News
Updated Version of Mediathread Released
CCNMTL has released an updated version of Mediathread, the Center’s innovative, open-source platform for exploration, analysis, and organization of multimedia content.
Improvements in this release include:
- Direct video uploading: Columbia University students, instructors, and staff can now upload video to Mediathread directly from their personal computer.
- Bookmarklet compatibility with Vimeo and Kaltura: The Mediathread bookmarklet, which allows users to easily import media from online collections into Mediathread for analysis, is now compatible with Vimeo and Kaltura video collections.
- Improved design: The Instructor Dashboard has a more organized look and simplifies course configuration. In addition, instructors can now select which sites or archives - such as YouTube or ARTstor - to set as sources.
- Improved multi-course functionality: It’s now easier for users in more than one Mediathread course to switch between courses.
- Help when you need it: Features in the site are accompanied by information that can be hidden and revealed as needed. In addition, Mediathread’s Help page is now connected to CCNMTL’s growing Knowledge Base.
The code for Mediathread is publicly available, and the platform is being installed at higher education institutions such as MIT, Wesleyan University, The New School, and Georgia Tech.
Columbia University instructors can get started with Mediathread by sending an email to ccnmtl-mediathread@columbia.edu.
Special Event: Recapping Project Vietnam
On June 9th, please join us at this special public event for a recap on Project Vietnam presented by CCNMTL's Mark Phillipson and Maria Janelli.
Project Vietnam is a partnership among CCNMTL, WGBH, and the University of Massachusetts-Boston to digitize, preserve, and disseminate primary source materials created for the 13-part series landmark documentary, Vietnam: A Television History, which examines in depth the causes and consequences of the Vietnam War.
Project Vietnam was funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. It enables students to discover and watch full-length interviews and a range of stock footage; annotate, edit, and create sub-collections of these videos; and incorporate clips into multimedia projects. Faculty from Columbia University's Teachers College, Graduate School of Journalism, Department of History, and Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures have integrated Project Vietnam into their curricula.
Phillipson and Janelli will be joined by professors Margaret Crocco, William Gaudelli, and James Lap, who will describe their experiences incorporating Project Vietnam into their curricula.
Date: June 9, 2011, 2pm -4pm
Location: 203 Butler Library
Information: ccnmtl@columbia.edu or 212 854-9058
RSVP: https://calendar.columbia.edu/sundial/webapi/register.php?eventID=50385
See also:
More information on Project Vietnam
New Features Added to Mediathread
Mediathread, CCNMTL's innovative platform for exploration, analysis, and organization of web-based images and videos, continues to improve. A new beta version of Mediathread was released earlier this spring; student surveys and suggestions from educational technologists and instructors using Mediathread last semester shaped the results. Two major features are introduced in this release:
Project organization: Projects in Mediathread are now easier to organize and track as assignments. A new Instructor's Dashboard helps instructors create projects, assignments, and discussions, all of which appear on the class home page. The Instructor's Dashboard also contains reports so instructors can track assignment submissions and assess overall student activity in Mediathread. Students are now alerted to assignments in their Items and Projects workspace. They can also link projects to assignments and are notified when instructors post feedback on submitted projects.
Multiple annotations view: All annotations posted by class members on images and video imported into MediaThread are now available for browsing on the item profile. Annotations are color-coded and can be sorted and viewed by the annotation author or tag. This feature was first cultivated in the Engaging Digital Tibet course and is now part of the Mediathread functionality, giving course members better ways to view 'coverage' of and connections between annotated objects.
Mediathread is slated for use in various schools and departments at Columbia University this semester, including classes in the History Department, East Asian Languages and Cultures, English and Comparative Literature, Barnard Department of Theater, Social Studies Education at Teachers College, and the Teaching Residents @ Teachers College program.
Mediathread is an open-source software developed by CCNMTL that supports a variety of uses and configurations. A Mediathread site for a course at Columbia University can be set up quickly with a custom set of collections. To discuss piloting Mediathread in your course with a CCNMTL educational technologist, send email to ccnmtl-mediathread@columbia.edu.
New Mobile Version of Mapping the African American Past
February 14, 2011. 
