JISC Digital Media Blog Archive
September 2010

Considering the delivery of digital media online

Posted by Zak Mensah on Thursday 30 September 2010 at 8:45am
Tags: e-learning | news |

Image credit James Justin, found on Flickr, key word: delivery. Used under a Creative Commons licence

This document looks at some of the options for delivering digital media using the web as a delivery platform.

JISC Advance - Digital Media and Copyright Seminar, London

Posted by Joel Eaton on Wednesday 29 September 2010 at 10:34am
Tags: copyright | event | news | training |

Use of digital media has fast become the norm in day-to-day work, and as a result awareness of copyright and other rights is key in taking care of your own works, as well as making sure you are not infringing the rights of others.

This seminar aims to offer practical approaches and considerations for using digital media in teaching and learning, digitising digital media and digital rights management. It is aimed at those working in developing institutional policy, disseminating copyright information to staff, and those working with digital media on a day-to-day basis.

The objectives are:

• To increase confidence in dealing with multi-layer intellectual property rights in digital media
• To identify appropriate approaches to dealing with the uncertainties of copyright law in relation to digital media
• To share experiences of both issues and solutions to IPR challenges in relation to digital media

Having listened to many of our users, we are running this event outside of Bristol, with a view to hosting it in various venues nationwide in the upcoming future.

To find out more and book a place please see JISC Advance - Digital Media and Copyright Seminar.

Photo by 917press on Flickr - used under a Creative Commons licence

Viewing, using and producing digital media resources

Posted by Zak Mensah on Wednesday 29 September 2010 at 8:40am
Tags: e-learning | news |

Photo by Thomas Hawk on Flickr - used under a Creative Commons licence

Here we cover the considerations for the four stages of resource development - creating, using, managing and delivering resources.

Designing a learning experience

Posted by Antony Theobald on Tuesday 28 September 2010 at 8:40am
Tags: e-learning | news |

This new advice document looks at the importance of designing the learner experience when producing learning materials.

Photo by Thomas Hawk on Flickr - used under a Creative Commons licence

Ten new advice documents released

Posted by Antony Theobald on Monday 27 September 2010 at 10:45am
Tags: e-learning | news |

Normally the University of Bristol based team release a new document every week - but after a busy summer we will release a new advice document every day for two weeks.

The flurry of documents looks at the role of digital media in teaching and learning and starts with an Introduction to e-Learning.

Photo by FabioHofnik on Flickr - used under a Creative Commons licence

#1 Introduction to e-Learning

#2 Designing Learning Experiences

#3 Common Methods for Viewing, Using and Producing Digital Media Resources

#4 Considering the delivery of digital media online

#5 Organising Digital Media Content in a VLE

#6 Mobile Learning for Education

#7 Providing Live Support to your Community over the Web

#8 Audio Feedback

#9 Telling it like it is - a how-to guide on creating audio feedback

#10 Using Multimedia in a PDF

YouTube cleared of copyright liability again

Posted by Steve Hull on Friday 24 September 2010 at 1:14pm
Tags: copyright | youtube |

A similar ruling was made in YouTube's favour earlier this year in a US court. While not surprising, these rulings illustrate yet again a basic truth about the Internet which academics and students would do well to heed: the fact that something is accessible from the Internet, even from a well-known and reputable website, in no way implies that it is legal to re-use it in a work you create. Always check the copyright situation of everything you utilise.

e-Learning: an introduction

Posted by Antony Theobald on Monday 20 September 2010 at 8:50am
Tags: e-learning | news |

Photo by kristofabrath on Flickr - used under a Creative Commons licence

Normally we release one new advice document each week, but we've been busy over the summer and have put together two weeks' worth of advice.

We'll be kicking things off with our brand new Introduction to e-Learning.

Watch this space for more details!

Playing with the Zumi

Posted by Steve Hull on Wednesday 15 September 2010 at 11:08am
Tags: camcorder | cameras | equipment | inspiration | photography | video |

The Digital Harinezumi 2++ a.k.a. the Zumi. Image by JISC Digital Media.

The Zumi is a tiny (3 cm high, 9 cm side to side) camera/camcorder designed to look a bit like an old 110 Pocket Instamatic film cartridge (for those who can remember back that far). It's definitely lo-fi: video is standard NTSC (480i/30) and the colours are heavily saturated and contrasty, somewhat like old Super-8 film. (The Zumi website refers to its "melancholic image quality.") The camera function gives you a choice between 1024x768 and 2048x1536 pixels and you can also toggle the virtual film speed between ISO 100 and ISO 800. It has a self-timer and also allows you to select black & white or colour. You can record video without sound if you wish and there's a macro switch for doing very extreme close-ups. My favourite bit: the viewfinder is a metal rectangle that pops up on top of the camera. Seriously retro.

