Video Conversations: The social power of video for distributed collaborations

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Video Conversations The social power of video
for distributed collaborations

• Roy Pea
• Stanford University
• 5th Media X Conference
• April 16, 2007

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• In today's attention economy, Internet users
  should be able to rapidly explore, discover and
  create points of view on video content that
  matters to them for their use and for sharing
  in conversations with others.

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What do I mean by video conversation?

• Not videos OF conversations
• Nor LIVE video conversations as in the
  videoconferencing enabled by MSN Messenger 7.0 or
  Apple iChat

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But conversations about video

• Interacting around video - how different people
  interpret parts within that video - the moments
  that matter to each of them and why.
• Why is this important?
• Because conversational contributions about videos
  often carry more important content than the
  videos themselves - the diversity of
  interpretations and connections made by people
  provides new points of view.

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Why do we need video conversations?

• Video has been broadcast-centric TV, K-12
  classroom films, web video.
• Yet we know people engage and learn more from
  interactions that connect their interests and
  knowledge with those of others.
• With the growth of virtual teams, we need
  multi-mediated collaboration infrastructure for
  sharing meaning and iterative knowledge building
  across multiple perspectives.
• We need infrastructure for video that is more
  interaction-centric - for people to communicate
  deeply and precisely about the video content.
• This requires more than videoconferencing and net
  meetings - and video uploads and tags a la
  YouTube.

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• YouTube is now the 4 Website in the World.
• While writing about Googles purchase of YouTube,
  Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li offered an
  explanation for their runaway success.
• "YouTube is a gem because it figured out what
  Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and all the other video
  players in the marketplace could not," wrote Li.
  "It is not about the video, it is about the
  community around the video.
• Can you imagine what might happen if we actually
  supported video community members to have video
  conversations?

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Consider video content types

• Journalistic video, such as network news
• Sporting event videos
• Corporate training videos
• Political campaign videos
• Long and short-form entertainment Movies, TV
  shows, music videos, YouTube amateurs
• Teacher education videos
• Science, history, humanities and DIY educational
  videos
• Health and medical videos
• Advertising videos
• Home videos (children, travel)
• Research video (e.g., to study human learning
  animals science labs, etc.)

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and the kinds of conversations you might have
about them if you could

• Journalistic video discussing current events,
  political stances of different networks,
  mobilizing action around news events
• Sporting event videos compile and share
  highlights from favorite players and games
  analyze players for competitive purposes or
  recruiting
• Corporate training sharing with colleagues only
  the parts you find useful - and expect to be
  helpful for them
• Political videos debates on positions analyzing
  contradictions
• Entertainment videos Movies, TV, music, YouTube
  amateurs Mashups of best moments or ironic
  juxtapositions
• Teacher education videos sharing and discussing
  exemplary practices
• Science, history, humanities and DIY educational
  videos discussing challenging topics and
  phenomena
• Health and medical videos heres what we need to
  do - and why
• Home videos (children, travel) compiling
  memories, sharing stories
• Research video identifying key patterns of human
  interaction document and discuss design problems
  with new products in user-testing

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Challenges for mediating conversations around
video

• Whereas electronic text provides for
  collaborative writing - when researchers or other
  collaborative teams want to work with video as a
  medium for interpretation, sharing, and
  conversation, their collective work is poorly
  enabled today.
• We need simple methods for pointing to and
  annotating parts of videos analogous to
  footnoting for text - where the scope of what one
  is referring to can be made readily apparent.
• We also need to search points-of-view about
  videos and their parts as readily as we search
  for the videos themselves.

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The DIVER Project

• Goals To invent, develop and explore values of
  new ways of interacting collaborating with
  digital video - in support of learning sciences
  research, learning, and teaching

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What is ?

