Videos: YouTube vs. Blip

Given our goals with this site, the civic engagement vision, and the concerns Amber expressed in our last meeting, I am re-thinking the idea of sending youth to YouTube to upload their video.

And we’re all in agreement that providing video streaming on this site, at least initially, may not be desirable because it may make the server requirements too expensive.

I’ve done some research on this topic and wanted to share what I have learned. Let me also say that this need not have an impact on cost for web development so let’s not worry about that for now.

This is an awesome explanation of the issues and options:

Prepping and Posting your Video to the Web
Which of the many video sharing sites should you use? The answer really depends on your goals for the video.
http://www.nefilm.com/news/archives/2007/05/web2.htm

I would like to suggest using Blip.tv for the following reasons:

• They don’t take over ownership of the content. From their Terms of Service page: Blip.tv does not claim ownership of the materials you post, upload, input or submit to the Blip.tv site. Full terms here: http://winelibrarytv.blip.tv/tos/
• They don’t advertise their service, send people to other unrelated videos, etc.
• They’re just not YouTube.
• The quality is better and there are more options; for instance videos aren’t limited to 10 minutes in length
• Kids choose their licensing model when using Blip.tv

Also for the site, regardless of the YouTube / Blip.tv issue, I will be using a module that actually makes it possible to embed video content from any of the following (see below) providers by just posting the URL to the video.

Note that we can disable any of these we wish, and the specifics are a little different for each, so I may later want to disable some of these for greater consistency between the various videos on the site. Or if any of you know any reason to disallow any of these, we can do that too.

• YouTube,
• Google,
• Revver,
• MySpace,
• MetaCafe,
• JumpCut,
• BrightCove,
• SevenLoad,
• iFilm,
• Blip.TV,
• Live Video

Thoughts??

Best,
-Samantha

Entry Filed under: PSO website development

2 comments December 24th, 2007 at 11:30am Sam Permalink

Blogging curriculum draft

Here is a rough draft of my blogging curriculum in MS Word format. It makes perfect sense
to me, but I suspect some parts might not be entirely intelligible to
others, so please send any feedback you may have.

A brief note about executing this curriculum—I wrote it with a classroom-based instructional style in mind. In this it borrows much from Howard Rheingold’s digital skills exercises, with two major exceptions: 1) my curriculum assumes less civic foreknowledge and initiative on the part of students, and 2) it attempts to leverage peer feedback as an evaluation mechanism that lets students know whether their messages are being conveyed successfully. The classroom approach is superior to placing the curriculum exclusively online primarily because it is very difficult to inculcate civic interests via the web—that is, I don’t imagine that many kids will come to the PSO site in
search of instructions on how to blog deliberatively. Rather, I believe
that skills such as these are better discussed and taught in person and
among peers whenever possible. That said, I think the technical
how-to’s of blogging would be good to place on the site in a “Help” or
“How to use this site” section, and I also think that some of the video
PSAs might be able to address some of the more normative aspects of my
curriculum. But generally speaking, it’s probably not a great idea to rely on the web site as our primary medium for imparting
civic skills to kids. The learning goals my curriculum aims to fulfill—public voice, issue definition, deliberation, active listening—aren’t the sorts of skills most teenagers can (or would necessarily think to) teach themselves. Actualized citizens will find PSO on
their own and do great things with it, but their less-engaged peers would best
benefit from as much direct civic instruction as we can provide them.

Download YVO-blogcurriculum.doc

Entry Filed under: digital learning skills

Add comment December 14th, 2007 at 04:59pm Deen Freelon Permalink

Partnering with Power of Hope

I talked to Michael at Power of Hope today, and they are very interested in partnering with us! Michael brought up a lot of good questions about safeguards against predators and youth contact information protection. These are profiled in the post about safeguards below.

He has emailed Jennifer Parker, an old time friend of his at the Y, for more information. I’ve sent him Chris Tugwell’s contact information so he can get on our list for March 15th content posting testers. He and I talked about the idea of doing some curriculum bits on how youth can protect themselves on the internet. I told him I’d file that idea with the group.

The Power of Hope website (designed by Sam too) will be going up in April, so he said that the timeline could work really well for partnering on this front.

Also, to summarize our lengthy email exchange that resulted from my contact with Michael, it sounds liek we’ve decided to have a small group of internal testers (at the Y, for example) work with the February 15th test site, and then we’ll open up testing to partners like Artworks and Power of Hope for the March 15th test launch. It sounds like starting a mailing list for testing partners with a pugetsoundoff-specific email address is an idea that everyone is on board with. It also sounds like MacArthur experts can weigh in on the website after the March 15th test launch, but that they may be presented with some wireframes and site explanation before that test launch.

I’ll leave contact with these partners in Chris Tugwell’s hands after
the end of the quarter so that he can get in touch with test partners
with Sam’s instructions and information.

We’re really moving forward with this! It’s exciting to have some enthusiastic partners on board.

Entry Filed under: partner strategy

Add comment December 6th, 2007 at 12:41pm Toby Campbell Permalink

The Service Board?

Do we have these guys on our radar yet as partners? One of the kids in Amber’s class told us about TSB yesterday, and they seem like ideal partners for us. Have a look . . .

In 1994, a young snowboarder named Jay Bateman
was killed in a tragic, drug-related murder. Community members saw this
tragic event as a call to action: no longer could we sit by while kids
grew up absorbing only the messages of consumption and competition. A
group of local activists decided to create a program where young people
could come together to laugh, dream, think, and explore the true
meaning of community: The Service Board was born.
Hard work paid off, and in January of 1995 we opened our doors to
high-school students from across Seattle. Since our inaugural class,
the number of teenage participants, adult mentors and small business
sponsors has grown each year. In fact, growing demand for tSB from
students, parents, and schools led us to launch a pilot program based
in the neighborhood of White Center in January 2005, serving an area
that is among the most culturally diverse in the region, with one of
the highest per capita populations of young people.

http://www.theserviceboard.org/index.html

Entry Filed under: partner strategy

2 comments December 4th, 2007 at 11:56am Deen Freelon Permalink

Youth Information Safeguards

I received an email from Michael at Power of Hope about getting some content from their organization for the launch of our site. He responded with interest:

“I’m about to go in to a meeting with my team here, and will discuss your proposal and get back to you right away. One main thing to consider - in our field we are very protective of contact info for our youth participants, to keep them safe. Is there a safeguard built in to your system that keeps their contact info hidden? Naturally we understand that a safeguard of this kind adds a layer of complexity and ‘web monitor’ time to someone’s plate.”

I wanted to make sure we’re all on the same page with an answer to this important question. Sam’s response was:

“* Email addresses will not be published
* Contact info will not be published other than neighborhood and/or zip code
* IF we want to enable one-on-one email correspondence between site users then we can give youth a contact form that people can use to send them email messages. Not sure if this is desirable. This is not on the feature list but it’s about 2 clicks to set up so it would be easy to add.
* In a wireframe I’d suggested having IM usernames but this was a dumb suggestion given the youth audience; we’re not doing that.”

Let me know if you have anything to add here, as this is a question I imagine we will receive from potential new partners often.

Thanks!

Entry Filed under: legal and privacy, partner strategy

2 comments December 4th, 2007 at 10:38am Toby Campbell Permalink