Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

6.3.10 |

The State of Online Video: Pew Internet & American Life Project today released a new study on online video. Among the highlights:

* Seven in 10 adult internet users (69 percent) have used the internet to watch or download video. That represents 52 percent of all adults in the United States.

* Comedy or humorous videos rose in viewership from 31 percent of adult internet users in 2007 to 50 percent of adult internet users; news was the second most-popular category, with 43 percent of adults saying they watched such videos, compared with 37 percent in the earlier survey.

* Educational videos rose in viewership from 22 percent to 38 percent of adult internet users.

* Movies or TV show videos rose in viewership from 16 percent to 32 percent of adult internet users.

* Political videos rose in viewership from 15 percent to 30 percent of adult internet users.

* One in seven adult internet users (14 percent) has uploaded a video to the internet, almost double the 8 percent who were uploading video in 2007. Home video is the most popular content by far, shared by 62 percent of video uploaders. And uploaders are just as likely to share video on social networking sites like Facebook (52 percent) as they are on more specialized video-sharing sites like YouTube (49 percent).

“Transparency is Not Enough”: danah boyd gave a talk at Gov2.0 on the importance of information literacy when addressing transparency of government data.

Plus: Open-government activist Carl Malamud, who crusaded to make the Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR database publicly available, is calling for an “authenticated registry and repository of all primary legal materials in the United States available to the public at no cost,” reports the Chicago Tribune. View http://public.resource.org for more information and resources.

2010 AP Stylebook Adds Social Media Guidelines: You know social media is here to stay when the AP Stylebook adds entries on “friend” and “unfriend.” The Stylebook’s new Social Media Guidelines section includes 42 separate entries on new terms, along with information and policies on how journalists can use Facebook and Twitter in their work and how to verify sources.

Teaching the Oil Spill: Melissa Corey, a library media specialist at Benton High School in St. Joseph, Mo., developed a LibGuide—an online resource that makes it easy to add and share library content—related to the ongoing oil spill to help teachers incorporate instruction into the classroom. The site includes news links, a RSS feed, Delicious linkroll and a Google Map that compares the relative size of the spill to major global cities.

“Needless to say this all piqued the student’s curiosity, increased interest in the assignment, and improved their assignments,” Corey told Library School Journal. “In many classes, we ended up having very open discussions about the disaster in addition to completing the assignment.”

Know of other creative classroom exercises on the oil spill? Let us know in the comments. And check out other LibGuides; the site boasts that there are now 90,077 guides by 20,869 librarians at 1,367 libraries worldwide.

The Future of Cross-Platform Entertainment: Here’s a story from The Guardian I meant to point to earlier—an interesting read about the new “Doctor Who Adventure Games” and, more broadly, the changing role of TV viewers, gamers, storytelling and technology.

Piers Wenger, head of drama at BBC Wales, notes that there are 17 episodes of “Doctor Who” this year, four of which happen to be interactive. “Everything you see and experience within the game is part of the Doctor Who universe: we’ll be taking you to places you’ve only ever dreamed about seeing – including locations impossible to create on television,” he said in this press release.

Writer and gamer Keith Stuart reflects on what this means:

[T]he transformation of TV shows into games, and the development of online TV-style dramas, is just the beginning. What we’re also seeing is a move in the opposite direction – with games becoming more like television. [...]

Through experiences like these, traditional barriers between interactive and linear broadcast content are crumbling. And in the background, the delivery platforms are changing too. A growing number of TV sets now come with internet connectivity (Samsung’s Internet@TV range, for example, which even have their own app store), while more and more people are using services like iPlayer to watch traditional TV on the net.

Indeed, viewers are now creating their own converged entertainment experiences by texting, messaging and tweeting during shows – and this is something TV companies are keen to tap into; “social viewing” is an emerging field, a means of employing audience chatter into the very makeup of the show. In 2008, for example, MTV in the US realised that around 40% of 20-year-olds were using the internet while watching television, and so launched Backchannel – a sort of competitive Twitter service, designed to run alongside its teen soap, The Hills. Developed by New York agency Area/Code it allowed viewers to make snarky comments about characters – the funnier the remark, the more points they scored.

“Audiences are in the most part happy to use TV as a mild anaesthetic, but there are a growing number of people who have their laptops open at the same time as watching TV,” says Rik Lander, founder of cross-platform development company, You Are Here. “These people are not simply seeking to turn their brains off with TV and we believe they should be served by TV offering them participation.”