Tag Archives: DUVAGA

DU CourseMedia™ Released!

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The University of Denver Center for Teaching & Learning has (finally) released the DU CourseMedia™ Course Media Management System. This has been a focus of my work for the past 5 months or so and is one of the major CTL projects for 2009. Some may recall the mention of the DUVAGA system from time-to-time. CourseMedia™ is DUVAGA reborn.

DU CourseMedia(tm)

DU CourseMedia™ was developed by the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Denver as a course-based media presentation tool for organizing and presenting high quality images and videos to system participants. Although it was initially built with the needs of faculty in the school of art and art history in mind, DU CourseMedia™ is now used by faculty in many other disciplines in approximately 250 courses each term.

Through DU CourseMedia™, instructors have access to over 50,000 art and world history images and over 2000 library reserve videos. DU Course Media™ allows instructors to create online galleries that can include streaming video, images, text slides, discussion boards, quizzes, and voice narrations.

Some of the highlights of the new release are as follows:

  • Complete overhaul of how media objects are accessed
  • Entire media galleries can now be shared across permitted websites
  • Gallery object functionality is raised one level to become more accessible for users
  • The new Media Viewer is written from scratch with the input of DU faculty, staff and students
  • The Media Viewer is a Flash application written upon the Flex framework
  • The VPS Projection System, an application which runs upon the Adobe AIR runtime has also recieved a number of updates

I’ll be presenting on DU CourseMedia™ at the Adobe Education Leader Institute this summer.

To see an overview of the new features, you can check out a screencast produced by Alex Martinez, ColdFusion developer for the CTL.

A screencast specific to the Media Viewer was also authored by Jenn Light.

DUVAGAII PDF Presentation

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One thing which is really unfortunate (but necessary) about the DUVAGA project is that all major functionality is not available to the public. We have developed some really nice tools and a good workflow but no one outside of a class setting has access to any of these materials due to copyright restrictions.

Back in June, we put together a short, written overview of the system for the VRA Bulletin. Since we are also lacking in basic instructional overviews for users, I applied some screen captures of the various features along with text from the bulletin in a PDF document.

DUVAGAII in ‘The Source’

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About a month ago, I was interviewed by a writer from the University of Denver faculty and staff monthly newspaper, ‘The Source’. The context of this meeting was the launch of the second iteration of our VAGA project this past January. I sat down with the writer and gave her a short demo of the application, explaining how unique a system this was among educational institutions and the greater world in general, the technologies behind the application, the necessary expertise of such a small group of developers, et cetera. While I understand that not all of what I went into would be included in the paper, I had hoped for a little more technical accuracy and positive engagement.

The article itself is rather short and unfortunately does not convey much of what I tried to get across. In fact, it somewhat erroneously states that “The program was created in ActionScript using the Flash Platform.” While this is somewhat true, the underlying core of the system is built using ColdFusion and mySQL. All of the major tools in the application are built with Flash, and while this is a large chunk of the programming involved, it is certainly not the whole picture.

Back from VRA25

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So I am back from the VRA conference in Kansas City, MO. I have to say that this was the absolute worst travel experience I’ve ever had. Not because of the conference itself, or the hotel, or anything like that- mostly just because I was sick the entire time and having a head cold while traveling by airplane is pretty much a guarantee that you are going to have some extra issues. In this case- my hearing was so messed up that I could barely carry a conversation with anyone while I was there.

On the technical side there were also some issues. Our hotel had the most ridiculously restrictive internet access I’ve ever experienced. They had real crummy wireless (two of my fellow presenters could not get their machines to work on wireless), had denied access to many useful sites including http://mozilla.org/ (WHY???), and most importantly were blocking port 1935! So I’m doing a live video tools demo and the port used by Flash Media Server to stream content is blocked- not good. Thankfully, through some dialogue with the technical coordinators and the hotel, we were able to get 1935 opened up for our presentation. Oh- and the machines they had available for us to use were installed with FLASH PLAYER 5!

The presentation itself went well. I was on a panel talking about different video delivery methods with three other universities. I had about as good of a time as possible considering my condition and we received a lot of positive feedback.

Presenting at the VRA Conference

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I’ll be presenting my work with Flash Media Server and the DUVAGAII project as part of a panel on March 29th at the Visual Resources Association‘s 25th Anniversary conference. It should be a fairly interesting panel and I will be demonstrating some of the video tools I’ve authored allowing instructors to produce short clips of longer film materials online, at their leisure, for presentation in the classroom and on the web. For anyone interested in using the Flash Platform, Coldfusion, and Flash Media Server for dynamic video delivery, this should be a panel worth attending!

A Burgeoning Beyond Restraint: Delivering Video, Audio, and Image Data to the Classroom

With advances in presentation platforms, file storage systems, and the increasing functionality and power of computer hardware, software, and network infrastructures, there is very little to hold back an educational institution from implementing a full-featured, bleeding-edge multimedia delivery system. During this session, we will demonstrate different systems built to take advantage of these advances in digital technology, and begin a discussion to further advance the development and implementation of such systems, while remaining mindful of very real restrictions placed upon us by fair use and intellectual property considerations.

During this session we will address three important areas software and hardware requirements for storage and delivery, the development and usage of advanced media delivery tools, and a discussion of questions surrounding copyright and security policies.

System demonstrations will include the DU-VAGA media presentation application, the ALORA digital object repository application, and the Media Mill storage, processing and delivery service.