Kaltura Video in Sakai

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Unicon's Aaron Zeckoski is a software engineer and open source software developer. He is internationally recognized for his expertise in the Sakai open source collaborative learning environment. His nine years of experience include work both as part of a university team and as an independent consultant. An experienced systems architect, Aaron has demonstrated his programming expertise in all aspects of web application development. He is also experienced and interested in technical documentation, programmer tools development, and developer training.

Abstract:
This is a presentation on the integration of Kaltura Video into Sakai. We will discuss the use cases for the project and why it was developed. We will also present results of the pilot at UVA. There will be a demonstration of using the Media Gallery tool to create a media collection and using the Sakai Rich Text Editor integration to capture, edit, and embed video into various other parts of Sakai.

Kaltura is an open source video transcoding system to put content into Sakai. It is like YouTube except it is siloed. I am not sure if this is a good thing but for student privacy or some copyright issues this may be important.

The users will create collections of media. The processing and coding of video is done on Kaltura's servers. It is holding content and delivered through Sakai. The beta has been released first production in the Fall. Can be installed in Sakai 2.5-2.7

Instructors can create collections and site libraries. Content can go in the library and then the instructor can create a collection for a course or an assignment.

Instructors and students are able to tag the videos and write descriptions.

There are institutions using Kaltura for lecture capture.

There is a "Media Gallery" link in his course that becomes available to the students for their courses.

They are working on integrating with HTML5 so it will work on iPhones.

I was afraid of this presentation at first because I thought it would be too technical but this was clearly presented. It was a good over-view of the tools.

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Educause: a comic interlude...

There is a great story by Dostoevsky called "The Crocodile." It is a longish short story of four chapters. It has been coming to mind recently. It especially comes to mind at conferences. It allows me to laugh at others and also keeps me humble whenever someone refers to me as an expert on anything. This is one of Dostoevsky's extremely rare funny stories. In the story, Ivan Matievich decides to go to the Arcade with his wife to see the crocodile that is on exhibit. He winds up teasing the crocodile and getting swallowed whole. A big farce ensues when his wife tries to figure out how to get him out - Who does she go to? Who has the authority over the crocodile? The owner? The state? And there is this horrific bureaucracy to get through. In the meantime, he is miraculously still alive in the crocodile and they ocassionally ask him to speak to see if he is still alive. The crocodile becomes more popular than ever before and people come from all over to hear the man speak from inside the crocodile. Eventually the man begins to believe that they are not coming for the oddity but because he really has something to say.

I see this story as a metaphor for media and politics. People often confuse access to the stage with having something to say. For some people, it can be a real trap. People are often in the positions they are in for many reasons apart from having any deep insights - they can be good at a dozen things and still not really be insightful people. They can be knowledgeable and have some good ideas, but lets have some humility! Maiamonides used to say "Teach thy tongue to say 'I do not know,' and thou shalt progress." In education, no one says "I do not know," they say "Good question! I would say that the cross modal affordances of the matrices of these pedogogical dispositions are quite problamatic at this stage and will require further inquiry and research." Let's not take one another so seriously: journals, blogs, conferences - whatever your media, it can be your crocodile!