Video Paper Builder - About VideoPapers and VideoPaper Builder

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IMPORTANT NOTICE - There are several major issues with VideoPaper Builder. View our Known Issues page for descriptions of the issues and work-arounds.

What is a VideoPaper?

VideoPaper Builder 3 is a creation tool for users of any level of technology skills. The updated software version is cross-platform and runs natively in OSX or on Windows machines. VPB3 imports text, image, and video files, and assists the user in synchronizing these files as a single user-navigated multimedia web document. VideoPaper Builder 3 generates HTML, video captioning, menus, links, framesets and slide shows, and organizes the imported files as an HTML coded document viewable in a web browser. Videopapers can be published in CD-ROM or posted on the Internet.

VideoPaper is a multimedia document that combines three elements:

• Digital video with subtitles, to be viewed by the user either as a whole or in segments predefined by the author.
• Textual commentaries on the video, with buttons to play relevant segments of the video.
• Images shown at pre-determined moments of the video that provide contextual information about the videotaped events.

The VideoPaper is created using HTML in a format similar to a frame-based webpage. The video frame contains a QuickTime video and controller. The slide frame maintains a space for images synchronized to the video to appear. The text frame contains a navigation menu and holds "pages" of the paper, which may be selected for viewing via the menu or from links within the video. The text, video, and slides may be linked through the use of hyperlinks.

What is VideoPaper Builder?

VideoPaper Builder 3 (VPB3) is the software application that creates VideoPapers.

The VideoPaper Builder software, first released in 2000, was originally developed as part of the Bridging Research & Practice project at TERC and funded by the National Science Foundation (Grant # 9805289). In 2002, the Seeing Math Telecommunications Project at the Concord Consortium received funding from the U.S. Department of Education (Grant #R286A0000006) to develop VideoPaper Builder 2.0, a cross-platform version of the original software. VideoPaper Builder 3.0 was developed in 2004-5 and expanded on earlier versions by adding new functionality, including a caption editor and HTML editor, as well as improving on ease of use.

The original goal of the Bridging Research & Practice project was to create an alternative genre for the production, use, and dissemination of educational research. In a VideoPaper, classroom or interview-filmed episodes can be displayed and synchronized with interpretations, transcriptions, closed captions, images of student work, clarifying diagrams, or other pieces of information that expand the events, portraying their full complexity. The project conjectured that teachers, researchers and other communities interested in education could use VideoPapers to make their conversations more grounded in actual events, more insightful, and more resistant to oversimplifications.

Since the original VPB software release, VideoPapers have been developed by teachers, researchers, and students; they have been used as part of class projects, for conference presentations, and as an alternative form of research publication. With this latest version release, the possibilities of VideoPapers expand. We look forward to hearing your ideas for the use of VideoPapers.

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Last Update: 07/15/2005 Maintainer: VPB Webmaster (webmaster@concord.org)