Manager, IT & Media Services, Helpdesk Manager and Streaming Media Manager all attended the Apple University Consortium Academic and Developers Conference at Wrest Point in Hobart from 25-28 September 2005. All three were granted AUC scholarships that supported or completely covered travel, accommodation and conference fee costs. Some highlights of the Conference were:
Streaming TV via IP
James and George presented a paper in the Conference’s technical stream giving an update of the Internet Television project they are undertaking (the AUC, through the Apple University Development Fund, started the project off in 2002 with a grant to James of a server and technical assistance: the presentation was a progress report on how the project was going).
There was significant interest in the project from a number of other Universities with representatives at the Conference. Most notably, the Central Queensland University is following up the project to see whether the television received here in Canberra can be viewed, via AARNET’s GrangeNet experimental ip network, in Rockhampton and then out to CQU campuses throughout Queensland, the rest of Australia and even internationally.
Interestingly enough some streams prepared earlier here in Canberra were received well in Hobart on the Conference’s 2Gb link: the same streams often don’t work on broadband connections here in Canberra, so more investigation is required to see where the problems lie.
See the project website for more information. The presentation is also available for download.
Creative Commons
Joichi Ito, who among his other broad interests is on the Board of Creative Commons (http://www.creativecommons.org/) presented one of the keynotes of the Conference. From the Creative Commons website:
Creative Commons offers a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors and artists. We have built upon the "all rights reserved" of traditional copyright to create a voluntary "some rights reserved" copyright. We're a nonprofit. All of our tools are free.
With all the discussions around the world recently about copyright, music and movie sharing and the dire warnings of the collapse of the music and movie industries (some might say “hurray!”), it was refreshing to hear of an alternative, creative way of providing access to media materials simply and easily.
Several disciples in the Division, particularly Education, Media and Journalism, may find something of interest in the Creative Commons approach to sharing that will be useful in their professional activities.
Seminar: An online delivery tool
Simon Goldrei is a postgraduate student at the University of Sydney who has written an application called Seminar to broadcast and archive presentations, meetings and lectures simply and effectively using the internet. The application was of particular interest because of its simplicity, and because Simon announced at the Conference that the program would now be available for free as an open source product. For further details see http://www.SydneySeminars.com/.
