, Drupal and Mediawiki so it's ready to drop into your site.
A project the Head of Maths at Albany Senior High and I are working on is a living textbook for maths that allows students to film and upload different ways of solving equations using Kaltura. Here's a very rough working prototype of what we've got in mind. (See if you can spot the LaTeX on the page; something Wikieducator handles perfectly.)

1 comment:

  1. That was a lovely trip down memory lane. I haven't done any quadratic equations for several decades and I'd forgotten how much fun they were. And what a great teaching technology.

    ReplyDelete