CCNMTL has released a new mobile version of the award-winning Mapping the African American Past (MAAP) project coinciding with this year's Black History Month. MAAP is an educational website featuring multimedia profiles of significant people and places in the history of African Americans in New York. In the mobile version (http://maap.columbia.edu/mbl_index), historical places are organized by geographical areas—such as Lower Manhattan, Upper Manhattan, and Eastern Long Island—to allow simpler localized access. Each area has a corresponding live Google Map view and includes links to additional information about every place. Highlighted places also include "then" and "now" pictures, a textual description, and an audio version of that description as read aloud by several New York high school students who participated in the project.
The MAAPm web app is designed primarily for the iPhone/iPod Touch and can be converted into an app by using the "Add to Home Screen" button in Mobile Safari.
Created by CCNMTL, Curriculum Concepts International, and Teachers College, and funded by the JPMorgan Chase Foundation, the MAAP project received the Award for Innovative Use of Archives from the Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York (ART) in September 2009.
New Book on Digitization Features Black Radical Archive
August 16, 2010. The Black Radical Archive, a digital archive created by CCNMTL in collaboration with Columbia English Professor Brent Edwards for the course Black Radicalism and the Archive, is the subject of a chapter in the newly published book, Digitization in the Real World: Lessons Learned from Small and Medium-Sized Digitized Projects.
Digitization in the Real World profiles more than 30 examples of successful efforts to digitize historically significant materials at leading libraries in North America. CCNMTL's Mark Phillipson partnered with Michael Ryan, Director of Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia, in developing the Black Radical Archive website and writing a chapter for Digitization in the Real World.
In "Special Collections, Digitization, and the Classroom: A New Model," Phillipson and Ryan describe how the Black Radical Archive leveraged digitization to involve students in the discovery and description of heretofore hidden collections. The chapter gives an in-depth look at how the Black Radical Archive was produced through the innovative collaboration between Columbia archivists, CCNMTL educational technologists, a faculty member deeply engaged with archival collections, and his students—who made selections of their own and added to the digital archive. The chapter also emphasizes the cross-divisional support for the Archive, its implementation in a Columbia graduate course, and lessons learned from the informal, just-in-time digitization intrinsic to course-driven repository building.
Published by the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO), Digitization in the Real World also examines efforts to digitize rare and important materials at the American Museum of Natural History, Jewish Theological Seminary, and Leo Baeck Institute, among others. With each case study, the book sheds light on the strategies, challenges, and perspectives of digitization projects led by universities, libraries, and research centers.
"One of the key findings in pulling together case studies from all across the U.S. was the fact that, while all digitization projects are different, key learnings from successful projects at one library can provide very effective guidance and support for projects at other libraries. This book also presents real-world perspectives tailored to the needs of library professionals, so the guidance is targeted and specific,” said Jason Kucsma, emerging technologies manager at METRO and co-editor of Digitization in the Real World.
Digitization in the Real World is available at online vendors including Lulu.com (currently available) and Amazon.com (beginning in September). Learn more about the Black Radical Archive, a Digital Bridges Initiative project.
The Chronicle of Higher Education Highlights Vietnam Collection
August 5, 2010. The Vietnam Collection, an online archive of the 1983 WGBH series, "Vietnam: A Television History," which is currently being used in Columbia classrooms under Project Vietnam, was featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education. In Archive Watch: Summer Doldrums Edition, author Jennifer Howard lists the collection as one of the cool digital archives that she came across lately.
The Vietnam Collection is housed in WGBH's Open Vault archive, and comprises original footage and stills from the 13-hour television series. CCNMTL, along with the University of Massachusetts at Boston, partnered with WGBH Media Library and Archives to make the online collection available to the public and accessible for educators to use in the classroom.
At Columbia, the CCNMTL-developed Project Vietnam enables students to discover and watch full-length interviews and a range of stock footage from the Vietnam Collection; annotate, edit, and create sub-collections of these videos; and incorporate clips into multimedia projects. Faculty from Columbia University's Teachers College, Department of History, and Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures are integrating Project Vietnam into their curricula.
Visit the Vietnam Collection and learn more about Project Vietnam at Columbia.
Virtual Forest Initiative Featured at the Ecological Society of America Meeting
August 4, 2010. Dr. Terrayanne Maenza-Gmelch is presenting web-based tools from the Virtual Forest Initiative at the 95th Annual Ecological Society of America Meeting this week. Dr. Maenza-Gmelch is a lecturer and co-director of labs in the Environmental Science Department at Barnard College. She has partnered with CCNMTL to develop online teaching modules for the Virtual Forest Initiative focused on paleoecology, which is the study of ancient organisms and their environment. At the meeting, Dr. Maenza-Gmelch will demonstrate how the Paleoecology Module introduces students in Barnard's undergraduate environmental science course to concepts such as pollen morphology and sediment sampling with interactive online visualizations and learning tools.
