Clipper – Interview: Will Gregory and John Casey

Sep 5, 2009 by michelle-pauli

Will Gregory, software developer, and John Casey, educational developer, both with Digital Insight talk about how Clipper will change the way we organise audiovisual resourcesWhat is Clipper?Last week, Manchester City scored two goals. The rest of the game was boring. Clipper allowed me to send video clips of just these two goals instead of the whole boring game to my friends with my comments. Clipper allowed my friends to respond with their clips and comments.What problems/issues is Clipper tackling?The problem Clipper addresses is the growing need to organise and tag audiovisual resources that people are using for teaching, learning and research. Clipper lets you do this and create clips from within those resources, add notes to those clips, collect them into clip playlists with the notes and share them with other people. No video files are harmed during the making of the playlist – we’re using timecode to create the Clipper documents that are shared. It is in XML so can be output into anything that can output XML so it’s not locked into the Clipper platform.How would you like other software developers and users to get involved in what you are doing?We’re going to be testing with the users and clarifying the purpose and the potential uses of the tool. Currently you can’t do this so we need input from users and we’re also making users aware of the abstract concept. We need to test it out. The interface will be crucial. We need to connect with the small band of action script developers in education. HE is dominated by the Java community. It would be nice to collaborate with other institutions – we’ve identified a few possibilities from this meeting to follow up. We can see natural educational applications for it. We’d also like to work with JISC Digital Media in Bristol.What developer communities have you been involved in and if none, why not?Adobe development communities over the years and that’s not really present in academia.What is the coolest or most exciting thing in educational software development?John: the return of the user! Arguably in the past it has been too much about doing it for an abstract challenge but this event represents the return of the user.