Video Conversations: The social power of video for distributed collaborations

1. Video Conversations: The social power of video for distributed collaborations Roy Pea Stanford University 5th Media X Conference April 16, 2007

2. 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.

3. 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

4. Alan Kay - "Point of view is worth 80 IQ points" 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.

5. 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.

7. YouTube is now the #4 Website in the World. • While writing about Google’s 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?

8. 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.)

9. …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 • Corporatetraining: sharing with colleagues only the parts you find useful - and expect to be helpful for them • Politicalvideos: 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: here’s 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

10. 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.

11. ™ 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

12. What is ? • In everyday life, a speaker’s pointing directs a listener’s 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.

13. ™ Demo

14. Use Cases Scenario 3: Teacher education Scenario 5: Film analysis and assessment Scenario 1: Learning interaction analysis Scenario 2: Learning tool prototype design Scenario 6: Japanese conversation instruction Scenario 4: Film making

15. Examples from remote user communities • 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 • 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

16. 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 we’ve devoted our attention in DIVER to supporting video collaboratories in science and education - perhaps there is broader applicability.

17. 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.

18. 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)

19. 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.”

20. ™ • Contact: Roy Pea (roypea@stanford.edu) • See: http://diver.stanford.edu 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.