Edit video online

Reading Bolther/Grusin's Remediation is at once a great reading experience and a opportunity to turn your world view into some sort of oppositional view for a brief while. The idea is quite infectious, that mediums combine and "remediate" each other; TV becomes more like the web, and the web expands out from text and still images into a experience that is not television -- something more and in my opinion much better.

I have spent a lot of time in YouTube, because I think they get it in a way that Google and some of the others (such as Veoh) don't get it; it is about a simple viewing experience enhanced with a social construct. It's pretty deep, I've written a paper on it for a course I'm taking, and I hope to publish it somewhere. It is close to offering the types of things that people might want in a future video sevice; the only thing that is missing now is ditching the web browser centric interface for a "10 foot" experience.

I talk a lot about how pervasive visual tools for contructing knowledge have become. Word processing is now something that doesn't live on your desktop, but is an application that lives in your browser -- Google has a word processor, Microsoft has Live Office, and there are a host of other simple word processing applications such as AjaxWrite. The folks behind Ajaxwrite continue to roll out web-based applications as a way to undermine Microsoft's move into this environment, but it is not clear to me that what they offer is a suitable replacement.

Eyespot is a online video editing and sharing environment. It has some aspects of YouTube, but offers the ability to mix and match content. "Editing" in this environment is essentially cuts-only editing, but given time I am sure that will change. However, the quality is not great, it is almost more of a technology showcase than a practical tool. But still, I am in favor of anything that makes this more approachable.

The mind-numbing truth is that we have always been visual thinkers, some more than others. Film and video were not invented by arbitrarily; it hooks into the way that our brains work. It is, to use a bad analogy, why Tetris is popular -- it uses a basic skill that we have, the ability to rotate objects in our head, and turns it into a game. Video editing combines the cultural (what is the proper way to tell a story, what is time, what is real) with the innate (we think in pictures).

Eyespot itself is not necessarily that important, but what it represents is important; that these once esoteric tools are becoming common as dirt. It is not the accessibility to the tools that is preventing us from embracing them and using them to construct knowledge, it is our attitude towards them. Education is not ready to deal with students that are heavily visual thinkers.

Everything has moved away from that; again I come back to the general ideas of "industrial revolution" thinking; repeatability, quality assurance, easily quantifiable knowledge, scaling. These goals are not consistent with this breed of learner. I will not call them a "new breed" because it is my strong belief that these people have always existed, what has changed is the opporunities they have to learn, and our attitude towards them. The schools of today and the near future do not embrace these students; they are considered abnormal -- borderline autistic, adhd, what have you. We give them medication to make them manageable, but we don't teach them. They have to teach themselves.

--hal