The menu system seems a bit clumsy at first but you very quickly get used to it. There's no USB port, so to transfer media you have to take out the microSD card, stick it in an SD adaptor and put it in your computer.

The Zumi is designed for fun and that's what it is. It's so small and light that you can easiily take it anywhere. The lo-fi quality and ease of use mean that you're not too fussed about getting your images just right. I very quickly found myself pulling it out again and again to take random shots of whatever caught my attention. Unless you have limitless disk space on your computer (not to mention a limitless capacity for boredom) you'll want to do some pretty severe editing of what you shoot when the time comes to upload it, but that's all part of the fun.

Here's an example of what it can do, shot in beautiful Berkeley Square (the one in Bristol, not the one with the nightingale):

Test footage shot on the Zumi.
If you cannot see the video above, please use this link to download the video file (2.5MB).

It'll set you back something in the £100 range -- a bit cheaper if you get it from the US but the Royal Mail will hit you for delivery and customs, so it ends up costing much the same.

Organising your images with Flickr

Posted by Antony Theobald on Wednesday 08 September 2010 at 8:37am
Tags: creative commons | delivery | digital collections | flickr | news | photo sharing | photographs |

Photo by yvestown on Flickr - used under a Creative Commons licence

Whether you have a small number of photographs you would like to share privately with a few colleagues, or a larger collection you need to make more widely available, the photo sharing site Flickr has the sorts of features and tools that make it a potential alternative to setting up an in-house image database - or, if not a replacement for your own system, a useful additional means of exposing your collection to a larger audience.

As well as exploring some of the more useful features, this document will also highlight Flickr's limitations and point out areas where particular consideration needs to be taken.

Read our advice on Using Flickr to Organise a Collection of Images.

Finding free music online - SoundCloud’s new CC features

Posted by Joel Eaton on Tuesday 07 September 2010 at 11:17am
Tags: copyright | creative commons | finding audio | licensing | music |

One of the main problems when sourcing online music is ascertaining the copyright restrictions imposed and ultimately finding audio files that you can use legally.

You can now search SoundCloud exclusively for Creative Commons (CC) licensed files, and for music sharers the licence is now viewable in the embeddable player. There is a new CC landing and discovery page, prominent placement of the licence information on pages and players, and you can now advance search by licence type, making finding and using CC music a whole lot simpler.

Photo by Giuli-O on Flickr - used under a Creative Commons licence

A Delicious for scholarly articles

Posted by Steve Hull on Monday 06 September 2010 at 8:49am
Tags: web services |

It's somewhat reminiscent of Delicious in that you can build up a list of links to papers which you identify by tagging and then share your links with others. However, CiteULike also compiles and stores all of the information needed for citations in scholarly journals. What's more, it has the Genius-like capability to make suggestions of other articles that you may find interesting or useful.

The advantages begin to spring to mind immediately. You can find and study your papers on any computer on the Internet. Citation details are automatically generated. You can easily collaborate on papers by sharing links with your co-researchers. You can find other researchers who are reading the same papers as you and look at what else they're reading. If you're a student, you and your classmates can group together and build up a common library of links.

Perhaps best of all, you can organise and index the papers you read without knowing where your reading will take you. In fact, tagging can become a research tool in its own right, suggesting lines of enquiry that you may not think of otherwise.

A simple idea well executed -- the web at its best.

NASA launches on Flickr

Posted by Antony Theobald on Friday 03 September 2010 at 11:40am
Tags: digital collections | finding images | flickr | photo sharing | photographs |

Bumper V-2 Launch. Photo from NASA on The Commons on Flickr - No known copyright restrictions.

There are only 180 NASA images available via The Commons on Flickr so far - and all have been previously accessible via the NASA Images website, which has hundreds of thousands of images and thousands of hours of video and audio available to the public - but by adding images to The Commons on Flickr NASA hopes its media will "reach an even wider audience and invite that audience to help tell the story of these photos by adding tags, or keywords, to the images to identify objects and people".

It's also worth pointing out that in addition to The Commons and NASA Images, NASA has a number of other accounts on Flickr with thousands more images available under Creative Commons licences.

New advice on accessibility issues for digital media

Posted by Steve Hull on Wednesday 01 September 2010 at 9:05am
Tags: accessibility | news |

Not surprisingly, this guide looks at the issue of accessibility, including the concept of ‘reasonable adjustment.' The advantages of digital media for accessibility are discussed, followed by sets of guidelines and a basic accessibility check that can be performed on existing documents.

Note that this document is intended as a very basic introduction to the subject of accessibility. This vast subject is dealt with in depth by our sister service JISC TechDis. Pointers to various TechDis resources appear throughout our document: they should be considered a stepping-off point for exploration of the wealth of material TechDis supplies.

Read our Basic Guide to Accessibility.