Open University ED209 fOCUS II – Video Index (2009)
I got so fed up of viewing videos through the tiny embedded player in the fOCUS II software that I’ve created an index of the videos so I can play them at a sensible size outside of the control of fOCUS II.
To find them on the DVD, go to: <drive name>:\fOCUS II\assets\Video\
| Collection | Title | File name |
| User Help | Socio-dramatic play | 1045.mov |
| Bill Clinton interview | 1047.mov | |
| Coding | Dinosaur play | 1162.mov |
| Paper clips | 1197.mov | |
| Reliability | Still-face transition | 1317.mov |
| Still-face experiment | 1322.mov | |
| Attachment | AAI interview 1 | 1800.mov |
| AAI interview 2 | 1804.mov | |
| AAI summary 1 | 1808.mov | |
| AAI summary 2 | 1812.mov | |
| Strange situation 1 | 1816.mov | |
| Strange situation 2 | 1820.mov | |
| Tasks | Hand game 1 | 1824.mov |
| Hand game 2 | 1828.mov | |
| Hand game 3 | 1832.mov | |
| Hand game 4 | 1836.mov | |
| Knock tap 1 | 1840.mov | |
| Knock tap 2 | 1844.mov | |
| Knock tap 3 | 1848.mov | |
| Tower of London 1 | 1852.mov | |
| Tower of London 2 | 1856.mov | |
| Tower of London 3 | 1860.mov | |
| Broccoli 1 | 1864.mov | |
| Broccoli 2 | 1868.mov |
Why is it that the OU seem so consistently bad at this kind of thing? It doesn’t look to me that it would be overly difficult to rewrite fOCUS as normal HTML which would give us all resizeable windows and make it accessible on Linux and Macs for that matter.
The course I did last year even went so far as to write a custom video viewer in what would otherwise have been fairly straightforward HTML. Not only that but it seemed to have been written for an 800×600 screen which was just too bad if anyone had a portable with a very high resolution but physically small screen.
It’s interesting how many people on the course forums say they have had some kind of technical issue with fOCUS II. I found the history of the software quite interesting: http://www.open.ac.uk/observationskills/p4_1.shtml – it has its roots back in 1996 and won an award in 2000 too.
I suspect the reason it’s used on this course are the coding modules we’ve just done. I don’t think you could successfully do that (easily) in a browser-based application and of course, such modules take considerable time and money to develop. It’s also handy to be able to carry the software around with you. I don’t always have access to the web, but I nearly always have a laptop with me.
Maybe when the successor to ED209 comes along they’ll upgrade it then (apparently, if you wade through the reports on the project a fOCUS III had funding in 2006 and was due for release at the end of it).