NMC 2009 - Misc. Sessions
Some of the session I attended were only limited in what I got out of them. One was called International Presentations and Conferences: Examples and Lessons. The presenters from the University of North Carolina at Pembroke talked about how they taught art classes internationally and the problems they faced. One class was taught to Chinese students in mainland China. They were using iChat AV but found that the Chinese had strict limitations on file sizes that could be downloaded. When bandwidth became an issue they switched from iChat AV to Skype video, which they said gave them better video throughput, but not the ability to add files to download via the chat interface as they could with iChat. Not much mention of other video conferencing s/w such as Wirecast or UStream, however.
Another session was called Teaching New Media Literacy to Undergrads. I thought that this was going to be how they taught digital media to students via hands-on projects, but instead it was more of an overview of the different media. The class had a negotiated syllabus and they voted on what percentage each type of activity would count for. These were class participation, weekly essays, talking points, short activities, and a term paper.
Some of the weekly topics the students were given to explore were:
• Interactivity - studied game design and multimedia interactivity. Each student had to write a software review for an essay
• New media and art - had to do a group PowerPoint activity. Also gave them a 75 word description and they had to interpret it into a drawing.
• Ethics, copyright, piracy, and privacy - An amusing anecdote in this section was the comparison of stealing music and stealing a car. When confronted with this question, one student made this analogy: "No, I wouldn't steal that car, but if I could make an exact duplicate of that car and leave it where it sits, I would."
• People morphology
• Story morphology - Choose your ending activity.
• Video games - Discussed Zork, a text-based adventure game
• Social networking, viral video, and mashups
• Lies and hoaxes
• Virtual reality - Anaglyphs and 3D effects
• MMUGs and roleplaying
• Artificial intelligence
A particularly interesting session was Building Community Around Tools for Automated Video Transcription presented by MIT. They are building an engine called The Spoken Media Project funded by Nokia that can in almost real time transcribe videos well enough that they can be searched. A search will bring up a certain number of words before and after the searched word so you can read it in context. Although accuracy they say is only about 52%,
it still seems to work very well for searching videos. The terms that people use to search are very often transcribed properly. Nokia wants this to be phone functional. It takes about 10 passes with the same speaker for the transcription engine to get really good at transcribing what a particular speaker says. The transcripts are passed through phonemic, acoustic, and semantic models before making the transcription to increase accuracy. We also discussed crowd-sourcing as a potential avenue for increasing the accuracy of the transcripts. A click to edit feature for trusted users might be implemented. Depending on how Nokia feels about it, they would like it to become open source and estimated about 8 months until a beta-worthy version is available. A couple other software solutions for doing transcriptions were DocSoft, which apparently runs about $15k, and VideoNote,which is more of an annotation software I'm guessing to be similar to StudioCode. Info about this project can be found at http://icampus.mit.edu/projects/SpokenLecture.shtml
One of the speakers at the Five Minutes of Fame demonstrated a method of transcribing video where he had trained MacSpeech in recognizing his voice and as he listened to a video with headphones simply repeated the words into a microphone and the computer transcribed his voice. Simple but very effective.
The other Five Minutes of Fame presentation I liked was from Tulane where they used high quality audio recordings of Guatemalan natives to teach Mayan language via a self-paced, Flash-based interface. The module allowed the student to listen to the words, then record them and play back the recordings. They used a Flash Media Server for this application.
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