Great Unexpectations - Day one of Title IX videotaping

Today we started the video portion of the Title IX project that I’m working on with Deb Jacobson. She is documenting the history of women’s sports at Northland College where she taught for 34 years. She has been tracing the team history and electronically converting old photos for over a year. Seeing as she was the one who pioneered all women’s athletics for the school I felt it was important that her story be told as well. That’s where I come in. I get to be the one to interview her. So I created a set of interview questions and a basic story board and came up to Thief River Falls to get started on it. I learned that I needed to both plan for the unexpected as well as not assume all things unexpected would be negative. In fact some unexpected events can turn into something really good. See Blog titled “The Unexpected” under the blog “From Reality Shows to Showing Reality”. Just like in the classroom, I need some organization and yet some flexibility.

What else I learned today:
Many kids today do not know what Title IX is or why it was needed.
Many kids today do not have a concept how recent Title IX legislation was passed it terms of who it affected (parents, coaches, adults living today)
Plan more time than what you thing for video taping in order to account for some of the unexpected.
It will take longer than expected to save the video clips from the Flip video cam to the computer.
Pat Summit, one of the Pioneers of women’s progress in athletics and women’s basketball coach of the Tennessee Tarhills, was offered the coaching job of the men’s team, but declined it because she felt that would be degrading to women (giving the impression its more impressive to coach the men’s team than her champion women’s team).

Other ideas for class:
Survey my students on history/influence of title nine
Have my students survey other students and/or community members on the history/influence of title nine
Title IX link and short quiz for Intercultural class

PHOTO NOTE: This is a still that we captured from the streaming video.  The flip ultra seems to have pretty decent quality for a very small camera.  

Flip Ultra Directions/Mino Mac warning

Directions from Gina on using the Flip Ulra:

I'm a computer artist and animator and I haven't been happy with a lot of cameras. I was drawn to the Ultra Flip because of the lack of wires, I like the idea of the USB stick. They include a set of batteries with the package so you can start recording right away (as well as a little velvet drawstring bag). It was very easy to use, it's just as promised, click the red button to record (and to stop) then flip (ha-ha) the USB stick out and put it in your computer's USB slot.

I read a reviewer of another model of the Flip saying he needed an extra part to hook up his USB, I don't know what he was using but you don't need any middleman if you have a current USB port. Of course it might have been that he didn't feel comfortable with the camera sort of weighing itself down a bit when you have the USB attached to a tower. I'm using mine with a laptop which is on a table so the camera can rest comfortably on it. He might have gotten a USB extension so that he could set his down if he was using a desktop computer. I did try the flip out in my desktop and I did have to make sure that the dog didn't jump around it as it does feel sort of vulnerable, but I will mainly use it in my laptop.

After you have it in your USB port, you will then go to "my computer" and see a new blue icon (unless you're Mac, you'll see a folder for you instead), click it and it installs the program - which seems to run on the stick alone, not taking up any space on your system, although it does put a small encoder on your system. (Side note: - I did try to click "explore" before I installed the program to see if I could just drag the videos directly to my desktop by passing the program, and while you can save them, you can't see the videos). You have to go through the program to save them to your computer and be viewed properly.

So after you have installed the program, click "flipvideo" from your "my computer", then click "Flip Video for PC.exe" to open the program. It's very simple, you will see your videos and on the left you'll see a "save video" tab, here you can select what video(s) you want to move to your hard drive and then click the save button - they call it saving to your library, they will ask you to name a library, which will end up being a folder that holds your videos, which you will find in your documents as "My Flip Video Library".

After you have done this, you can then open them normally (outside of the program using just a player). They will be saved as AVIs.

They also have a "share video" section where you can upload your movies straight to Youtube, AOL or any video sharing website. Sounds good, but I haven't tried it yet. Now you can make a "movie mix" which is basically adding an effect to your video (slowed down in black and white or cartoon fish floating about etc. - no editing). It's very (very) simple, but it's cute.

They include a little plug that connects your Flip straight to your TV. Use your remote to find your 'line', 'input' or 'source' button to find it, click a few times, you'll see the first still of your video when you've got it right. Then hit play, now it wasn't clear in the instructions, but you want to hit play on your Flip (not the TV), to watch your video on your television and it looks great!

They also have an option to 'save for email' - if you do this it will save the videos into a folder "Flip videos for emailing" on your desktop that you can then send as attachments. When I did this it sped up the sound (think Mickey and Minnie) while the footage remained at normal speed (now don't worry, this doesn't happen when you save the videos to your computer as discussed above). This is probably a compression problem, but we can't fix it in their program, so I won't be using that option again - I'll stick to the 'save to library' option. It also does this for the ecard videos. There is an option to send the video as an ecard with cute little borders around them, recipients are sent a link to see the card, but again when played the sound is sped up.

In spite of that (cuz it's worth it), I have found my video camera, it's so small and light, there are no plugs or cords, it takes great videos, no tracers, no little pixel smudges and the lighting is great. I took one outside at dusk and it looks nice. This thing records twice as long as my bulky handycam and I don't have to format any disks or plug in a bunch of stuff. The picture quality of the Ultra Flip videos is really amazing, my other cameras (handycam, Creative labs, the onboard Vaio and VIJE) do not hold a candle to the Flips quality. I'll be using it for video projects. I am very happy with the Ultra Flip and will be bringing it along with me for a family visit. I recommend it! Yes, I flipped for it!