Dr. Maenza-Gmelch will also explain how students benefit from engaging with the Virtual Forest tools. In the meeting abstract, she notes "The Paleoecology Module provides to the student a means for learning the discovery process inherent in reconstructing a forest's ecosystem using paleoecological techniques without the time and resource constraints that make actual sediment coring and pollen processing impossible in a classroom setting." Learn more about the Paleoecology Module in the announcement, Barnard Students Engage with New Virtual Forest Module.
The Virtual Forest Initiative is currently in the process of expanding with new ecological and environmental science learning modules developed by CCNMTL in collaboration with Barnard College and Columbia University faculty. Learn more about the Virtual Forest Initiative.
The Vietnam Collection Featured in New York Times
May 3, 2010. The New York Times' Arts Briefly section recently featured the launch of the Vietnam Collection, the online video library developed and disseminated by a partnership between the WGBH Media Library and Archives, the University of Massachusetts in Boston, and CCNMTL.
The article, Rare Interviews Tell Vietnam’s Story Online, describes the Vietnam Collection's robust digital repository containing previously unavailable original interviews and stock footage from WGBH’s 1983 landmark series, Vietnam: A Television History. With a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, CCNMTL joined WGBH and the University of Massachusetts in Boston to make the collection available to the public on WGBH's OpenVault website and used for educational purposes at Columbia University and other interested institutions.
Read the New York Times article here and learn more about the Vietnam Collection and Project Vietnam.
WGBH Launches the Vietnam Collection
April 15, 2010. WGBH Boston announced the public release of the Vietnam Collection, an online video library comprising WGBH’s 1983 landmark series, Vietnam: A Television History. The Vietnam Collection is at the center of Project Vietnam - a joint collaboration between CCNMTL, WGBH Media Library and Archives, and the University of Massachusetts/Boston to provide professors and students hands-on engagement with digitized source materials from the Vietnam: A Television History series.
The Vietnam Collection, accessible on the newly designed Open Vault website, contains hundreds of hours of original interviews and stock footage from the 13-hour series. While much of the series' interview materials and stills were previously unavailable to the public, the launch of the Vietnam Collection has enabled students, researchers, educators, and the general public to access the collection's resources.
At Columbia, professors in Teacher College, the Graduate School of Journalism, the Department of History, and the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures have partnered with CCNMTL to build curricular models that incorporate the Vietnam Collection in their courses. Students in Teachers College, for instance, are using CCNMTL-developed analysis tools to annotate, edit, and incorporate clips from the Vietnam Collection into multimedia lesson plans. Read the WGBH press release and learn more about Project Vietnam.
Barnard Students Engage with New Virtual Forest Module
March 11, 2010. The Virtual Forest —a project developed by CCNMTL and earth science and ecology faculty partners to enrich research, education, and community activities at Black Rock Forest —now offers students a virtual learning experience designed to enhance their understanding of paleoecology, or the study of ancient organisms and their environment.
Students in the environmental science department at Barnard are using this new online training module to improve their knowledge of two key concepts in paleoecology: pollen identification and sediment sampling. The Pollen Identification activity was designed to introduce students to the various structures and names of pollen. Students are provided digital images of 15 pollen specimens taken from Sutherland Pond in Black Rock Forest and learn how to identify common pollen types and characteristics using an interactive scientific key. The Sediment Sampling activity allows students to view data from select samples of sediment from the Sutherland Pond and analyze various types of pollen prevalent in the samples using an interactive visualization tool.
This training module was developed in partnership with Dr. Terryanne Maenza-Gmelch for her Barnard course, Land Use Dynamics, and is the fourth module added to the Virtual Forest project. "As a teaching and learning strategy, this module provides key interactive and inquiry-based learning opportunities for students, facilitating synthesis of key palynological concepts and skills within the time frame of a traditional lecture based undergraduate course," wrote Dr. Maenza-Gmelch. CCNMTL will evaluate student use of the module following the completion of the course and determine how the tool might be expanded. Learn more about the Virtual Forest and view the new training module.
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