24 colleagues from Distance Providers across the US, including from sectors with which we were less familiar such as Military Instructional Education, joined us for a DiAL-e workshop in Madison-Wisconsin. A half-day workshop on the first day of the 27th Annual Distance Education Conference in Madison-Wisconsin ( #dtl2011 ) provided us with an excellent opportunity to explain and explore the work progressed since 2006. In retrospect, we might well have spent more time on the underlying theoretical frameworks and contextual issues which underpin the DiAL-e, but we were excited to discuss video in a broader digital context with a focus on distance education.
We took the opportunity to discuss how digital video might be optimised in distance education contexts using Web 2.0 technologies. We discussed and demonstrated the opportunities for using video as the basis for asynchronous discussion using VoiceThread, (about which we have already written elsewhere), for using subtitling not only to translate but annotate and punctuate video using Universal Subtitles, and the opportunities for using embedded segments of existing YouTube clips with ChopTube. We ended with an insight into the role of emerging Semantic Video engines and the HTML5 format. The focus was very much on how teaching and learning can benefit from these emerging technologies.
