The Future of Education

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution relates an anecdote about educational reform in a remote Mexican village:

If I think of the Mexican village where I have done field work, the education sector "works" as follows. No one in the village is capable of teaching writing, reading, and arithmetic. A paid outsider is supposed to man the school, but very often that person never appears, even though he continues to be paid. Children do have enough leisure time to take in schooling, when it is available. I am told that most of the teachers are bad, when they do appear. You can get your children (somewhat) educated by leaving the village altogether, and of course some people do this. In the last ten years, satellite television suddenly has become the major educator in the village, helping the villagers learn Spanish (Nahuatl is the indigenous language), history, world affairs, some science from nature shows, and telenovela customs. The villagers seem eager to learn, now that it is possible.

That just confirms my belief that education is going to be revolutionized with technology delivered content.

Saddling Middle America

Tyler Cowen wonders Why hasn't the Fed been targeting two or three percent inflation? and doesn't like the implications:

I also regard this as a somewhat gruesome hypothesis. It means that "Main Street" is paying for "Wall Street" (forgive me the use of those awful terms) in at least two ways: high unemployment and inability to earn much on one's savings.

Tyler Cowen on FairTrade

Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen distills FairTrade: "...it's mostly a marketing gimmick."

Incentives Matter

Tyler Cowen links a BBC story:

A Buckinghamshire man diagnosed with terminal cancer is to collect a second winning payout of £5,000 after betting he would stay alive.

Jon Matthews, 59, from Milton Keynes, was diagnosed with mesothelioma, a cancer linked to asbestos, in 2006 and told he had months to live.

He placed two bets, each with a £100 stake at odds of 50/1, that he would be alive in June 2008 and in June 2009.

A third wager will earn him a further £10,000 if he lives until 1 June 2010.
The widower will collect his second lot of £5,000 winnings on Monday.

My First Gig as a Reporter (pt2)

This is my second "lessons learned" post about covering the Tax Day Tea Party here in Saint Louis as a PJTV Citizen Reporter. My first post focused on my audio reporting. This post will review my video work.

The seven part YouTube playlist at the top of this post is the whole enchilada. Mostly. All the copyrighted material (music) has been cut from the beginning and I dropped about 15 seconds of Dana (between parts 6 and 7) to avoid having an eight part playlist. Sorry Dana! Note to self, plan your edits better so you don't have to do that in the future.

Interview

I only did one video interview at the tea party and it came after the event when I spoke with Rich from Circle of Concern. Circle of Concern is a local food bank. They provided a van to pickup donations of non-perishables. Operation Food Search also participated in the tea party food drive. They had a 26' to 28' foot truck, like the big ones UHaul has.



I don't think I did very well. My questions were sorta ok, but there are three points in the clip where I just can't remember the name of "Operation Food Search". The audio's not very good. I'm too loud and you can barely hear Rich. Perhaps I should've used my MP3 recorder to get a better recording of Rich and then edited the two together. A microphone is probably a better option since I could point that at whoever is currently speaking. The video is blurry, in part, because of the hardware I used. I plan to use a better camera in the future, but that will mean that I'm recording to tape. I hate tape...

Quality

It's my experience that conservative voices don't get much airtime. Grainy videos with bad audio are not going to change that. If you're seriously pursuing citizen journalism, then quality has to be a priority. This not only includes quality content (e.g.: an engaging and informative interview, a newsworthy event), but it also includes technical quality (e.g.: 1080i or 1080p video, crisp focus, stereo sound, good levels, etc.)

TV newsrooms across the country have made huge investments so that they can broadcast in high-def. They don't want bouncy cell phone footage except when there's no alternative. They want high quality content: an engaging and informative subject, a sharp picture, and clear audio.

Content is still king. With the economic downturn and the pressures imposed on broadcast news by their competition on radio and the Internet, newsrooms are going to be looking for less expensive sources for their footage. They're going to be looking for open content. Content they can use at little or no cost. Content that you gather with your HD video camera and then make available to them on the Internet.

