Conference | Video, Education, and Open Content

Peter B. Kaufman, Welcoming Remarks

thank you very much Frank Kathy deeply grateful to the Hewlett supported this meeting and this year long project and to Frank Moretti Maurice matey’s and others at this

extraordinary Center here at Columbia whose wisdom whose work with the magic of new media and education is just so exciting as you’ll see over these next two days and to all of our participants

who have come to visit with us this week last week a number of things happen that bears some relevance to the state of affairs that this conference is meant to address in Daily Variety the show

business Bible there was another handsome article about an accomplished company active in the documentary field Atlas media the article went one of the most active producers of nonfiction

programming for a dozen cable networks has set up a new division to develop and produce theatrical documentaries that’s promising enough the article went on the first feature-length project put

together with voom HD networks will focus on a behind-the-scenes look at meatloaf as he goes about prepping for an 18-month worldwide tour this is at a time when the learning channel The

Learning Channel originally conceived of by founder John Hendricks is such promise is now officially called TLC and discoveries branding Bible and showcases programs like what not to wear and Miami

Ink a show about tattoos when the news doesn’t tell us anything about the world we live in or what we are doing in it and when the US military our own government has effective last we cut off

the access of all of our soldiers in Iraq to myspace YouTube photobucket and MTV calm a move redolent less of a secretary of defense named gates than a general secretary named Gomulka in a

closed society from a land at a time far far away imagine for a minute a world instead we’re all of us in this room and the organizations that large and small we represent our stakeholders in the

future of nonfiction where faculty librarians archivists curators are passionately on the same side as leading producers directors and distributors and the millions of

consumers out there hungry for education and for American and world culture then we’re video is as easy to create and distribute and annotate and repurpose as a piece of email is today imagine a

world where university education and some of the projects you will hear about this morning can connect to the outside world at various levels for intelligent contributions recognizing that the

thousands of Columbia faculty students alumni and friends out there notwithstanding the thousands of MIT Yale UC Berkeley Case Western Michigan State faculty students alumni and

friends out there notwithstanding even the thousands of Cornell faculty students alumni and friends out there notwithstanding there are by any kind calculation more smart people outside

the university walls and university firewalls than inside of them and imagine a world where the paths between academic media productions archival resources worldwide the talents and

experiences of producers directors and cinematographers and the public are paved swept and illuminated like runways at an airport in the morning this is the world we are going to be investigating

in some detail over these next two days with presentations from stakeholders from non-commercial institutions and private enterprises and government agencies concerned with its improvement

describing a set of common concerns common obstacles and emerging solutions for improving the field of educational video that feel less than a hundred years old whose systems are not yet in

tranche like the worlds of print and whose future we can influence for the better so I would like to open with five general points about today’s media and

technology environment and say a couple words about the structure of our meeting to my five points first demand for online video worldwide has exploded over 100 million videos are watched on

youtube alone every day the top 10 video streaming sites now stream some 7 billion videos a month that’s 10 million Amina and bittorrent the internet protocol that facilitates online sharing

and distribution of video and audio is the number one file format in use on the Internet worldwide these aren’t just people filming David Hasselhoff thundering or swinging their house cats

around by the tail they are accessing university lectures information and resources that can in fact make us feel proud and all things being equal safe to be their neighbors second the

opportunities to produce video have exploded teenagers groups of all ages but teenagers especially or producing and posting rich media online in numbers that are growing exponentially over

70,000 videos go up on youtube every day for example young people in the United States and worldwide mimicking what we do when we cut and paste casual text from a website or an email or Word

document now believe they have a veritable video access mandate a new almost inalienable right to work with video to access it cut it and paste it change it post it much as with text

online my colleagues Mark Phillips India and Jonah bossa wits have rift on the fact that last year Stanford Law Professor and creative commons founder Larry Lessig never shy one about

identifying a trend declared spectacularly after a presentation that featured several video mashups from young producers that text text is dead that the written word has become the

latin of our modern times that the ordinary language the vulgar or burnett language the new language of the street is video and sound and that the software suites that facilitate video and sound

editing apples iMovie Adobe’s premiere the others listed here including open source video editing tools as well are the new essential tools of speech in the digital age what less it calls a shift

in production and use patterns from read-only to read/write engagements with video now result in millions of original new videos and mashups of classic material being posted online every week

according to one estimate almost half of all video online today’s user-generated that’s a remarkable statistic Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal has a pine that everyone now can be a video

producer and he tells us the most every computer package on a Mac or Windows now comes with elemental video editing software in the camera and we can buy additional software for a few hundred

dollars the Financial Times is declared with a looming of YouTube from whom ovid i Greenberg will speak to us today and with the arrival of juste the new video service from the founders of skype and