NEW UPDATE ADDITION (11/15/07): Just an update for you here, after I wrote this review I did run the flip on some other systems and it did not have the problem. I only had the problem on my custom Hypersonic PC laptop which runs windows XP. The computers that had no problems were: A Boxx desktop running Windows XP pro, and a Sony Vaio laptop running Vista, and just today I tested the flip on a Dell desktop running XP home which also had no problems. -And, a big AND here, after I ran the flip on the first two working machines (the Sony and the Boxx) a few times (using the export and email functions), suddenly it worked on the "bad" Hypersonic laptop. It seemed to have jolted it to work? I don't know why. Since that time I have had continued success on the Hypersonic. -An engineer from Pure Digital (the makers of the Flip) emailed me after reading my review and we had an extensive exchange working on trying to figure out why this happened and he was very serious about resolving the issue. Another thing that flip does is create updates, so with these two things in mind I feel confident that they have or are taking care of any problems. But again, right now I do not have any problems. -Also, someone asked if you can take stills. This camera is only a video camera, you can't snap pictures with it, however you can pull stills from your movies inside of their program.

From Amazon.com reviews

ON THE FLIP MINO:

MAC USERS BEWARE..., June 12, 2008
By
I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere and I thought it was important for Mac users to be filled in on the following.... 1. The software that comes with the Flip Video Mino does NOT allow you to stitch multiple clips together to make one movie. Only Windows users can do this. 2. I was able to get the Flip Video Mino AVI videos to play in iMovie '08, but not export. When you export the video you get a blank screen with only audio. I had better luck exporting the video from Final Cut Pro. 3. In case you are interested, the codec that Flip Video Mino uses is the 3ivx codec. There are workarounds for the above issues, but it would have been nice if there was a way to combine clips into one movie right out of the box. Hopefully this will be possible in the future with a software update. Other then those concerns, its a great product so far and the video quality from the raw AVI file is really impressive. I found a site called motionbox that will let you upload the raw AVI files that the Flip Video Mino creates and once uploaded you can do some basic editing and combine multiple movies into one. Doing it this way gives you a much higher quality video then what you get on sites like YouTube.

Fact-Inference Confusion Exercise

I was leaving a grocery store today with a friend when we spotted this man with his arms in one of the bins of the large recycle station in the back of the parking lot. My friend and I watched him for awhile trying to figure out what he was doing. I saw him take out some paper products from the bin and place them in the blue cart in front of him. Why was he going through the recycle bin? Even though my mind wanted answers, I guess we'll never know the real reason for sure.

What I did figure out is that this photo would be a great exercise in fact-inference confusion. I could easily use it in the chapter on perception. There could be several possibilities for the man's behavior. Why did I think the worst? What did I know for sure as a fact and what did I just infer? What biases and stereotypes came into play leading me to make that first quick judgment? What did you think when you first saw the picture?

Allness Exercise

When I was writing a blog entry for my "reality shows to showing reality", I wrote one particular entry with a class exercise in mind. I decided to demonstrate the frequency in which we sometimes use allness terms (always, never, no one, everyone, everywhere, nowhere, etc .) So I specifically used them in the entry titled, "We Sell Amish". I then can have a matching quiz for them to take in D2L.

I love how the blogging has developed into so much more than I had originally intended.

We're going to the zoo zoo zoo, how about you you you?

I used to do an in-class activity in my Interpersonal Communication class that had students describe themselves as an animal. For some the answer came easy and for others, not. Today my friend and I decided to go to the Minnesota Zoo in Apple Valley. What a great idea for converting an in class activity to an online learning object.

The goal is to take pictures of various animals that can be shown. Students will first be asked to identify what traits they as assign to each animal. Once they've done this individually, they can compare their answers to their groupmates. Finally, they will be asked to pick an animal (one pictured or another of their choice) that they think best fits them (justifying their answer of course).

So we're going to the zoo zoo zoo, how about you you you?

Conference Time - CTAM

I'm at information overload. I've spent the last 3 days at a CTAM conference. CTAM stands for Communication and Theatre Across Minnesota. Friday was over 13 hours of sessions! That's alot of information. I learned alot. I came home with a plethora of ideas. However, unlike most years, I might actually get a chance to explore some of these references a little more since I'm on sabbatical. So since I learned more than I'm able to document here, I'll have to just do a couple of highlights:

1) Definitely need to get the flip camera (the batttery recharges when you're plugging it in for downloading--other brands use disposable batteries too quickly)
2) Windows movie maker now has "narrator" function which makes it easier to give oral feedback to speeches that get turned in to digital videos.
3) "When the wind blows it blows for those that..." an icebreaker that get's people moving and learning about each other
4) Thesaraus.com polarizes terms in a manner ripe for discussion (masculine and feminine)
5) Lori Halvorson Wente has stored public speaking resources on her efolio site
6) Public speaking concept/theory video clips will be released on Minnesota Online repository sometime very soon
7) MnSCU global education conference is coming up in November and CLC needs to be there. Bring an administrator
8) postsecret.blogspot.com
9) interactive listening quiz wisc-online.com
10) notes saved as word document "CTAM Notes 08" on faculty 1's site