MediaNotes & Video Annotation

I'll throw in our bits of the process, too. We have 1 professor that has used it for her Negotiations and her Interviewing and Counseling courses. About 25-30 students each, usually working in pairs. No adjuncts, teaching assistants, etc involved. Just the one professor.

The community law center is considering using it for supervising attorneys to review the work of students, but that project has been stop and go.

We have gone the route of user education on codecs and quality level to control media file size, educator education to develop projects that require shorter videos (10 minutes on the long side), and a dropbox for uploading and downloading of entire packages (media + project file). We do not separate delivery of the media from the annotations (project file).

We used dropbox.com the first year but ran into problems with the 2GB limit for free accounts. We signed an agreement with box.net this time around and I can control quota dynamically. We allocated space as needed and did not run into problems. Students uploaded packages - recommended to do so on campus but informed that they just needed to wait longer if elsewhere - and the professor downloaded them as desired. We also set up the sync client on her desktop in her office, so that the packages would download overnight or whenever the students delivered them. box.net (and dropbox in their latest client version) allows for selective sync. The professor gets only the "finished package" folder, not the folders that students use to share video with each other.

We then set up additional box.net folders between just the professor and each student, so that the "graded" projects could be delivered individually.

allan

-------
Assistant Dean for Law Technology & Academic Computing
Santa Clara University School of Law
ph: 408-210-6274

>>> "Seibel, Robert" <rfs@cwsl.edu> 5/17/2011 07:50 PM >>>
Hi Will, sorry for the belated reply. As you recall, we have been using MediaNotes on a farily large scale (over 100 students) for a couple of years now and we are pretty satisfied with it. Next year we will be increasing to over 200 students and that will be a bigger test. We have had some problems, but most of them have been operator error type things relating to making the recordings. We are looking into replacing the webcams that students set up themselves to more sophisticated video cameras that we will set up so the students just have to turn them on. That will also make the recordings a standard format. One of the problems we have had is that some students have recorded in some native format resulting very large files (many gigabytes for a 30 minute video) and some students with mac laptops have insisted on using the buiilt in cameras, which are fine except they also produce huge files.

The reason this is important is that the single biggest issue we have had is about the transfer of the completed videos to the supervising attorneys who review them. Uploading and downloading has proven too time consuming and subject to more user errors, so we have gone to a system where the students save the videos onto thumb drives and then give the thumb drives to the supervisors who can quickly copy them for review. Of course the project files go with the videos but mostly the transfer of project files has not been a problem.

We are really just using the basics of MediaNotes. We know that we can set up some "canned" comments for use by the reviewers for some of the most common issues that come up, but we have not used that feature yet. There are other features that allow editing and combining excerpts for classroom use or for posting so that students can review them as good and bad examples of techniques, but we have not done that either.

All in all we are pretty happy with the way it has met our needs--students mostly seem to master it quickly with relatively little training (we have a video and we usually do a 30 minute lab at the start of the course).

Hope this is helpful.

Bob Seibel

California Western School of Law

rfs@cwsl.edu

________________________________________
From: teknoids-bounces@ruckus.law.cornell.edu [teknoids-bounces@ruckus.law.cornell.edu] on behalf of will monroe [wtmonroe.ls@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 27, 2011 9:55 AM
To: Teknoids
Subject: [teknoids] MediaNotes & Video Annotation

Hello,

I'd like to talk to any of you who have experience supporting the use of MediaNotes or other video annotation software for review of activities like interviewing, counseling, and appellate advocacy.

For the last five years we have used Communicoach, a web-based video annotation application, to support student/faculty review of video recordings. Isoprime, the company that develops Communicoach, has been great to work with and the product has been solid. Our Communicoach instance runs on two VMs running Windows Server 2003 using IIS and SQL server. However, the developers informed us recently that they would no longer be developing Communicoach.

Because we have a perpetual license to Communicoach we won't lose access. But we want to stay ahead of changes that could break the essential functions. By changes, I mean updates to browsers (IE, Safari), media players (Windows Media Player, Quicktime) and the plugin (Flip4Mac) that are required.

