Joseph will demonstrate how the University of Denver is leveraging the Flash Platform across the campus community to allow collaboration between students, faculty, and staff in a number of our web applications. Connectivity to Facebook and Twitter services will be covered as well as specialized collaborative services in University applications like CourseMedia™ and the tracking of targeted activity through Google Analytics APIs.

(I know the audio isn’t the best, apologies!)

The University of Denver made a strong commitment to delivering rich media for classroom use across campus years ago and we are still going strong. This presentation will cover every aspect of video capture, cataloging, and delivery at DU today through custom-developed solutions as well as failures and lessons learned.

Here’s a rundown:

Using Collaborative Media Services with Flash in University Applications
July 28, 2010 – 11:15 a.m.
See how the University of Denver uses the Adobe® Flash® Platform across the campus community to allow collaboration between students, faculty, and staff via a number of web applications. This presentation will have both general overview and code example portions. It will cover:

• Connectivity to Facebook and Twitter services
• Specialized collaborative services in university applications like CourseMedia™
• The tracking of targeted activity through Google Analytics APIs
• A general overview of services such as Adobe Social, Adobe Stratus, and the ActionScript® 3.0 Client Library for Facebook Platform

Mobile Outlook 2010 – Where Are We?
August 11, 2010 – 11:10 a.m.
We are currently experiencing what will probably be the largest technological shift since the introduction of the internet onto our campuses for widespread use. Powerful mobile devices are expected to increase at a tremendous rate at universities and elsewhere in the world over the next few years to the point that many activities now done via a desktop machine will be enabled on hand-held devices. This holds great promise but also much uncertainty – so where are we now?

We’ll have a look at the history of these devices, milestones in the evolution of mobile handsets for teaching and learning, and a lot of looking ahead to what the future holds while devising a strategy to plan for what needs to be done today.

Making Rich Video Happen!
August 11, 2010 – 1:10 p.m.
The University of Denver made a strong commitment to delivering rich media for classroom use across campus years ago and we are still going strong. This presentation will cover every aspect of video capture, cataloging, and delivery at DU today through custom-developed solutions as well as failures and lessons learned.

Demonstrated during the presentation will be a variety of toolsets for capturing, transcoding, cataloging, presenting, and monitoring video materials at the University of Denver. With so many different ways of approaching the same problem, special attention will be paid to not only our current, working solutions- but also failures and lessons learned along the way. Depending on the needs of different departments and the variety of materials out there, the tools developed and used can vary quite a bit and we will attempt to provide a clear picture of the general video landscape. We hope to present some suggestions and recommendations for other universities contemplating video solutions based on the experiences we have had over the past 5 years.

If you can’t catch any of these events, I’ll also be speaking at Adobe MAX 2010 in Los Angeles- so come see me then!

I’ve been reformatting a lot of the presentations and webinars I’ve done over the past year and plan to host them all on Vimeo, at some point. So here is “Custom Event Reporting from Flash to Google Analytics”:

FITC Unconference at Adobe MAX
Los Angeles, California
October 2009

With the ability to define and report custom events from within your Flash application, you retain control over how specific events are reported and the information contained in these reports. This presentation will cover the implementation of the Google Analytics Tracking For Adobe Flash ActionScript 3 API for generating custom events and emulated page views from within Flash.

BTW: the FITC and Influxis people are really great to work with!

A strange thing has been happening over the past year or so. It has become quite fashionable amoung open source advocates, social media “experts”, and HTML5 zealots to talk down Flash with every breath…

Well, that was the start of an article I’ve been writing for the past three weeks or so. It was a difficult article to write and I’ve been stuck on more than one occasion – causing some frustration for me. There’s no need for me to do so now as similar thoughts have been expressed elsewhere with more grace than I would have allowed and a more informed perspective.

I encourage anyone who is interested in the subject to read the following posts and the comments that come along with them:

• Sympathy for the Devil [John Nack]
• 2010: the year Flash became irrelevant [Serge Jespers comment is golden]
• On Google, YouTube, HTML5, Adobe, and Flash [Ryan Stewart]
• HTML 5 and Flash video [Lee Brimelow]
• Flash Platform is at a crossroads [Ain Tohvri]
• The Flash world that the standards people do not see [Robert Reinhardt]
• HTML5 will save us all from the evils of Flash! [Andreas Rønning]
• Why HTML 5 Won’t Kill Flash or Silverlight [Roger Peters]
• Flash vs HTML5 – a few points for HTML5 advocates to consider :) [Neil Webb]
• RE: Is Canvas the End of Flash? [Kevin Suttle]
• Tech tabloids, Project Harmony, and the proposal of a ‘Flash’ tag in HTML5 [Kevin Suttle]
• Growing tired of Apple [Rick Mason]
• “The World is Moving to HTML 5″ and Other Flights of Fancy [Richard Leggett]
• HTML5 and a Brave, Flash-Free, Open World? Uh… Not So Fast [Peter Kirn]
• Why Flash Isn’t Going Anywhere, iPad Be Damned [Scott Gilbertson]
• Open Access to Content and Applications [Kevin Lynch]
• My Thoughts on the Future of Flash [Grant Skinner]
• Web development will become much more complicated [Lee Brimelow]
• Five Myths of HTML5 (vs. Adobe Flash) [Radley Marx]
• The Future of Web Content – HTML5, Flash & Mobile Apps [Jeremy Allaire]
• My thoughts on HTML 5, Flash and Innovation [Duane "Chaos" Nickull]
• …more to come

My general take is this; Flash and HTML are not in any way enemies or opposed to one another. Both can serve very different purposes and both are useful in many different (and sometimes similar!) circumstances. It is ridiculous to go after Flash as it it is the worst thing to ever happen to the Internet and needs to “die” – as many have stated.

