How ubiquitous can it get ??!!

Consider how video is touching our lives more and more....

www.clickz.com/experts/brand/cmo/article.php/3487961


Attention, Shoppers! "Retailer-Generated Media" in Every Aisle
By Pete BlackshawMarch 8, 2005

Every day, Wal-Mart touches more consumers than a typical country's census bureau counts in a year.
Small wonder the world's largest retailer is looking to significantly expand the in-store television network that's presently available in 2,600 locations. This includes new equipment, new programming, and the installation of 42-in. LCD TV monitors throughout the store. Already, the Wal-Mart TV captures approximately 130 million viewers every four weeks, placing it in the top five TV networks in the U.S.
Not surprisingly, major advertisers such as PepsiCo are already on board. Many more (at least, according to Wal-Mart) are signing up.
In effect, Wal-Mart is pioneering what could be referred to as retailer-generated media (RGM). Like consumer-generated media, advertisers can influence, but not entirely control, this ad platform.
Good for the Manufacturer or Consumer?
Is this a good thing? Is Wal-Mart TV a net positive for manufacturers? More important, what about consumers? Is this the type of content consumers truly want or need as part of the in-store shopping experience? Answers are hardly obvious, particularly against a backdrop of heightened retailer leverage, as well as consumer backlash against advertising.
Last week, I did a fair amount of "eflycasting" to a couple of online marketing message boards and various contacts in my Outlook directory to gather feedback on the issue.
Manufacturers won't go on record as saying this, but they certainly are asking hard questions about how a turbo-charged version of the end-aisle display will play out for their products and services, not to mention the balance of power between retailer and manufacturer.
Kelly Mooney, an expert on shoppers and author of the shopper behavior book, "The Ten Demandments," considers what Wal-Mart is doing a "brilliant move" on its part. "They are leveraging their size, their reach, their physicality, and more. Not to mention, they, too, are feeling the squeeze on margins and growth is increasingly challenging. This could translate into huge dollars to their bottom line."
As for the actual advertising, some see real potential. Rishad Tobaccowala, president of Starcom MediaVest (SMG) and a digital pioneer with whom I had the pleasure of working while at Procter & Gamble, wrote to me in an e-mail, "We are in the 'era of visual engagement' where television will be even more important in the future than it is today." Wal-Mart TV, he explains, falls into the category of "out-of-home video" -- not unlike the new video billboards in Times Square.
Such networks, Tobaccowala said, will "become part of the communications mix for many advertisers," and this is just the beginning. "Soon there will be video on grocery carts too as the price of technology drops and wireless broadband allows customized and localized delivery of video."
Media or Merchandising?
Is this media or merchandising? If this is just standard TV-inspired broadcast media, how do we know it will truly work?
If this is a merchandising play, does it even matter if it's truly effective? Who's to say this isn't yet another bargaining chip in the broader trade game? Today, you can leverage trade funds for shelf-talkers and end-aisle displays. Tomorrow, in the world of Wal-Mart TV, manufacturers will be able negotiate virtual posters.
It may be great for the environment -- retailers won't need as much cardboard. But I keep asking myself, is this truly good for the consumer? At a time when consumers feel overwhelmed with advertising, are we really making their lives simpler and hassle- and clutter-free in an already hectic shopping environment?
Former media researcher Bill Denneen posted a thoughtful response to my inquiry on a marketing bulletin board. Wal-Mart TV "just doesn't fit," he explained. "Shopping is a mobile activity, whereas television is sedentary. Shopping involves continuous visual scanning of the environment, where television tries to lock your gaze.... It can't be an important part of the in-store experience."
Can Wal-Mart overcome such challenges and truly make the messaging useful and relevant to consumers? In a recent U.K.-based retail conference, Saatchi planning and insight director Gareth Ellis noted that "just .05 percent of in-store messages are currently 'genuinely relevant' to consumers, despite the fact that 75 percent of purchase decisions are made in store."
Will this ad model improve that track record? Forty-two inch LCD monitors are nothing to sneeze at, but they draw from a TV foundation. If it turns out their messaging doesn't work and there's no real value in the messages, the manufacturer and, ultimately, the consumer will likely end up absorbing the cost.
What's the Consumer Think?
The critical question for Wal-Mart is: what do consumers actually think about this?
I decided to ask a few consumers myself and even hosted a small forum. Reactions were mixed. Some saw value if the monitors work to explain and describe product benefits. Noted Virginia W., "I would support the idea if the main emphasis was information, such as how to tie a scarf, cook a particular recipe, care for plants, repair a car, etc."
Some were more skeptical, citing ad clutter and the downside of increased impulse purchases. Said Lisa R., "As a shopper, I know I don't want to be surrounded by children in the throws [sic] of a tantrum because they've been told they can't have the toy/snack/whatever they just saw on the TV monitor."
Added Chris C: "If anything, excessive advertising tends to turn me off, and sometimes I make a mental note not to patronize a certain business or buy a certain product because the ads are so intrusive."
Key Implications
Consumer accepted or not, the advent of Wal-Mart TV promises to rewrite the marketing script for manufacturers and their agencies. No one can really ignore this because, frankly, advertisers have nowhere else to run on the advertising front.
So don't be surprised if we begin to see more traditional agencies, as well as media integrator shops, start to form "retail advertising" groups, not unlike the recent burst of shingles around "branded entertainment."
We may also see a steady migration from Madison Ave. down to Fayetteville, AR. After all, who's going to advise all the legions of shopper teams about media optimization, RGM rates, and message rotation? In this new world, the guy selling Milk-Bones may well have a media buyer standing next to him.
Focus on Consumer Value
With such armies at work, something powerful may well emerge, perhaps even a cross-channel synergy between the Internet and Wal-Mart TV we haven't even considered. But one thing is clear: consumers are increasingly making demands, and they can stand only so much advertising. Without genuine value, they'll simply become more cynical.
Wal-Mart and other mega-retailers are in a unique power position to claim value. Whether they can truly create value through an in-store TV network is a question we probably should keep asking.