cos ah who’s director of business development will speak to us today that the democratization of video distribution is now underway their access and this is the third point is

undeniable first two professional resources moving image archives millions of hours of audio and video around the world and we will hear from several of these curators of these archives today

and then to everything as you can see from this slide over the next 13 years an ipod for a device its size will be able to hold a year’s worth of video by 2012 all the commercial

music ever created by 2015 and all the content ever created in all media by 2020 shrek three is already online today and by the time my youngest child Charlie who is six enrolls at Columbia

an iPod or a device its size would be able to hold all the human knowledge ever created in all media whatever that device is you can bet that will have a camera and a microphone on top of it so

my fifth and final point is that the legal and economic constructs around all of this are changing too but my colleague Eric notice at the center told me yesterday that chris anderson’s new

book contract at hyperion from the chris anderson from the long tail the editor wire is for a volume called free to be delivered in 2008 and on his blog chris is asking people which subtitle they

like better free the story of a radical price 0free how 000 changed the world free how companies get rich by charging nothing free the economics of abundance and the marketplace without money free

the past and future of a radical price I kind of like five he says what do you think we will hear from Eric Saltzman at Creative Commons Josh Nathan general counsel at wnet 13 and others here on

both days about new initiatives in this area and legal regimes emerging to cover education and public use more generally all of this suggests that it is time now to take the temperature of rich medium

now at the start at the heart of this meeting is the University and its work at the intersection of video education and open culture on any given day at the center my colleagues here will be

transcoding classic silent films for a class in the school of the arts perfecting a video editing tool to allow the comprehensive population of moving images for

assignments working in the school of social work with archival video from the Cambodian killing fields filming new assets in a mock AIDS intervention digitizing an interview with an English

professor about Ralph Ellison shooting b-roll of the Apollo Theater and the churches and synagogues in Harlem video recording teachers teaching children account at Teachers College for judging

documentaries for the DuPont awards at the same University that also administers the pulitzer prizes and the Bancroft prizes in history that energy is huge but at the same time the

particular suite of challenges that universities and other educational institutions face in the digital video age requires some new and profound examination and will benefit from

ongoing proofs and descriptions of best practices being compiled published and consistently improved and updated so this meeting teaches 45 speakers over two days Maurice and his team have

provided us opportunities to enter comments about the presentations online in case we don’t have time to razz our speakers while they’re up here at the podium and and please take advantage of

this those of you who care to with your laptop’s we are fortunate to have the greatest speakers working on these topics beginning to address their experiences here with us their

challenges in the following fields University productions educational productions outside the Academy distribution options and best practices for educational video rights and key

legal considerations for producers distributors and consumers technology issues at the intersection of video and education archiving preservation best practices archiving access best

practices teaching and learning best practices at the heart of the heart the heart of this meeting research and scholarly communication best practices and finance best practices towards

sustainability and self-sustainability when the people who are represented in this room educators and public castors public broadcaster’s and public libraries work closely together when

cultural institutions and of private enterprises can fashion useful agreements / cultural heritage materials stimulated by educators educators like Frank Moretti with a nudge from an

occasional mediator like Jeff you boys we can see some great things happen here’s a clip meant to demonstrate just a bit of that it’s from an interview that we recorded at USC late last year

for project that we are doing front of harvest hundreds of hours of film about Alzheimer’s it’s directed by a Columbia DuPont award-winning filmmaker it’s shot by a Sundance award-winning

cinematographer and this is Roberto Diaz Bobby Brenton professor of molecular pharmacology and toxicology at USC director of the star science education program there and head of the

pharmaceutical Sciences Center the video of a neuron and you begin to see a neuron that looks beautiful it’s healthy it’s plump it has these beautiful arbors and neural connections and it’s

connected even in a cell culture neurons want to talk to each other they want to connect they want to create those neural circuits that say we can do amazing things together we can make videos we

can find ways to prevent Alzheimer’s disease we can do this and then you begin to see what happens when you put just one of the degenerative insults of Alzheimer’s disease this beta-amyloid

peptide and you begin to see at first the network begins to degenerate I know the processes begin to grow old before your very eyes and then they shrink the cell body completely

implodes and now begins its transforming reality of dying and dying in a way that won’t create more havoc by its dying it’s an implosion and then you begin to see the results of not only that dying

that cell dying but the other cells in the network progressing and dying so that when one of them dies that one neuron dying is a message and that in other components of the neural network

begin to generate the network begins to die and with it who we are hopefully that won’t happen any of us during this meeting try to keep it stimulating

enough and with that like to thank you again for coming and maybe we can invite our next panel up

Welcoming Remarks
Speaker: Peter B. Kaufman
Affiliation: Intelligent Television
Date: May 22, 2007
Event: Video, Education, and Open Content: Best Practices