Open Video Content

Here are my first thoughts on a concise list of parameters that content creators (citizen journalists) are agreeing to when they offer their work as open content:

1. The content creator must be credited by the content user (TV station, website, etc.)
   
2. A link to the complete source material must be provided in the show notes on the content user's website
3. The content user may edit the content as long as the meaning is not inverted
   

Obviously, these are my priorities. Editing a video will cause some distortions, if only by omission. The link back to the original should mitigate minor distortions. #3 seems reasonable, but I'm not sure how to put teeth in it. Should a lawyer draft a simple open content license? Perhaps the Creative Commons License would suffice... Please put your thoughts in a comment below!

Video Distribution

Source audio and video content is only the beginning. After the video is shot, it has to be made available online. YouTube is one option, but it has significant drawbacks. Video uploads to YouTube must not exceed 1G and they cannot be longer than 10 minutes. Those factors limit quality and increase the workload for providing video content online.

For the Saint Louis Tax Day Tea Party, I took the time to enter the metadata for each part of my seven part video. That metadata includes name, description, tags, location, etc. Copy and paste helps a lot, but it's still a pain. Motionbox.com offers a much better solution. Since you are not limited either by duration or file size, there's less administrative overhead because you don't have to dice-up your video and duct-tape it back together with a YouTube "playlist".

Before I figured out Motionbox.com, I exchanged emails with some folks at PJTV. They were helpful, but they really couldn't fix the bottleneck: I did not have enough bandwidth. I discovered this problem before tax day when I tried to upload my interview with Bill Hennessy. It took 12 to 15 hours to upload that interview to PJTV. That's just too long to be useful and it invites data corruption problems and other weirdness.

Motionbox.com has a tool that manages the upload process. Even though the upload takes just as long, their upload app tool allows you to queue multiple videos. You can also pause all uploads with the app. The pause feature is very helpful when your wife starts complaining that the Internet is slow.

I still don't know if PJTV used any of my footage. I know some of it uploaded successfully. I know that they received a DVD via FedEx Tuesday (4/21) with all of it. This is another reason for #1 and #2 in my list of open content expectations—I'd have a way to find out what they used. Of course, by Tuesday my video footage was, to put it charitably, starting to ripen. News is time critical.

Crowdsourcing the coverage of an event that has over 500 locations on a single day was bound to be messy. If there were other videographers that weren't able to get their content uploaded, I would not be surprised. My conclusion here is that the videographer needs to be responsible for getting their video online. I think that's the view PJTV took. I also think videographers should be independent. It doesn't matter to me who broadcasts my work; I just want it broadcast. If PJTV or someone else, is willing to guarantee that X minutes of my footage will be broadcast or that they're willing to pay me, then that's another story.

If content creators are independent and responsible for getting their footage online, then Motionbox.com is the linchpin. It took awhile for me to upload my recording of the tea party to Motionbox.com. The video was online for a couple of days when it was shutdown for bandwidth/cost. That's not a slight on Motionbox.com. I love their service! Their prompt and helpful email support was excellent. They offered me the option of keeping the video live by upgrading my account from Premium to Pro, but I was concerned about cost. Their Pro accounts are charged per gigabyte for bandwidth (at a competitive rate)... here's the thing, I couldn't figure out how, in two days, a video of the St Louis Tax Day Tea Party had been viewed 600+ times. Paying for each of those was a scary prospect.

With a Premium account on Motionbox.com there's a limit to the number of views/downloads your videos can have. There's no limit to the quality, file size, or duration, so Motionbox.com is a nexus between content creators and broadcasters. I grant access to my video content to PJTV, C-SPAN, NPR, Fox, whoever and they download the original hi-def content for broadcast.

What would happen if PJTV (or any outfit, really) had video content from hudreds of locations? If those are live feeds, it's going to be a brutal day herding cats. If it's recorded video like mine, then video editors are going to be working day and night reviewing the content. They might just pitch some of the video, but then they're alienating the people that shot that video for them. The most labor intensive component of video editing is annotating the video, marking the start and end points of various segments, and identifying who or what is on the reel.

Edit Decision List (EDL)

The annotations of a source video are often in edit decision list format or EDL. EDL was originally developed to keep track of all of the edits on multiple source video tapes so that they could be assembled into a movie or show. It's the lingua franca of video editing. It can be the basis of a library of metadata that allows a video editor to quickly find the clip they need.

