When people ask me why the new media asset management system at University of Edinburgh will be called Media Hopper I reply:

‘because it will gather together all the mixed up multitude of video material from all over the University; bring it into one place; channel it into our VLEs, websites, portals and courses; apply standards and metadata ; and be very cool’.

You will know the following definitions of hopper:

hopper ( agric) :  a container for a loose bulk material.

hopper ( minecraft ):  a block that can be used to catch item entities, or to transfer items into and out of other containers.

channel-hopper( tv) : quickly changing from one channel to another to find something you want to watch.

Grace Hopper ( rolemodel) : an inspirational computer scientist. She developed the implementation of standards for testing computer systems and components and coined the term “debugging” for fixing computer glitches when she removed a moth from her computer.

Dennis Hopper (role model):  just cool.

space hopper ( toy ):  just orange and bouncy.

Handling your hopper
We plan to launch Media Hopper in pilot form before Christmas. In practical terms this means that whilst the service will be available for everyone to use, there will only be a basic set of help materials available, and no supporting training courses.  We realise that there are a number of staff around the institution who are very experienced users of media and we want to make the service available to this early adopter community as quickly as possible. If you are a less experienced user of media, we invite you to take a look and send us your feedback, but if you plan to use it for core teaching and learning activities, we would advise you to wait until more support is available.

The project team will continue to work on the service over early 2016, expanding support materials, developing training courses and finessing the service based on early adopter feedback. The full Media Hopper service will be available from May 2016.

Over the next 2 weeks, we have scheduled open sessions across the University. We’re very excited about the new service, and we’d like to share more info about the rollout plans, as well as demo the basic service and hear your feedback. Don’t worry if you can’t make it along though – this is the first of many opportunities and we will be scheduling more in the New Year.

Search for Media Hopper in MyEd Events Booking (https://www.myed.ed.ac.uk) for details of a session near you.

We are currently targeting the week beginning 14 December 2015 for the Media Hopper pilot launch.