Is a Cinema Studies Degree the New M.B.A.?

Check out this story from the 3/6/05 New York Times. It makes a good case for the fact that by studying film a person is preparing for a new way of communicating -- and this knowledge will soon be well rewarded.
The salient question flowing from the article is how the education field will be affected by this. What do you think?


New York Times
March 6, 2005
Is a Cinema Studies Degree the New M.B.A.?
By ELIZABETH VAN NESS

RICK HERBST, now attending Yale Law School, may yet turn out to be the current decade's archetypal film major. Twenty-three years old, he graduated last year from the University of Notre Dame, where he studied filmmaking with no intention of becoming a filmmaker. Rather, he saw his major as a way to learn about power structures and how individuals influence each other.

"People endowed with social power and prestige are able to use film and media images to reinforce their power - we need to look to film to grant power to those who are marginalized or currently not represented," said Mr. Herbst, who envisions a future in the public policy arena. The communal nature of film, he said, has a distinct power to affect large groups, and he expects to use his cinematic skills to do exactly that.

At a time when street gangs warn informers with DVD productions about the fate of "snitches" and both terrorists and their adversaries routinely communicate in elaborately staged videos, it is not altogether surprising that film school - promoted as a shot at an entertainment industry job - is beginning to attract those who believe that cinema isn't so much a profession as the professional language of the future.

Some 600 colleges and universities in the United States offer programs in film studies or related subjects, a number that has grown steadily over the years, even while professional employment opportunities in the film business remain minuscule. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are only about 15,050 jobs for film producers or directors, which means just a few hundred openings, at best, each year.

Given the gap between aspiration and opportunity, film education has often turned out to be little more than an expensive detour on the road to doing something else. Thus, Aaron Bell, who graduated as a film major from the University of Wisconsin in 1988, struggled through years of uninspiring nonunion work managing crews on commercials, television pilots and the occasional feature before landing his noncinematic job designing advertising for Modern Luxury Media LLC, a Chicago-based magazine publisher.

"You sort of have this illusion coming out of film school that you'll work into this small circle of creatives, but you're actually more pigeonholed as a technician," said Mr. Bell, who is now 39.

For some next-generation students, however, the shot at a Hollywood job is no longer the goal. They'd rather make cinematic technique - newly democratized by digital equipment that reduces the cost of a picture to a few thousand dollars and renders the very word "film" an anachronism - the bedrock of careers as far afield as law and the military.

