Educational Media distribution and you

Learning Objective: Map learner-centered options, for your course, for accessing/distributing media

Mobilizing Media

• What should you support?  BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)…  Do you have to build 4 versions of your media/app?
• HTML5 is as an answer to our ‘build it once and it will work for all devices’ goal.
• Demo how to distribute video via HTML5

Push vs. pull

Web 2.0 technologies provide teachers with new ways to engage students, and even allow student participation on a global level.

• Web 2.0 a term coined in 1999, this refers to the Internet as a place where things get done, as opposed to places where you go to read stuff.
• Using RSS vs visiting websites vs email vs carrier pigeons ( Google Reader, Feedly, Rolio, The Old Reader, )
• RSS for courses in action ( French 215- D100, ds106 ,)

Why Mobilize Now?

PDA and Palm devices came and went long before our current smart phone/tablet craze.  Why is mobile ‘working’ this time around?  What is different?

The iPhone started the ball rolling, followed by an almost equally successful tablet in the iPad.  Over just a few years Apple went from a niche market computer company to the most valuable company in the world!  Mobile was and still is the “it” thing.

Google and BlackBerry tried to directly compete with Apple while Microsoft chose to focus on areas that Apple lacked.  Low powered Apple devices, running on ARM processors, were incapable of running the same programs we all run on our desktops/laptops.  “Apps” were created to help solve the problem but it meant software companies had to build “app versions” of their software so users could use their products on these new mobile devices.

Intel has taken so long to come up with a solution that ‘major player’ companies are looking for their own solutions.  Google and Microsoft have created ARM versions of their operating systems.  Just recently, Intel finally has processors available for smart phones/tablets that are both fast and efficient enough to allow for long battery life. Its only a matter of time before the phone, laptop, and tablet are merged into a single device that is more than capable of handling all of our daily tasks done on desktops/laptops.

How far have we come since the original mobile media player came out?

By Samsung Belgium (Flickr: GALAXY S 4 (7)) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

By John Sauter (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Mobile devices of today and what tomorrow might look like

The current 4 major players in the mobile sector are:

Apple with iOS – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0y-PON19un8

Google with Android – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAEUQPyNAos

Microsoft with Windows 8 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crZOgnc8cS8

BlackBerry with BB10 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7sxi27FRbc&list=PLSV1iA-lr7ykoKsJ3popveqDJkgtCoaB1&index=5

With processor power and battery life much improved the only thing left is device size.  Dell spends a lot of time and money in researching what is the perfect device size.  In 2010 Dell released its Streak 5″ device that, although way ahead of its time, failed.  Years later Samsung’s Note and Note II have won a huge loyal fan base that loves its large 5.25″ screen.  Google’s Nexus 7″ is also very popular… so much so that Apple has finally released a 7″ device in the iPad mini.  Wouldn’t it be nice if we could somehow have the best of both worlds.

A look into the not too distant future…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3x-bAWZWPM

Video over the internet

Flash was the major player in video distribution over the Internet.  However, heavy use of resources, and troublesome browser plugins led to HTML spec built in to video players.  The sudden flood of success of Apple’s iPhone and iPad, along with their lack of Flash support, seem to have marked the end of the dominance of Flash.  Mobile platform specific “apps” were created while HTML 5 caught up.  Today HTML 5 supports built in video and much, much more.  It is supported in all mobile devices across all platforms.  Using HTML 5 assures that your assets can be accessed by all.

Using Kaltura+HTML5 to distribute videos to any mobile device

Upload your file to be converted to Kaltura Management Console:

Choose the encoding type you need:

Wait for conversion to complete:

Enable HTML 5 player option and copy tiny url:

Visit the tiny url and copy the full url:

Add a new page in Canvas and switch to html code view.  Paste the full url into a iframe with the relevant width and height:

<iframe src="http://sham.tlc.sfu.ca/index.php/kmc/preview/partner_id/102/uiconf_id/6709423/entry_id/0_2dy9jj24/delivery/http" width="480" height="256"></iframe>