An obvious candidate for us is MediaNotes since it is promoted by CALI and used by other law schools. But I'd also like to hear from those of you who are using other video annotation software. I'm particularly interested in hearing details about the following:

-Capture of video that will play in MediaNotes across both platforms (Win/Mac).
-Distribution of video files to students and faculty.
-Sharing of MediaNotes project files and the associated video files.
-Other web-based video annotation software.

Thanks for your attention. I look forward to hearing from those of you who have thoughts on this.

Best regards,

Will

--------------------------------------------
Will Monroe
Head of Instructional Technology
Paul M. Hebert Law Center
225.578.7838
will.monroe@law.lsu.edu_______________________________________________
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The website for MediaNotes is live and up to date...

http://www.cali.org/medianotes

The old website (www.medianotes-app.com) belonged to the company that
did the original programming and is long gone. There are links
hard-coded into the software that still point there and I am working
on the source code to fix that. It does cause confusion like this.

The software works just fine the way it is, but there are things we
would like to do to make it better...

- fix the links (duh)
- simplify the interface
- better codec handling - moving target

Simplifying the interface is the big one. It easy to *add features*,
but tricky to take them away, but the learning curve of the software
is a little too steep with so many capabilities. This is a situation
where features are a problem because most users (students) show up to
annotate a video for one or two assignments and don't want the
software to get in the way.

I haven't been able to clear my plate enough to work on this. It's a
project that we (CALI) didn't expect to have to provide coding support
for - the original plan was to pay the coders for maintenance and
updates, but they desired to divest themselves of the software
entirely. It's a dropped ball, but I haven't given up hope on picking
it back up.

John

On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 12:08 PM, Tom Ryan <tomryan@camlaw.rutgers.edu> wrote:
> If you're worried about lack of future development, I would be cautious of
> Medianotes as well (the main website is long gone).
>
> I wrote a simple javascript based annotation package that works with
> quicktime streaming videos (the reason was because media notes didn't work
> with streaming media which required the user to have access to the full
> media file). I have since ported it to flash (very simple changes).
>
> We only have one icn/negotiation professor using it (though the user loves
> it :)
>
> There's also the matterhorn/opencast project which has been gaining some
> steam (and supports annotation as well as recording)
>
> Tom
>
> On 4/27/11 12:55 PM, "will monroe" <wtmonroe.ls@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I'd like to talk to any of you who have experience supporting the use of
>> MediaNotes or other video annotation software for review of activities like
>> interviewing, counseling, and appellate advocacy.
>>
>> For the last five years we have used Communicoach, a web-based video
>> annotation application, to support student/faculty review of video recordings.
>> Isoprime, the company that develops Communicoach, has been great to work with
>> and the product has been solid.    Our Communicoach instance runs on two VMs
>> running Windows Server 2003 using IIS and SQL server.  However, the developers
>> informed us recently that they would no longer be developing Communicoach.
>>
>> Because we have a perpetual license to Communicoach we won't lose access.  But
>> we want to stay ahead of changes that could break the essential functions.  By
>> changes, I mean updates to browsers (IE, Safari), media players (Windows Media
>> Player, Quicktime) and the plugin (Flip4Mac) that are required.
>>
>> An obvious candidate for us is MediaNotes since it is promoted by CALI and
>> used by other law schools.  But I'd also like to hear from those of you who
>> are using other video annotation software.  I'm particularly interested in
>> hearing details about the following:
>>
>> -Capture of video that will play in MediaNotes across both platforms
>> (Win/Mac).
>> -Distribution of video files to students and faculty.
>> -Sharing of MediaNotes project files and the associated video files.
>> -Other web-based video annotation software.
>>
>> Thanks for your attention.  I look forward to hearing from those of you who
>> have thoughts on this.
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> Will
>>
>> --------------------------------------------
>> Will Monroe
>> Head of Instructional Technology
>> Paul M. Hebert Law Center
>> 225.578.7838
>> will.monroe@law.lsu.edu_______________________________________________
>> You are currently subscribed to teknoids as: tomryan@camlaw.rutgers.edu.
>> To unsubscribe send a blank email to teknoids-leave@ruckus.law.cornell.edu
>> --
>> See the web interface at
>> http://ruckus.law.cornell.edu/mailman/listinfo/teknoids to get your list
>> password, unsubscribe, and view your list settings.
>
> _______________________________________________
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