Jonah Bossewich and Mark Philipsonfrom Columbia University talk about Mediathread, an open source project that makes it easy to annotate various digital sources. It’s used in many courses at Columbi, as well as around the world.

It comes from Columbia’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning. It began with Vital, a video library tool. It let students clip and save portions of videos, and comment on them. Mediathread connects annotations to sources by bookmarking, via a bookmarklet that interoperates with a variety of collections. The bookmarklet scrapes the metadata because “We couldn’t wait for the standards to be developed.” Once an item is in Mediathread, it embeds the metadata as well.

It has always been conceived of a “small-group sharing and collaboration space.” It’s designed for classes. You can only see the annotations by people in your class. It does item-level annotation, as well as regions.

Mediathread connects assignments and responses, as well as other workflows. [He’s talking quickly :)]

Mediathread’s bookmarklet approach requires it to have to accommodate the particularities of sites. They are aiming at making the annotations interoperable in standard forms.

Categories: interop, liveblog, too big to know dw