Learning with the Fang

This video of Professor Tanya Monro featured on the AdelaideNow website contains re-mixed footage shot by other people! This is a VERY GOOD THING which represents the first fruits of something I have beeen trying to achieve for a very long time.

Over a year ago, I convinced Prof. Monro to  fund the shooting and purchase of some video footage that we could publish online with an open license. This effectively grants PERMISSION IN ADVANCE to anyone who might want to re-use that material. Up to now, the only person who has actively re-used this footage is me, preparing educational and promotional resources for the University of Adelaide.

So, what are some of the things I have been trying to achieve?

• Leadership in appropriate strategies for re-use of digital material in the context of online social media
• Promotion of some excellent research by passing interesting stories through social networks
• Efficiency in the very costly process of creating effective digital stories
• Protection of valuable brand and IP assets through careful selection to manage risk
• Prototype an ecosystem for multi-generational re-mix of digital assets for both research and teaching & learning

How does this early example of re-mix rate against my lofty goals? I’d say we score 6/10 based on the following criteria:

• Efficient – at short notice we conducted brief interviews & provided links to existing footage with minimal disruption to labs
• Effective – a good, new story has been created and shared on a high traffic site
• Correct – appropriate footage was re-used (in fact, some of it was ’second-generation’ that is based on footage that was already re-mixed)
• Social – passing links to the video through twitter and facebook resulted in a measurable increase in views of the video in a very short time period (from 10 to 40 at the time of writing, within hours of publication). Compare this to the average of 0-5 views of other videos published on the same site, earlier on the same day.

On the down-side we missed out on:

• Attribution – the only requirement stipulated by our open (cc:by) license is that some form of attribution is given to the source of content. Ideally this would take the form of a hyperlink like this: “video materail courtesy of Prof. Tanya Monro“
• Possibility of future Re-Mix – the streaming video on AdelaideNow site is difficult to download and is locked up under Copyright (i.e. not openly licesed). This means that this story will die when the video ‘ages off’ the AdelaideNow archive. Furthermore it is effectively sterile and very unlikely to ‘re-produce’ because of the restrictions just mentioned.

How could we do better next time?

• Attribution – it would be enough to mention the names of contributors to successive generations of video content in some form of credits in the video itself. For example video courtesy of Mike Seyfang, Rob Morrison and Tanya Monro covers it. Better still, hypertext links in the copy surrounding the video might reward the contributors with visits to their websites, downloads of their material and possibly further re-mix of their work. That could be achived in a simple sentence “video courtesy of  Mike Seyfang, Rob Morrison and Tanya Monro .” Even better still something like:

Derived from video by Mike Seyfang, shot by Rob Morrison , courtesy of Tanya Monro.
Derived from video by Mike Seyfang, shot by Rob Morrison , courtesy of Tanya Monro.

• Downloadable for easy re-mix – in addition to the streaming video, provide links to easily downloadable versions in appropriate formats for editing. For example this version of the ‘GreenBeamMeUp’ sequence is available as medium resolution quicktime and mpeg-4 while this version of it can be downlaoded as high resolution DV-Video (which is how it was shot). p.s. As a side note – trying to prevent downloads by only offering streaming video is a complete joke. Worse still the futile act of crippling the content with DRM locks and the like.
• Open License – granting permission in advance to would-be re-mixers is a very potent thing to do. The cc:by (Creative Commons, Attribution) license granted to carefully selected material from Prof Monro’s labs places only one restriction on future re-mix – that of giving some form of Attribution. As re-mix culture evolves, I predict that any material not licensed as openly as possible will rarely be discovered, seldom re-mixed and will therefore dissapear out of culture over time. Notice what happens in the advanced search tabs of google and flickr – when selecting material you are free to re-use and modify, even for commercial purposes, only the most openly licensed material is returned in the search results. Think about the impact of that.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

remix, ccdrm, video, coephotonics