I’ve got great video of everyone having a blast, experimenting with the new guerilla-style video production tactics I’ve been teaching them — I showed them how to use the front and rear-facing cameras on their iPads to shoot video. Here, they are working on producing “establishing shots” using whatever equipment is available to you at the time; in this case, it means holding the iPad up in front of your face and doing slow 360s, talking to the camera, so the audience can see for themselves what the landscape around you looks like.

They absolutely loved their brand-new iPad 2s. It was like seeing little kids getting handed Magic Mirrors. They were polite enough for most of the day, but about mid-afternoon, I just lost them in the wilds of the App Store. Also - I will never understand how the Ukrainian women manage to walk down these uneven, treacherous ancient cobblestone streets in stiletto heels.

I also taught them the basics of shot selection, framing, the Rule of Thirds, and some basic stuff about editing and shot sequencing as a means to create emotion. It was about a semester’s worth of material crammed into a one-day lecture, but at least I opened them up to what is possible, and where they can go to try to learn more on their own.

This is still a beautiful city, even if the sky in unrelenting slate gray, and the wind from Siberia knifes right through you after the sun goes down…

At night, the streets of Kiev are filled only with the rumble and clatter of Dr. Zhivago trolley cars, and the whistling north wind. The architecture here is like the people; kind of battered, but still full of character. Resilient.

I haven’t gotten to see as much of this city as I would like; I’ve always been working too hard, or pretty much exhausted & creaking from the demented flight schedule it takes to get here from Los Angeles. Still, the little I have been able to discover on my own has been delightful.

This time around, my students arrived in my classes with significant New Media skills. Some of them were already creating infographics, and this girl is already ghost-blogging for big financial companies. As you can see, she is quite determined; meanwhile, behind her, another of my more active and vocal students gasps in horror at the convoluted assignments I have inflicted on the class...

One of the greater joys of this class was seeing my students help each other out. When they got stuck with some of my more technically challenging exercises, they reached out to each other, and shouted advice back and forth across the classroom.

There is no better feeling for me. I am only here for such a very short time; I keep wishing that I had an entire semester to really reach deep into these young people, to help them draw out their skills & refine them. But seeing their willingness to follow me down these strange multimedia pathways, and to help each other out along the way … leads me to believe that they will continue to help each other out after I am gone.

The switchover to all-digital textbooks is happening faster than predicted. I'm not too sure about reading an entire text on a smartphone screen, but for in-between class cramming, or getting instant updates to course material, it's not a bad choice.

I’d love to say that this is it, we’ve found the perfect replacement for textbooks, but from what I can see here, this is still a very limited solution. They are also trying to accomplish something that is unbelievably complex. I know, because we’ve been trying to do the same thing: come up with a way to create once-publish many.

That is — we all pretty much know how to make very interactive web sites, using HTML, Javascript, Flash, CSS, etc. etc. But the sticking point is trying to get that experience to play out the same way across all these varied platforms. The app-building tools coming out from Adobe are aimed at resolving this dilemma … but Purdue has evidently decided to enter the software-creation arena, next to Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, Google, et al.

Nut graf: 

Bowen says JetPack allows users to simply upload content without worrying about putting it into a specific format or learning to code.

“It’s as simple to do as putting content on a blog such as WordPress,” Bowen says. “At a basic level, if you want to just add images or video to the text, you can easily do that. On the other hand, if you are more advanced and you want to add interactive content, you can add a wide range of interactivity with HTML5. You don’t have to worry about what formats work on different devices. That’s all done for you.”

Content that can be used to supplement the e-book text in JetPack includes:

* Photographs
* Graphs
* Video
* Documents
* Interactive media
* Specialized calculators
* Interactive self-assessments or games
* Quizzes
* Links to online resources such as Wolfram Apha or Google

“In later releases authors will be able to add data feeds from social media sites or other websites, which are known as APIs, so the material is automatically updated,” Bowen says. “This could be news articles from the past month on a particular topic, for example, so that whenever the person reads that chapter, or pack, there is also a discussion of current events that is kept up-to-date.”