• In everyday life, a speakers pointing directs a
  listeners attention. In DIVER, users "point"
  into a streaming video with a mouse-controlled
  camera viewfinder to mark interesting frames, or
  record a "movie within a movie".
• By selecting and annotating these video segments,
  a user authors a point-of-view on specific video
  moments. A dive is the clip collection with its
  annotations.
• Technically
• A dive is a collection of "link-addressable" XML
  metadata pointers created by users to specific
  space-time segments of one or more video sources
  stored in databases, and affiliated text
  annotations. No new videos are created.
• DIVER supports 2-way video-anchored conversations
  between Internet users through web browsers
  (secure or open groups).
• Individual components of the dive can be played
  back, commented on by others, copied to make new
  dives, or shared by email.
• Playing the dive remix produces the collection
  of frames and videoclips with annotations as an
  integrated movie, or mashup.
• Community - For shareable video - Dives can be
  exchanged via URLs in email or published by
  embedding a DIVER player in blogs or other web
  pages.

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Demo
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Use Cases

• Scenario 1 Learning interaction analysis

Scenario 5 Film analysis and assessment
Scenario 3 Teacher education
Scenario 2 Learning tool prototype design
Scenario 6 Japanese conversation instruction
Scenario 4 Film making
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Examples from remote user communities

• Comparative political video analysis across TV
  networks
• Critical episode analysis of emergency medical
  team responses during childbirth
• Breast cancer survivor women's story group
• Uses of smart-boards for group learning in
  different higher education domains
• Studying diagram use in high school physics
  teaching of geometrical optics

• Teaching and analyzing small group rapid
  prototyping design in HCI course
• Intern doctor training in patient interview
  skills
• Improving college physics teaching discourse
• Informal learning of mathematics in families
• Collaborative learning database for study of
  collaborative capacities
• Studies of office workers using paper computing
  technologies

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Central tendencies of user groups?

• Documenting successes and challenges in cultural
  practices -- and coalescing distributed expertise
  to foster iterative cycles of improvement in
  those practices
• While weve devoted our attention in DIVER to
  supporting video collaboratories in science and
  education - perhaps there is broader
  applicability.

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Why might companies want video conversations?

• People in your company could be tagging and
  annotating parts of videos developed by and used
  within and outside the company with meanings that
  they perceive in the video, and others can learn
  from these tags.
• Collective Intelligence The dives people make
  create local meanings for the videos that
  participants in the network can benefit from when
  they are shared.

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Envisioning the future of video conversations

• Communities of interest will evolve for creating,
  sharing and collaborating via video
  conversations.
• Vast global video resources are available for
  remix and annotations.
• Services are available to search, aggregate and
  cull points-of-view from video content for
  defined audiences.
• Corporations run broadcast networks for internal
  and external communications with significant
  video content.
• Consumers use video communications in the
  lifecycle of shopping, sales, help and support.
• Video conversations bridge culture and language
  barriers for businesses and their customers.
• Intellectual domains relying on video
  documentation for inquiry and exposition
  establish peer-review video journals (see J.
  Visual Experimentation)

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• Nature Magazine published a recent paper by
  Matias Pasquali on the forthcoming role of DIY
  videos in protocol sharing among scientists

• Probably the most feasible approach is to
  publish movies describing the methods, a service
  already offered by some publications and protocol
  websites, but which could become routine. Much
  more information on the essential steps of a new
  protocol, including audio commentary on the
  trickiest steps (from the position of the Petri
  dishes to the speed of dispensing), could be
  accessible using video format and published
  online with the paper. Such videos could
  transform the way in which methods are
  communicated.

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DIVER Team Roy Pea (Director), Joe Rosen (Senior
Engineer), Robb Lindgren, Sarah Lewis, Greg
Wientjes DIVER Alumni Michael Mills, Eric
Hoffert, Ken Dauber, Wolfgang Effelsberg, Dirk
Farin, Amir Lopatin, Paula Wellings, Mike Ananny
Since 2001, DIVER Project goals have been to
invent, develop and explore values of new ways of
interacting, collaborating, and learning with
digital video.
Thanks to major funding from the National Science
Foundation, and also to Hewlett Foundation,
Cisco, KDDI, Nokia, IBM, and TimeWarner.

• Contact Roy Pea (roypea_at_stanford.edu)
• See http//diver.stanford.edu