A pretty sweet tool, Democracy Player is an application mashup of perenial favs VLC and BitTorrent, plus a lightweight web browser (gecko?) for finding potential broad/vod/pod/vlog casts. In theory, this tool lowers the bar for content producers to distribute their video. You post video content to the Democracy Player and anyone who downloads it from you immediately starts seeding it out to any other interested viewers. The more people download, the faster your content gets distributed to new viewers.

I am on the train right now, watching Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! show. I could download the podcast, sure. That would be easy. I have spent most of my life getting news from broadcast radio. (Except for a brief spate when I learned what the news was. My folks used to stay up and watch WNYW’s 10 O’Clock News and eat Entemanns. “Its 10 PM. Do you know where your children are?” Ominous. I think I was about 11 when I discovered this and started watching with them.) What you miss with the radio are the images. Sure, some are sensationalist, some are pointless. Amy is interviewing Rep. Michael Fisher(D) of the Vermont State Legislature on the phone. In the background are moving and still images of troops in Iraq. Troops on patrol, troops providing what appears to be humanitarian aid. You can’t get that from the radio, nor print journalism. Yeah, its all still mediated. But at least its media.

Now, the problems I see with Democracy Player. The version I downloaded a few months ago had almost no channels. Finding content was difficult. The version I downloaded the other day has lots of content, but the default channels that it wants to load are pretty darn far from having anything to do with “democracy”, unless busty women in skimpy outfits are somehow inherently democratic. Alright, well, they are not fundamentalist Cristian or Islamic. IF you are going to market it as having anything to do with “democracy”, put up content more along the lines of Democracy Now! in the default channel pane. Don’t make me hunt for it. What channels can folks recommend. In particular, I am looking for an independent news channel that posts at about noon UTC every day for my train ride. Does GNN have a stream? Okay, I also want to be able to shrink the window more, and get rid of the sidebar. How about a NicePlayer skin? That would be sweet. And, for advanced users, I want to see which videos I am currently sharing out, my share ratio, bandwidth, all the jazz I am used to seeing in Azureus and other clients. Time to do my own mashup? Maybe.

Finally, how can I, as an educational technologist, leverage this tool? WIth a MacBook or new iMac, the ones with built-in cameras, and GarageBand or iMovie, faculty and students could create their own video essays, lectures, and presentations. An educational technologist could build a channel for the course. I’ll leave discussions of the pedagogical value of these kinds of assignments for another time, or for others more qualified. One of the things I have been hearing more of since I got to Columbia is the importance of dissemination (a buzzword of the Cloisters) to the mission of the institution. Democracy Player has the potential to get institutional content out to a wide audience faster than one-to-many model of web-based dissemination tools , learning/course management systems, etc.

(About 35 minutes into the February 14, 2007, episode of Democracy Now! An excerpt from a GNN documentary on conflict diamonds. The audio backdrop is Peter Gabriel’s soundtrack Passion: Music For The Last Temptation Of Christ. This is the second time in two days I have heard the soundtrack used in the media. It is by far my favorite movie soundtrack of all time. It makes me kinda crazy. Rough situation to be in on the train. And Amy Goodman must be crazy for hip-hop. Or at least OutKast and Kanye. How progressive. Hey Amy, check out Count Bass D!)

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 15th, 2007 at 8:56 am and is filed under video, Notes from a commute, technology, learning technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.