At the University of Southern California, whose School of Cinema-Television is the nation's oldest film school (established in 1929), fully half of the university's 16,500 undergraduate students take at least one cinema/television class. That is possible because Elizabeth Daley, the school's dean, opened its classes to the university at large in 1998, in keeping with a new philosophy that says, in effect, filmic skills are too valuable to be confined to movie world professionals. "The greatest digital divide is between those who can read and write with media, and those who can't," Ms. Daley said. "Our core knowledge needs to belong to everybody."

In fact, even some who first enrolled in U.S.C.'s film school to take advantage of its widely acknowledged position as a prime portal to Hollywood have begun to view their cinematic skills as a new form of literacy. One such is David Hendrie, who came to U.S.C. in 1996 after a stint in the military intending to become a filmmaker, but - even after having had the producer/director Robert Zemeckis as a mentor - found himself drawn to the school's Institute for Creative Technologies, where he creates military training applications in a variety of virtual reality, gaming and filmic formats. One film he developed was privately screened for the directors John Milius and Steven Spielberg, who wanted to understand the military's vision of the future.

"That was like a film student's dream," said Mr. Hendrie, who nonetheless believes he has already outgrown anything he was likely to accomplish on the studio circuit. "I found myself increasingly demoralized by my experiences trying to pitch myself as a director for films like 'Dude, Where's My Car?' " Mr. Hendrie said. "What I'm doing here at I.C.T. speaks to the other interests I've always had, and in the end excited my passion more."

In recent weeks, members of a Baltimore street gang circulated a DVD that warned against betrayal, packaged in a cover that appeared to show three dead bodies. That and the series of gruesome execution videos that have surfaced in the Middle East are perhaps only the most extreme face of a complex sort of post-literacy in which cinematic visuals and filmic narrative have become commonplace.

Melding easily with the growing digital folk culture, some film majors have simply taken to creating art forms outside the boundaries of the established film business. In one such instance, Wes Pentz, a k a DJ Diplo - a 2003 graduate of Temple University, where film majors are encouraged to invent new career paths in museums, leisure businesses and elsewhere - broke through with his trademark Hollertronix, a style modeled on cinematic soundtracks. "I think of my songs as having a movement, like I would watch in a film, and there's a narrative feel to them," said Mr. Pentz, who said he had learned to frame music differently because of his film school experience.

In the public policy arena, meanwhile, students like Yale's Mr. Herbst hope to heighten political debate with productions far more pointed than the most political feature film. Even a picture like "Hotel Rwanda," with its unblinking look at African genocide, is "a soup kitchen approach," Mr. Herbst said: "You're offered something to eat, but there are no vitamins." Bringing film directly into politics, he expects to throw objectivity out the window and change minds - perhaps not an unrealistic aim at a time when, in a bit of what a headline in The Wall Street Journal characterized as "film noir," the Edward D. Jones & Company brokerage has entered the fray over the proposed Social Security overhaul with a highly produced video.

To some extent, such broadening vision is already helping to make economic sense of film education, which in the past was often a long path to nowhere. "Most find their way, and the skills they learn from us are applicable to other careers and pursuits," Dale Pollock, dean of the School of Filmmaking at the North Carolina School of the Arts, said of his students. "So we're not wasting their time or money."

Still more, Ms. Daley, the U.S.C. Cinema-Television dean, argues that to generalize such skills has become integral to the film school's mission. More than 60 academic courses at U.S.C. now require students to create term papers and projects that use video, sound and Internet components - and for Ms. Daley, it's not enough. "If I had my way, our multimedia literacy honors program would be required of every student in the university," she said.

Copyright and Fair Use

There is an excellent and clear discussion of copyright for the educational use of video at:
http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/copyright/copyright_fairuse.shtm

Here's an excerpt salient to the question Larry raised in class...

The Fair Use Guidelines for Off-Air Recording of Broadcast Programming for Educational Purposes
The federal fair use guidelines for off-air recording, which cover the recording off-air simultaneously with broadcast transmission (including simultaneous cable transmission), serve as primary criteria when courts assess fair use in cases involving off-air videotaping for educational purposes. Although they do not have the force of law, these guidelines have been considered a safe harbor for permissible use.

If a particular instance of off-air videotaping is not covered by a specific negotiated agreement with the copyright holder, the fair use guidelines for off-air recording may apply. These guidelines apply to off-air recording by nonprofit educational institutions only.

