Research

iCommons and the Open Video Alliance have asked Intelligent Television to prepare a report that describes the legal, policy, business, and technical procedures we expect to be involved in bringing educational video from universities, libraries, museums, and archives into the Wikimedia Commons. Wikipedia’s experience processing institutional uploads of image files—for example the 100,000-photograph collection from the German Federal Archives (http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,3851534,00.html)—have proven useful for education. How scalable are lessons from these experiences to moving image uploads? Instructions for providing educational video for other websites and harvesting efforts abound (see YouTube’s: http://docs.google.com/View?id=dc4j7df7_226g3sfp7cg or Home Movie Day’s: http://www.homemovieday.com/transfer.html). Our report will focus on policy and legal issues as well as on the technical issues involved in providing video for Wikimedia Commons.

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The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop has asked Intelligent Television to study the potential impact of open educational resources on the learning and digital media practices of young children. The project will be probing the potential costs and benefits associated with a new approach to opening up educational media content, documenting some of the most promising efforts to expand access to children’s educational media, and offering recommendations to industry, policymakers, and the philanthropic sector.

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Grantmakers in Film + Electronic Media has asked Intelligent Television to complete a survey and analysis of funders and nonprofit organizations to determine the amounts and kinds of philanthropic resources being devoted to media content, policy, and infrastructure in the United States.  The project will interview a wide range of grantmakers in media, distill survey results, and issue a detailed report for publication in the second half of 2009.

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Intelligent Television is working with the nonprofit Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) in developing an in-depth investigation into the many ways students, faculty, and staff at American universities use video and multimedia, how this media can be best delivered to them, what companies/institutions are currently providing products and services along these lines, and what business models CCC can develop to service and stimulate this demand. The pilot phase of the investigation features one-on-one in-depth interviews with faculty and staff at one major university about their use of video in research and teaching and learning; in-depth interviews with faculty and staff at several other universities; interviews with video and image licensing services from the corporate and non-profit world; and other field research.

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As educational and cultural institutions share lessons and resources from their time adapting to a world gone digital they have begun to study business practices in the commercial sector and how to apply relevant lessons from such practices to their work. Interest has grown among members of the cultural heritage community in investigating new sponsorship, advertising, and branding models and studying how to apply those models in support of their efforts mounting and maintaining digital content online.

The U.K. agency JISC has commissioned Intelligent Television to conduct a series of conversations, write case studies, and organize workshops with institutions active in the field of sponsored and branded content and with their current and potential sponsors. Conducted for JISC’s Strategic Content Alliance, a U.K. initiative bringing together institutions active in health, cultural heritage, education, research, and public service broadcasting, this work will explore if and how it might be possible to create sponsorship offerings that can help sustain cultural and educational institutions that are now putting their valuable assets online.

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The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Scholarly Communications Program has awarded a $48,500 grant to develop a business plan for an online service that will provide greater educational access to digital archival moving image content.

The Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) is serving as the fiscal sponsor of the grant. The business plan will investigate possible business models for creating a service that will provide solutions for the primary challenges facing the use of audiovisual content in educational environments today. Research and stakeholder interviews will be ongoing between July and November 2008, and a session will be scheduled at the AMIA annual conference, November 12-15, 2008, in Savannah, to present preliminary results and solicit feedback.

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Intelligent Television (with Channel Thirteen/WNET as its fiscal sponsor) has received two years of seed support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to establish a new Open Education Video Studio to catalyze and coordinate video production for the open education resource movement.

The Open Education Video Studio will cost-effectively produce educational video for university needs and make it broadly available. The Studio also will evaluate the use of such video in teaching and learning and build new tools for more cost-efficient video production and distribution worldwide. The Studio’s Production unit will cost-effectively produce educational video for university needs and make it broadly available, catalyzing new open production initiatives at educational institutions and through educational consortia. The Studio’s Research and Development unit will evaluate the use of such video in teaching and learning and build new tools—editing, annotation, search, summarization—for more cost-efficient video production and distribution worldwide.

In its first year, the Studio also will host intensive meetings for educators, technologists, video producers, and other stakeholders who together will help to articulate a sustainability plan for the studio’s productions and research and development projects. In its second year, the Studio will work to organize new multi-institutional collaborations into a distributed educational video production network, and help establish a new educational video commons to define best practices in video preservation and access.

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With the support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Intelligent Television and the Tribeca Film Institute have embarked on an investigation of the current economics of independent film and video distribution in the United States. The “Economics of Distribution” study is currently investigating current financing models for independent educational media; revenues that such film and video productions have realized from sales and licensing and other distribution; and the potential for new, alternative models of video and film distribution in the digital age.

This investigation will inform further research projects on the economics of open content and open educational video, as well as ongoing initiatives to build a new distribution solution for independent producers and creators. Please see: http://www.tribecafilminstitute.org/home/about/26250304.html

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Intelligent Television and OCLC/RLG Programs have been studying public-private partnerships for mass digitization and developing recommendations for libraries, museums, and archives, and their commercial partners. The “Good Terms” project has been examining in detail all publicly-available agreements concerning the digitization of American cultural heritage materials in all media, including video. These recommendations are now available as: “Good Terms—Improving Commercial-Noncommercial Partnerships for Mass Digitization; A Report Prepared by Intelligent Television for RLG Programs, OCLC Programs and Research.” D-Lib Magazine, 13,11/12 (November/December), online at http://dlib.org/dlib/november07/kaufman/11kaufman.html.