The space is crowded. And the other players have some very sharp elbows down near the basket. Basically, Purdue is buying itself a whole sack o’ trouble here – they are either going to piss off the textbook manufacturers who want to push their own solution … or they are going to wind up creating some software that infringes on some patent. If this does actually work out and allow indie authors/videographers to easily create cross-platform multimedia learning environments, then this is going to be an absolute godsend.

The screenshots of what Jetpack is supposed to help learning materials creators actually publish to the iPad/Android tablet platforms looks pretty decent:

Tilting at windmills?

I’m not sure why they settled on using Amelia Earhart as their poster girl for an app that will be distributed to students … wasn’t she famously completely lost without a trace? Is that some kind of post-ironic statement about how higher learning is lost in the fog…?

Nice timeline and images.

Or were they just really big fans of the “Air” comic put out by Vertigo until the circulation numbers sagged because the story got bogged down in incomprehensibility?

At any rate, I do like the attention to the graphic design & look and feel of the app that they’ve plainly put into this effort. The 3-D renderings of the tickets above are quite nice, and if the timeline zips across the screen at the flick of a finger, then that would be just *Hawesome* … and if the photos/images were hyperlinks to other content that helped tell the story, even better.

I’ve been in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for the last week, training the local journalists and government information officers (aka PR flacks) on how best to take advantage of the way that “New Media” is creating new ways of connecting with each other, and the world at large. I’m here as part of the same US Embassy program that has sent me to places like Chile, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Costa Rica, etc., to try to bring people the benefits of experience (aka the way newspapers & TV news has imploded in the U.S.), so they can start planning for the Great Digital Migration.

This is my class of TV journalists at Addis Ababa University (AAU). I tried to cram as much about online video and sharing into my short sessions as I could. Here, I'm showing how to use both professional tools like Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, as well as free alternatives like Windows Movie Maker.

The one thing that everyone here agrees on is that Ethiopia desperately wants to change its international image – c’mon, admit it. When you think of Ethiopia, what images come to mind? Deserts, starving people, vultures, Live Aid, right?

Well, it’s not like that any more. In fact, if you look around at the Addis Ababa skyline, you’ll mostly see cranes and highrise towers under construction. The real-estate bubble that burst and devastated the rest of the world never took hold here.

There are still many reminders that the ancient ways of living are still very much in existence here in Addis, but please also note all the other markers of modernity in this shot.

However, they are facing many of the same challenges as the rest of the world, at least when it comes to the emergence of the internet, and the struggles of newspapers, radio and TV stations to come to grips with social media, and the ability of anyone to become a publisher/broadcaster/internet troll.

The very first place I visited was Sheger FM, the one independent radio station in Ethiopia. This is the courageous owner, who is really struggling to walk the razor's edge here in Addis.

I’ve found many of the same behaviors and attitudes I’ve encountered in the other places that I’ve done web/online video/social media training sessions – stubborn insistence that things will never change, toxic skepticism, and even outright hostility.

After a bit of a rocky start, these guys really came around and appreciated the hands-on lessons I gave them on how to do live video stand-up reports and how to compress video into the best codec to upload to YouTube. The Nelson Mandela building is a challenge, though; between the thin air at this 8000-foot altitude, and having to haul my big carcass up 5 (five) steep flights of stairs, the first few minutes of every class were mostly spent huffing and puffing, and hoping that someone in the class had a particularly insightful comment.

(Aside: have you ever tried to explain to someone younger than 20 what it was like to be “mousetrapped” back in the day? Do any of you remember what being “mousetrapped” on your browser was like? Hello? Is this thing on…?)

Anyway, I happened to click on the Security tab and then the Show Cookies button. Here’s what I saw:

This is a short list of the cookies on my Mac. I've expunged some of the scary-looking hexcode on the right. Pay attention to the dates in the column in pink.

Yeah, that’s right. Some of the cookies on my computer won’t expire until nearly 30 years after I hit my 100th birthday. Most of the others will (supposedly) stay resident and not expire for another quarter-century.

