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Kent Hooper Writing about Literature and the Other Arts (German 270) Date Awarded: Fall 1999 Project Description: During fall of 1999 I received a one-unit release from teaching. With this time I was to try to develop software for German 270, Writing about Literature and the Other Arts. Previous to that fall, I had obtained authoring software and further training from Click2Learn, at the time known as Asymetrix, a Paul Allen startup based in Bellevue, and a company known well to me from my work with them over the years . In order to operate the latest version of this authoring software (actually even earlier versions), I needed at the office to switch from the Mac I had been using to a Pentium powered PC with 128k RAM, but I figured that transition would go smoothly, since OIS had scheduled me for a new machine late summer 1999. The new machine did not arrive til November 1999, which meant I had to rely on my own PC-capabilities at home, which only allowed me to run an older version of the authoring software. For the film unit of 270, I expected to be able to rip DVDs to obtain the cleanest possible images and ones that were already available in digital form. And yet, Mark Otis informed me that ripping DVDs was illegal (and still is it seems, although the software to accomplish this is available gratis on the www). More problematical, though, was the severe limitation on the amount of material one is allowed to take from a single film. Mark informed me that the amount of material I wanted to incorporate was not just a couple of times over the legal limit but rather about a gazillion times over -- I guess one would equate it to wishing to photocopy 300 pages of a 500-page book and then pass it out to students (which I would also probably have few qualms about doing). Password protection would have only solved part of the problem, but I did look into it. As a result, I contented myself with digitizing video-format material, just to see whether the size of the image on the computer screen would lend itself to the sort of analysis I wanted students to do. The conclusion I drew is that the amount of bandwith/memory needed to work with film footage was not yet at the stage that a full-fledged unit on film is feasible --copyright issues aside. The image is too small on a computer screen and the resolution really not good enough when projected onto a screen in a classroom (the new academic building might have better projection units than were available at the time I experimented with this). The filmic image is corrupted enough when I have to use video-format to teach units on films meant originally to be shown on the big screen and in significantly different relative size (letterboxed is not always available, meaning the videos we work with are basically chopped on both sides in addition to lacking in image quality relative to the original 35mm print). Reducing the size of an image to a small portion of a 17 computer monitor makes matters even worse. And for longer film sequences, one inevitably is stuck with very jerky images -- especially if one is not working directly with material installed on a harddrive but rather being transported over even a high speed line (not available off campus, of course). I encountered similar copyright-related obstacles trying to work with recorded-music material. Because of recording that I do on the side, I am well familiar with the various formats recorded audio-only-files can take, and I figured I would be able to convert CD-material to mp3-format and thus save a lot of memory/bandwith. Once again, I was informed that theamount of material I wished to take from one CD and mount on the www was exponentially more than would be allowed by law. If I wished to write to the record company to receive special permission to exceed the limits, I was welcome to do that. And yet, I have little interest in spending my time doing that, having years ago written a book that included illustrations, for which I spent months corresponding with various entities in attempts to gain permission to publish copyrighted material. So, basically, the unit off was a bust. I spent a lot of time spinning my wheels and getting nowhere. I ve been programming for years on my own outside of UPS, but designing a relatively simple computer-based teaching unit while trying to work within the confines of the limitations imposed on me by...the law (!) would have been a lot of trouble for very little benefit, given the small number of students I teach. If I could have envisioned thousands of students or professors using my material, I would think of restructering my unit. But at present, I equate the writing of teaching software for advanced-level courses with the writing of textbooks for them--there s no market for either one in German. |