Building on the “Marketing Culture” project below, our objective is also to develop a rich resource of publicly available agreements and commentary and also useful model terms for future agreements. This resource is now available online at: http://www.oclc.org/programs/ourwork/collectivecoll/harmonization/massdigresourcelist.htm

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University teaching and learning is involving more and more video and audio. Video (the word “video,” as used here, embraces modern moving-image content and technology, and “audio” the same for recorded sound) is being deployed in the physical classroom to enrich the classroom experience. Video and audio are coming to populate online and distance learning experiences. Video and audio recordings are being made to distribute university lectures and university-based events for audiences well beyond the university campus. As the production and distribution of video and audio increases, the implications for open education initiatives grow more profound.

Intelligent Television and Columbia University’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning embarked on a new project with the support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to increase the understanding of educators, technologists, video producers, and other stakeholders in how video and open education can work together for the public good. The project sponsored a survey of university uses of video nationwide; prepared detailed case studies of the use of video at two universities; consulted with the Hewlett Foundation on the production of video-recorded lectures; prepared a white paper recommending new approaches to sustain open educational video; and conducted a review meeting on open education and video where these stakeholders in the future of open educational video can better plan for its future. The video and audio from this meeting are available online at:

http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/opencontent/index.html

The Open Education Video Project has built upon the work that Intelligent Television and Columbia University have been conducting in the area of educational video, open productions, and commercial-noncommercial collaborations. The project has been helping to define new approaches—economic, legal, and editorial—to the creation and distribution of important new resources for open education.

See also: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/news/libraries/2006/2006-08-25.hewlettgrant.html

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With the support of the Hewlett Foundation in 2005 and 2006, Intelligent Television brought together business and industry leaders and culture and education stewards to explore new business collaborations between libraries, museums, archives, universities and commercial media and technology enterprises.

The proceedings of these meetings on the economics of open content (available in audio and video online at: http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh/forum.php?lecture_id=197) highlight emerging economic relationships in media and describe new models for commercial-noncommercial media collaborations involving cultural heritage and educational materials.

Intelligent Television’s Open Production Initiatives serve as one sort of new model for the distribution of open content and open educational content in particular to the broader interested public—a model based in video and film media, produced in the best traditions of documentary television, and meant to be distributed in various complementary ways. The two Open Production Initiatives for this project have been developed in association with Columbia University Center for New Media Teaching and Learning and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Open Courseware project.

This project explored the potential for new sources of support from the commercial sector for the missions that culture and educational institutions are serving, especially in the realm of digitization and digital media services. The project was intended to have a material impact on the dialogue between these institutions and industry.

The Hewlett Foundation’s support for this project was administered by the New America Foundation, a leading independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit public policy institute based in Washington, DC.

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With the maturation of newer trends in technology, education, culture, and television especially, there is a profound opportunity to develop and produce new types of valuable educational television projects. Digital technology has rendered the production and distribution of media less expensive, more able to be multi-purposed, more durable, and more portable, so that it can be watched and heard and read on almost every device with a screen or a speaker. University, high-school, and grade-school students and teachers have become accustomed to deploying video and audio assets in the classroom and in homework. Libraries and museums are moving to push parts of their holdings online and on-screen, often converting or even producing rich media to do so. And television producers and distributors are searching for what they call new models of broadcasting in the digital age.

With the generous support of Library and Archives Canada and JISC, Intelligent Television developed new models of “Open Production Initiatives” in association with cultural and educational institutions. The subject of one of these models—the Suez Canal crisis of 1956—drew upon many international collections of materials on the history of the 1956 invasion, the peacekeeping effort that followed, and the history of the Middle East and foreign involvement there.

This Open Production Initiative will make available as widely as possible new and old material produced and reformatted for the programs. The story is about 1) the foreign policies of a number of countries active in the Middle East; 2) a number of countries in the Middle East and the presence of foreign countries and foreign economic interests there; 3) a multilateral peacekeeping operation; and 4) how public interests and public and private media relate to one another in wartime. The collections of video, audio, books, newspapers, films, journals, documents, manuscripts, images, and online resources include those at the BBC Archive; the ITN Archive: the U.K. Public Records Office; the U.S. Library of Congress; the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration; Library and Archives Canada; the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; Egypt’s Library of Alexandria; Israel’s Ben-Gurion Archives; and materials at other universities, archives, and research collections around the world.

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With the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Ithaka, Intelligent Television conducted a study of the evolving relationships between commercial and noncommercial organizations in the digitization and publication, broadly defined, of educational and cultural heritage materials. The project’s primary objective is to develop a broad-based understanding of the mechanisms employed in commercial-nonprofit collaborations. There have been an increasing number of these collaborations, with enormous potential to further the causes of education and culture. But there is also a need for more detailed information about them, and for a broader understanding of how these cooperative ventures are structured and managed. The study may be helpful in determining how the different parties involved can preserve and maximize the value of cultural and educational assets.

The project canvassed custodians of commercial-noncommercial relationships at libraries, museums, archives, historical societies, and universities about their business and commercial relationships. The project also interviewed executives in commercial businesses—publishing companies; licensing and merchandising groups; law firms; accounting firms; investment banks; venture capital firms—who have been or may soon be developing roles as stakeholders in public-private partnerships. The project also established a preliminary database of transaction information.

In August 2005, the project completed a preliminary report about these conversations, available from Intelligent Television and Ithaka. As needs warrant and funding allows, the project continues in-depth analysis and reporting and collecting general and specific business, legal, and tax materials for the community.

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For further information about Intelligent Television projects and productions, or to get involved, please contact the company.