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We hear all the time that we are entering the "post PC era." Computers are out. Tablets are in. We will no longer be lugging around heavy machines with failure prone hard drives and bloated client applications. We will be carrying around thin and light screens (keyboard optional) that are portals to our cloud based apps and data.
This post-PC era brings to mind one of my intellectual heroes, Dan Quayle, who once said, "The future will be better tomorrow." Exactly.
So how do we make sense of instances when reality intrudes on our plans? Do we ignore our experiences to embrace the future?
Over the past couple weeks I've had to grapple with this question as I ran into a surprise cluster of video editing. Normally I go for months without cropping, trimming, rendering, transcoding, exporting. etc. etc. But over a 2 week period I became our team's video guru. Here was my workflow:
- Record a bunch of classes with a pre-lecture capture classroom setup (involving DVD recorders).
- On my MacBook Air, crack the finalized classroom recording DVD using HandBrake.
- Edit and trim the *.m4v with QuickTime.
- Export the edited file.
- Upload the video file to Kaltura.
- Grab the embed code and stick it up on Blackboard.
All this video editing (if trimming and cropping can be called video editing) actually made me feel pretty good. Normally my life is spent in meetings. Many days I go home with nothing tangible to show. After this video editing sprint I had a bunch of online videos that students could watch.
Could I have been able to complete these steps without a "real" computer (with applications and everything)? True I had to plug in a SuperDrive to my Air. And also true that the this video exporting was not exactly speedy, and the MacBook Air got a bit hot. But it worked.
Would a Google Chromebook been up to these video tasks? An iPad, Nexus 7, or Microsoft Surface Tablet?