Who does this? I mean, really? Is it really sensible in any way to assume that this computer, as much as I love & use it on a daily basis, will still be alive and kicking in more than 10 years? Or even 5? Have these guys even heard of Moore’s Law? I’m not bumming specifically on Lynda.com, because there are many other offenders, different only in degree.

But really, this is user abuse. Why would you cram something onto my machine that is so obviously useless, unless

1. You figure your average user is too thickwitted to actually delete their cookies regularly, the way most websavvy users do (or at least try to – more about that in a bit)
2. You arbitrarily picked a date far into the future because you couldn’t be bothered to take the extra 30 seconds to actually consider the needs of your audience;
3. You are being sneaky and underhanded, and you’re either planting what amounts to spyware on my computer, or you are actively engaging in the practice of Zombie Cookies.

It is #3 above that really gets my goat. It exploits the users’ trust, relying on the same obliviousness that makes so many of us just click on the “I Agree” button when faced with these labyrinthine EULAs & suchlike. This is short-term thinking. And it is wrong.

This has changed the way that I look at the sites that have placed these kinds of hidden, ill-considered material on my computer. I pass this on in the hopes that other users voice their concerns as well — only if enough people start becoming aware of shady practices like this will companies start policing themselves.

Useful stuff: If you want Safari to stop acting like Internet Explorer/Netscape circa 1997, here’s what you do:

1. Under the Safari menu, click on “Preferences” (⌘,)
2. Click on the Tabs tab (and yes, I know how that sounds, but that’s what it is)
3. Click on the pulldown menu next to “Open pages in tabs instead of windows” and choose anything other than “Never”

This latest cramdown seems to center around the whole subscription issue – one that mag publishers have been screaming about for the last year.

It looked so friendly and inviting on my taskbar...

It started innocently enough when I updated my Mac software and discovered a new icon down in the taskbar. Well hello there, App Store! Wow, it appears as though you launched with more than 1,000 applications already waiting for me to play with. Everyone’s been chattering excitedly about what this will mean for apps that do more than produce gastrointestinal sounds.

Cool! Can’t wait to start partaking of the free & open marketplace for creativity, ingenuity and that childlike sense of wonder – wha? A new Terms & Services Agreement? Again?

Every few weeks, with your iTunes, you’re making me agree to some massive list of incomprehensible junk, and now you want me to agree to something ELSE? Dammit.

OK, I’ve got a few spare minutes and have been eating a high-fiber diet recently. Maybe it’s safe to scroll through and see if there’s anything particularly noxious about the rules governing how this App Store for my desktop Mac…

Good Christ, what’s this?

So the apps you’re serving up for me to use on my main computer, the one where I have the really important data stored, may just come with viruses, spyware and trojans. And in the next breath, I have to basically hold Apple harmless if they happen to sell me something that destroys my business? Hey, can car manufacturers and prescription drug companies get in on this kinda scam?

Can you imagine that? “Oh yeah, here’s your new heart medication. It may actually contain arsenic, other heavy metals or rat poison. We don’t know. We just shovel this stuff out the door. It’s on you. And if you happen to drop dead because of it, we ain’t responsible and you can’t sue us.” That’d go over well with all the people screeching about Death Panels, wouldn’t it?

But where does HomeSec come in? Read this and see if you don’t feel ghostly fingers clenching around your throat:

You agree that Apple has the right, without liability to you, to
disclose any Registration Data and/or Account information to law
enforcement authorities, government officials, and/or a third party, as
Apple believes is reasonably necessary or appropriate to enforce and/or
verify compliance with any part of this Agreement (including but not
limited to Apple’s right to cooperate with any legal process relating to
your use of the Service and/or Products, and/or a third-party claim
that your use of the Service and/or Products is unlawful and/or
infringes such third party’s rights).

OK, maybe that’s just Hollywood, the MPAA and the RIAA again … what’s this?

You also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes
prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the
development, design, manufacture, or production of nuclear, missile, or
chemical or biological weapons.

Seriously?

Jesus Christ.

