What is MediaThread?

MediaThread, a project created by the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning through the Digital Bridges Initiative is a service that allows you to blend your thoughts with multimedia sources and share them with others. MediaThread supports video, images, metadata, and many content websites listed below. Most compatible with Firefox, MediaThread is currently being used by Columbia, MIT, Wellesley, Dartmouth, The American University in Cairo, and many other institutions of higher education.

Who can do what with MediaThread? Through MediaThread...

• All users can:
  • Manage web-based multimedia content (YouTube, The British Museum, Flickr, Naxos Music Library, library databases, film archives, course libraries)
  • Lift content out of sites into “analysis environment” easily through a bookmarkable tool
    • Clip
    • Annotate
    • Organize
    • Embed into written analyses
  • Maintain privacy or share with different audiences
  • Observe how media is being utilized by others in the course
  • Review professors’ feedback on students’ work
  • Track revisions on pages
• Students can:
  • Track work of other students as well as share their work with peers or larger audiences
  • Organize their throughts
  • Elucidate analyses through different kinds of media
  • Provide physical evidence of their points in writing (showed in the picture below, specifically the red underlined words with boxes to the left of them)
  • Reference specific portions of the assignment and media while responding to it
  • Be notified when other students use the content they’ve utilized
  • Other capabilities for students:
    • Students can access content by tags and physically place references to it in their work
• Instructors can:
  • Publish to the homepage
    • Announcements
    • Assignments
    • Discussions
    • Model projects
    • Archives
  • Provide a list of concepts and associated terms for the class (more structured tag format than student-generated) (e.g. “concept: religion, terms within concept: Buddhism, Hinduism”)
  • Collaborate with other professors within the same course
  • Access students’ responses with content through assignments
  • Provide multimedia feedback
  • Specify tags for students to use in assignments
  • Approve media sites for a particular assignment.
  • Other capabilities for professors:
    • Pick content (videos and pictures) and bookmark them on Mediathread
    • Annotate with tags, edit length (if video), and add notes
    • Highlight portions of a picture and add notes to them
    

In the assignment featured above, a student has utilized a video clip in his or her post.

What departments, projects, classes, and subjects could utilize MediaThread at Bryn Mawr?

• Art history (MediaThread allows you to highlight certain sections of pictures that relate to your post)
• Any class with instruction on citation
  
• Film (MediaThread has editing capabilities that would be helpful for featuring clips videos in posts)
• Teacher education
• Any class with a response component/requirement to connect with class readings
• Social work
• Teaching and Learning Initiative
• Any class that integrates different philosophies (e.g. political science + psychology)
  
• Journalism
• Cultural and Artifact Studies
• Any class that requires debate and interpretation of media
  
• History
• Public Health
• Any class that requires collaboration as well as revision
• English

This user of MediaThread selected a region of the painting that is the focus of his or her post.

Want to Learn More?

Visit MediaThread's website for examples and more information.

Visit MediaThread's FAQ page.

Watch the video below to see how MediaThread describes its capabilities.