The off-air record guidelines state that, to qualify as fair use, the following conditions must be met:

Broadcast programs may be recorded and retained by a nonprofit educational institution for a period not to exceed forty-five calendar days after the date of recording. At the end of the forty-five-day retention period, all off-air recordings must be erased or destroyed immediately. Broadcast programs are television programs transmitted by television stations and cable companies for reception by the general public without charge. (PBS has negotiated varying degrees of extended taping rights, which differ from this standard federal guideline; please consult the extended taping rights section for further information.)


Videotaped recordings of broadcast programs may be shown to students only within the first ten school days of the forty-five-day retention period, and they may only be shown two times: once by the teacher(s) in the course of relevant teaching activities and repeated once only when instructional reinforcement is necessary. They may be shown in classrooms and other places devoted to instruction within one building, cluster, or campus or in the homes of students receiving formalized home instruction. After the ten-day period, teachers may use the off-air recordings to the end of the forty-five-day retention period only to determine whether to purchase the videotapes.


Off-air recordings may be made only at the request of and used by a teacher. They may not be recorded in anticipation of such requests. No broadcast program may be recorded off the air more than once at the request of the same teacher, regardless of the number of times that the program is broadcast.


A limited number of copies may be made from each off-air recording to meet legitimate teacher needs. For example, if several teachers request tapes of the same program, duplicate copies are permitted to fulfill requests. This is not a duplication license. All copies are subject to the same limitations as the original.


All copies of off-air recordings must include the copyright notice on the broadcast program as recorded. Off-air recordings need not be shown in entirety, but they may not be altered or physically or electronically combined or merged into anthologies or compilations. Educational institutions are expected to establish appropriate control procedures to maintain these guidelines' integrity.

SushiCam

We were talking in class Tuesday about the visual nature of Japanese society as a reflection of its written language.
You can see this in a powerful way at a site called Sushicam.

Videora is the software that allows you to search for and download to your computer in compressed format almost anything that is on TV, much like a TIVO or a DVR does. This in effect allows your computer to time-shift your personal video programming. (Of course, you'll have to watch the show on your computer rather than your TV, however) Any TV program can then easily be put into MovieMaker for slicing and dicing.

Be careful not to use Videora anywhere on the MATC network, though. Videora helps you download BitTorrent files (explaining those is a whole other topic - google BitTorrent FAQ) which are a form of always on peer-to-peer that IT doesn't allow on our LAN. The network has sensors activated to locate any BitTorrent activity anywhere on the system. You'll get a call (or maybe a visit) from IT if they see it running on your PC, so don't even try it.

This is just here FYI. I am not in the business of supporting or promoting the use of this software.

A rationale for creating video vs consuming it as a learning imperative

We are living and learning in a world of change…

How is learning different in a world of change?

Is the content of a course what it used to be?

If content is transient, process becomes forever…

We are living and learning in a visual world…

How pervasive is image to everyday life, compared to word?

Is visual literacy similar to textual literacy in that it can be taught and used as a learning tool?

How can videomaking develop higher order thinking skills?

Visioning -- creation as a way of turning intangibles into tangibles

Research – selecting proper resources

Problem solving skills – how to deal with inevitable obstacles

Logic skills – strategies of planning, production and editing force all kinds of IF/THEN thinking

Planning – time is the canvas in video; managing it is important

Analytical skills – how a flow of new information informs process

How can videomaking develop personal and social skills?

Encourage creativity

Build confidence and self-esteem

Take pride in ownership

Express individuality

Show passion

Empowerment

Team-building skills

Collaborative skills

adapted from
The Director in the Classroom: How Filmmaking Inspires Learning
by Nikos Theodosakis

English for All

I use English For All with my online ESL students. It was produced out in LA by a friend of mine, Dr. Hugo Pedroza. Dr. Hugo tells me it was relatively easy to make out there in Southern California because of all the acting talent available relatively cheap.
EFA uses a very clean and intuitive learning management system. It is actually quite easy for an instructor to have students sign in by themselves, see the progress they have made in the curriculum and communicate back and forth with them by email.
Enter the site as a visitor and check out the videos. They are several clicks away from the start page. Notice how the site automatically checks your PC to see if it has all necessary and updated plug-ins to play the media files.
Truly effective use of movie media in online adult ed!
http://myefa.org

ChalknTalk

One of my favorite uses of video is by a Canadian ESL teacher I know, Brian Rhodes.

http://international.ouc.bc.ca/chalkntalk/

His video has hot links embedded right inside it. They launch extra explanations and quizzes inside different frames.