On June 21, Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL) staff members Jonah Bossewitch and Tucker Harding presented Mediathread in Philadelphia at a conference and workshop sponsored by the National Federation of Advanced Information Services. The conference, entitled Digital Content: Fostering Usage Through Practical Functionalities and Policies, looked at how the current means of consuming and delivering digital content impacts its use and re-use. Publishers, librarians, and scholars gathered explored the challenges and practical approaches for a generation of “digital omnivores” to share and annotate digital content.

Mediathread is CCNMTL’s an open-source platform for collaborative exploration, analysis, and organization of web-based multimedia content. Over 200 courses at Columbia University have used Mediathread since its launch in 2010. The platform is now being used at several other institutions, including MIT, Dartmouth, Wesleyan, Georgia Tech, and the American University in Cairo.

Bossewitch and Harding presented Mediathread as part of a session focuses on tools that enable well-established tasks to be performed more efficiently and effectively. They discussed how Mediathread allows small group of students to share and collaborate on media annotations and multimedia essays. They also showed sample student workflows and use cases from different departments at Columbia.

The code for Mediathread is freely available at GitHub. Columbia University instructors can get started with Mediathread by emailing ccnmtl-mediathread@columbia.edu.