Learning Technology Center Looks Back on Thirty Years of Video Equipment - April 6, 2011

At a recent staff meeting, Ken Waters, LTC Services Coordinator, and Rob Donald, who manages the Equipment Checkout service, mentioned that last fall no one checked out a video camcorder that recorded to tape. With a fleet of 25 Xactis and 30 Flips—both tiny camcorders capable of recording regular or high definition video onto a small memory card—the LTC’s Equipment Checkout had gone tapeless.

This seemed like quite a milestone for the LTC and its long history of providing video equipment for the College of Education. So we decided to take a look back at the video equipment the LTC has checked out over the last thirty years and the ways students and faculty have used it to create video.

“Video technology is always changing and improving,” says Ken. “Back in 1981 when I started at the LTC, which was then called the Learning Resources Center, we had Video Portapaks that for the first time allowed students to record their own video on location.” The “porta” distinction in its name is certainly dubious by today’s standards; the “pak” was a large case about three feet long, containing a camera, recorder deck, battery pack, AC adaptor, microphone, cables, and tripod and weighing about 50 pounds. Handles on each end allowed two people, with effort, to transport it with awkward mincing steps. The deck used a reel of ½” tape that had to be manually threaded through the recorder. Images from the camera were black and white only.

About two years later, tape cassettes had been developed. “We had to decide whether to go with VHS or Beta,” recalls Ken. “Fortunately, we went with VHS, which quickly became the standard format for the next several years.” The LTC’s VHS decks were smaller, lighter, and automatically fed the tape from the cassette around the recording heads. Cameras had also improved and could produce a color image.

More advancements occurred in the late 1980s and 1990s. The camera and record deck merged into one unit, the camcorder. Super VHS, 8mm, and High 8 came and went as the latest video formats. Mini DV, introduced in the late 1990s, digitally recorded a high-quality image on a very small cassette, allowing camcorder sizes to further shrink. And then, in the late 2000s, tiny tapeless camcorders became available.

Throughout these developments, the LTC’s Equipment Checkout always strived to provide students with up-to-date equipment that best allowed them to produce video easily and inexpensively for a variety of instructional purposes. Students honed skills by analyzing video of themselves teaching or practicing job interviews; created short instructional videos as part of lesson plans; recorded interviews for graduate research; and captured video to use within multimedia presentations.

Has tape disappeared completely from Equipment Checkout? Not really. Rob reports that some graduate students are using Mini DV camcorders this spring because external microphones can be used with them, providing better quality audio. There are also issues with the short battery life of the small tapeless units, making them less than ideal for recording long lessons. But, Rob says, “Most students love the fact that they don’t have to buy tape and can transfer the video files fairly easily to their laptops for editing with iMovie.”

So what’s next? Will 3-D capability be the big new feature for the next generation of camcorders? No matter what happens in the ongoing development of video technology, the Learning Technology Center will be there, assuring that College of Education students have access to the equipment they need to produce video for teaching and learning.

—Laurie Caldwell, LTC Communications Coordinator

* Ken Waters will be honored for his 30 years of service to the University at the President's Staff Awards Ceremony on May 13.