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Features
Students as Designers and Content Creators: An Online Multimedia Exchange between the U.S. and Spain
9/29/2003
The MITUPV Exchange was programmed as a class project by two MIT undergraduates who in Fall 2000 took Software Engineering of Innovative Web Services, taught by professors Hal Abelson and Philip Greenspun (original class Webpage no longer online; http://www.eecs.mit.edu/AY98-99/spring-cat/6916.html, is the URL from the previous semester). This course provided an emphasis on creative use of OpenSource software, using at that time, the ArsDigita platform (subsequently acquired by RedHat, http://www.redhat.com/software/rhea/) as a tool to build virtual communities (see http://openacs.org/).
The design for this specific application, which included input from students in a Spanish class that same semester, is robust and utilitarian, aiming for database modularity (Greenspun) and usability (Nielsen). There are provisions for continual uploading, downloading, automatic archiving, and for administrative access for the removal or correction of text entries in both English and Spanish.
Some desired features, such as search functionality, were not able to be included, so that within each subcategory, archived uploads are simply listed by date of posting under "View all." As content increases each semester, navigation becomes difficult, and subsequent students find the overall design less intuitive than did the original student programmers. We hope to improve navigation with a second archival webpage, working with Kurt Fendt at MIT, that will allow for tagging and search features as part of the MetaMedia group of projects (http://metaphor.mit.edu/) that is currently using Oracle 9i and Enhydra (http://www.enhydra.org). Academic Computing and Academic Media Production Services at MIT, which have provided a server (Sun Microsystems Sun Blade 100 running an earlier version of Oracle) and server maintenance, have also stressed the need to move to a platform that is readily supported.
Centrality of Video
Online video is one of the most appealing features of the project, and again, students play a central role. Most of the videos contain segments in both English and Spanish. At the UPV most of the time faculty is responsible for all stages of video, from shooting, to editing, compression and uploading, with one group lead by Plasencia working with Mac-based facilities and another, English students taught by Seiz, working in a PC-based lab. At MIT the same procedure was followed, with the teacher (Morgenstern) undertaking all production and post-production with Mac equipment. Since 2001 students have taken over the first stage: they borrow an MIT-owned dv video camera and shoot in places off limits to the teacher, thereby achieving more authenticity and more natural behavior. A few students take charge of all stages of video production.
Video can provide rich context as well as sound and movement, and for these reasons is well-suited for the transmission of cultural and linguistic information.
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