I’m not even going to get into all the creepy spyware language in Apple’s EULA, that basically says that they are going to record everything you do while online, match it up with your GPS data and whatever kinds of interactions you make on Facebook, blogs, Twitter, e-mail, chat, etc., and then bundle all that information together and sell it to the highest bidder. Plow through it yourselves, lazybones.

Next up was having to install/upgrade Adobe Reader so I can look at pdfs of reconciled accounts from Quickbooks (part of the joys of running your own shop – gahhhh!). By this time, I’m kind of in a state. I mean, like everyone else who’s gone from the CompuServe/Prodigy days of online to today’s web, I expect a certain level of monitoring of what I do online, and know that this is the price I have to pay for free (well, other than the damn escalating high-speed Time-Warner cable bill) access to all kinds of amazing content created & curated by geniuses all over the world. Maybe I’ll look at Adobe’s EULA. I don’t really expect much other than the usual boilerplate legalese.

Well, how bad can it be, really? I mean – pdfs, right? It’s just a basic document structure for people to …

The Software may cause your Computer, without additional notice, automatically to connect to the Internet and to communicate with an Adobe website or Adobe domain for purposes that may include providing you with additional information, features, and functionality. Unless otherwise specified in Sections 14.2 through 14.6, the following provisions apply to all automatic Internet connections by the Software:
14.1.1 When the Software automatically connects to the Internet, an Internet protocol address (“IP Address”) that is associated with your current Internet connection is sent to an Adobe website;

(snip)

Adobe may deliver in-product marketing to provide information about the Software and other Adobe products and Services, including but not limited to Adobe Online Services, based on certain Software and Adobe Online Services specific features including but not limited to, the version of the Software, including without limitation, platform version, version of the Software, and language. For further information about in-product marketing, please see the “help” menu in the Software;

Dude, WTF!

Your software is going to wake up in the middle of the night, dial the mothership, rat me out and then start serving ads into the middle of whatever I’m doing?

Not. Cool.

OK, is there anything about…?

…any end user who you know or have reason to know will utilize them in the design, development or production of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, or rocket systems, space launch vehicles, and sounding rockets, or unmanned air vehicle systems (each, a “Prohibited Use”), or (c) any end user who has been prohibited from participating in the U.S. export transactions by any federal agency of the U.S. government (each, a “Sanctioned Party”).

Guys. If I could use Flash Catalyst to make a space launch vehicle, I’d be kicking it James T. Kirk-style on my own moonbase right now, doncha think?

Great. Anything else?

Additional Terms of Use, the Adobe.com Terms of Use (http://www.adobe.com/go/terms) shall apply. Please note that the Adobe Privacy Policy allows tracking of website visits and it addresses in detail the topic of tracking and use of cookies, web beacons, and similar devices.

This just keeps getting better and better. So once again, you’re going to monitor what I do, turn it over to whomever you want, and somehow feel it necessary to put in a big scary paragraph about espionage and misuse of data?

Who owns your data? And I don't mean this guy...

I don’t remember all this garbage showing up in the earlier EULAs software/hardware companies crammed down our throats. Maybe I just wasn’t as observant. But it appears that someone has been having some very intense, shall be say, meetings with internet/software companies in the past month or so, with an aim towards making sure that if We The Users step out of line, there exists all manner of heavy-duty legal agreements by which to come down on our heads.  All that alarmist verbiage about nukes & nerve gas can only come from a gummint agency that’s paid to be paranoid & fearful.

And what’s been on their minds lately? Oh yeah – Mr. Assange and his cohorts peeking under their skirts. How best to head this off next time around, before any of the 500,000 or so minions with Top Secret access get frisky? Hmmm … how ’bout we make sure that the revisions to the basic document viewing and sharing software that pretty much everybody uses has “features” in it that check to see if you’re working with anything that’s been flagged as Top Secret, and then finks on you to The Man.

Learned some cool workflow stuff from the Adobe Premiere Pro product managers.

The first thing that strikes you about the Nook is how much *faster* it is than the Kindle. And Janine loved the touchscreen. More video to come on Digital Family.