If you still don't get what EDL is, here's an edit from a recent Bloggingheads.tv diavlog between Peter Singer and Tyler Cowen. The edit link captures the "in" (start time) of 48:41 and "out" (end time) of 51:04. You need me to annotate it by telling you that Tyler asks Peter whether it's moral to eat fish and I'd give the clip four out of five stars.

Bloggingheads.tv has already implemented part of the annotation process: defining the in-out points. Now we need someone to incorporate the other metadata: who, what, where, why, and how good is the clip. The nice thing about that work is that it scales—you can crowdsource it. Here's how that might have been done for the Saint Louis Tax Day Tea Party:

1. Bill Hennessy announces a phone number and asks for volunteers to text it from their phones
   
2. People who texted the number are sent a weblink to access the next day from home
   
3. When they follow the link, they're given a ten minute block of the footage to review
4. They enter in-out points, annotations, and star ratings for the edits in their ten minutes
   

"Whoa!" you think. "You'll get tons of hits on that Motionbox.com account and go over your limit." Yes. If the link is to Motionbox.com, but if the source is diced into ten minute blocks and put on YouTube, then there isn't a problem. YouTube versions are used for review and Motionbox.com is used for the hi-def version. Ideally, I'd like to see Motionbox.com offer some sort of journalism package. I'd want a way for people to annotate the video content. To reduce bandwidth costs, they could provide a low resolution version of the video for annotation.

I think I'll do a third lessons learned post... This doesn't feel done, but I need some sleep.

Related Posts:

• My First Gig as a Reporter (pt1)
  
• Finally!
  
• Estimating the Crowd at Kiener Plaza
  
• Video Setup for Hennessy Interview
  
• Bill Hennessy Interview

Update: Thanks for the Instalanche, Glenn! Part 3 will be up some time Sunday so please check back.

Let Me Revise and Extend My Remarks

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution made an obscure reference in a post yesterday about Social security and fiscal policy. Here's the seeming non sequitur in his post:

If I were Taiwan I'd feel a wee bit more worried these days.

Before I started blogging—late last September, to be specific—I emailed Tyler an early version of my Hu's in Trouble Post. He thanked me for the email, so I knew he had read it. I'll take the line above as confirmation that he hasn't forgotten it.

I've posted once more on China's massive underwritting of our debt to say that people that think that China will sell dollars on the open market aren't considering the other possibilities. Someone identified as "ws1835" commented on Tyler's post in part:

It was openly discussed that Clinton was begging China to keep buying Treasuries. That part wasn't news to me. The surprise for me was that the commentators openly discussed Chinese responses directly addressing the expectation of significant concessions from the USA in return for continued financing.

And when I say significant, I mean huge. There was no mention of Taiwan. The discussion cited items like troop reduction/withdrawal from S. Korea and Japan. Funny how you didn't hear about those topics from the Western press.

Given our massive and growing debt and China's strategic interests, they will continue to buy our treasuries. That they're using the mere offer to buy them as leverage is unfortunate for us, but smart for them. Here are a couple of questions to ponder:

1. How much debt forgiveness is Formosa worth?
2. ...Tibet?
3. ...extradition of the Dalai Lama?

Yeah. China's going to keep buying US Treasuries, because their greatest coup will be the role reversal of playing might first world debt forgiver to a banana republic: the USA.

Ready... Aim... Fire!

Tyler Cowen summarizes Obama's economic plan. I don't get the $3,000 per new hire. If Obama's elected, won't employers just fire lots of people November 5th? They could rationalize it on economy/market uncertainty and wait for Obama's new hire bonus to kick-in before raising head count again.

Update: Here's the bullet point from Tyler's post:

— for the next two years, give businesses a $3,000 income-tax credit for each new full-time employee they hire above the number in their current workforce;

The more I think about this, the more I think it's going to drive up unemployment in November when employers just fire lots of people November 5th. Doesn't "current workforce" mean the headcount of companies when the bill is signed? Assuming I'm wrong and that "current workforce" means workforce in October 2008, doesn't that create the incentive for employers to fire workers Nov 3rd and let them know they'll all be re-hired on the 5th if McCain wins? Is Obama intentionally trying to make workers worry about their jobs? And how does this restore confidence in the markets?

Please tell me I'm missing something....