Am I biased? Hell, yes! I love working with the Flash Platform for many reasons and am heavily affiliated with Adobe. Do I hate HTML5 or any other tech due to my bias? Hell, No.

There is true evil in the world and it is not Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX, HTML5 or any other technology platform.

A call for sanity – everyone just chill out. It’ll be okay :)

UPDATE 1: In regard to Apple and iPad; Serge Jespers has a nice post, of which I’ve made comments on.

UPDATE 2: Okay, I give in – “Just To Put Things In Perspective…”

The vendor in question was visiting to inform us of their specialized video capture and delivery solution. This solution is heavily tied to the iPhone and Apple’s set of hardware and software tools. While this may be appealing to those students and faculty with iPhones and iPod Touches, the emergence of a number of Android-powered mobile devices deserves some real consideration, and the Windows Mobile, RIM, and Palm devices are nothing to dismiss either. If you target the iPhone today, you are greatly restricting the use of your application to one device out of many (which may be perfectly okay for some apps). I’d prefer to write my applications for the widest number of platforms and devices available since this expands the userbase and does not exclude anyone from using the tools I’ve worked hard to create. In a university setting which encourages open exploration of platforms, you need to remain as open and accessible as possible. The Adobe Flash Platform fulfills all of these needs in a platform-agnostic manner.

All major mobile platforms have their own version of an “app store” or “market” in which applications are developed and targeted for that specific platform. But what of current browser-based applications in use by students and faculty? If they are built upon the Flash Platform (as many are) then they have been effectively cut off from use on almost all mobile devices since, as of today, Flash Player is not widely available for mobile. HTML-based mobile apps may be one solution, but their capabilities are restrictive, and you must deal with a great number of cross-browser issues. Today- there is no good solution for this range of applications but to design them with mobile in mind… and wait cautiously for something better to come along.

At the University of Denver, we have a mature media delivery ecosystem (CourseMedia™) that absolutely requires Flash and AIR for even the most simple usage. Modern web browsers on mobile devices do a great job at rendering HTML-based web apps exactly as they appear on desktop and laptop computers… almost. The most sought-after missing piece of the puzzle is the Flash Player. With no Flash on these devices, web content delivery is severely restricted. There are platform-specific apps for audio and video delivery alternatives through popular services such as YouTube, but what of the plethora of applications that go beyond the simple viewing of video content? As things currently stand- there is no solution!

We are very excited about the upcoming Flash Player 10.1 release as this means that users will effectively be able to use the full toolset we’ve created to manage, explore, and display rich media objects on a wide array of mobile devices. If we do find the need to target Apple iPhone down the road, we can use the same Adobe toolset to compile apps specifically for that set of devices. While this is not ideal in the case of Apple (everyone I talk to desperately wants true Flash on iPhone), the fact that we will soon be able to “write once, deploy anywhere” is simply an awesome thought to ponder.

So what would be a likely scenario as Flash Player is released for mobile in terms of university usage? I envision faculty preparing media arrangements on their mobile devices while riding public transit with full video editing and annotation capabilities over their provider network. I can see students, later that day accessing this same content in a park or coffee house while studying for an exam that will utilize the same ecosystem through an AIR-based hardware projection system in an upcoming lecture. At first, we developers will not necessarily need to make many changes to the tools that currently exist, users will simply be interacting with mobile devices to do their work instead of sitting at a workstation. As time passes and needs arise, we will be able to modify our tools to better suit this approaching reality and create new tools specifically for these devices. As the hardware becomes more powerful and the Flash Platform itself evolves in the coming years, there will exist truly great opportunities that forward-thinking universities and corporations would be foolish not to embrace.

Our mobile strategy at the University of Denver CTL is strongly tied with the Adobe Flash Platform and the future of Flash on such devices is especially bright as 2009 draws to a close. Welcome, 2010 and Flash Player 10.1!

References:
Open Screen Project
Flash Player 10.1
Adobe Flash Professional CS5
Mobile Framework ‘Slider’

Ted Patrick (@adobeted) announced the change over Twitter this evening. There’s a lively conversation going on now: Join in!

UPDATE:
Read an official statement from Lee Brimelow or Serge Jespers regarding the change.

Not only can you pass in “page views” to be reported just like HTML, but you can also craft custom events in a very customizable format:

trackEvent( FMS, Seek, rtmp://localhost/vod/mp4:test.m4v, 60 )
trackEvent( FMS, Pause, rtmp://localhost/vod/mp4:test.m4v, 8 )
trackEvent( FMS, Play, rtmp://localhost/vod/mp4:test.m4v, 8 )
trackEvent( FMS, Pause, rtmp://localhost/vod/mp4:test.m4v, 10 )
trackEvent( FMS, Play, rtmp://localhost/vod/mp4:test.m4v, 10 )

The “Event” view within Analytics itself is still in closed beta but you can request the UI to be enabled on a profile via this form.

You can also track events with a little cheat. Once logged in, just edit the address bar from “reporting/content” to “reporting/events”. You can even then add it to your Dashboard.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/facebook/

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.