PATRICK JOSEPH BESONG: June 2009 Archives
I've been messing around with live broadcasting via Ustream and using some software called Wirecast that allows me to use two video cameras and switch live between the two. That way I could have one camera on a mirrored monitor to capture what the speaker has on his podium computer and another camera on the speaker. Wirecast allows you to switch back and forth between them using a number of transitions. It's almost like running your own TV production from your computer screen. Wirecast also allows you to put titles under a speaker to identify them. You can also put logos and other graphics up as well.
Setting up Wirecast wasn't too difficult. Since my Mac laptop only has one firewire input, I got a firewire hub and plugged both of my video cameras into it. I'm using a Sony VX1000 and a Sony VX2000 for testing. I had some problems initially with an older video camera, but when I switched to these two it worked just fine. Once I got both video cameras working (by selecting Show Asset Manager from the Media menu), I then went to the Broadcast menu and selected Broadcast Settings. In the Broadcast Settings window I set the Encoder preset to Flash Medium Bandwidth and the Destination to UStream. I then entered the name of my UStream channel and my username. After that I clicked the Generate RTMP button and entererd my UStream password. The RTMP url then appeared at the bottom of the window and I clicked Save to close the window. I then clicked Wirecast's Broadcast button to begin broadcasting and pointed my browser to ustream.tv. After logging in there, I clicked the Broadcast Now button and it was all set up for live broadcasting. I just clicked the Start Broadcasting button and also the Record button (to record a version for later playback). UStream also has a chat option, which is very nice for fielding questions from your audience.
We will try to use Wirecast and UStream to do live broadcasts of our Learning Design Summer Camp here at Penn State on July 21st and 22nd.
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.
This was taught by Raymond Riley from Alma College. Ray showed some of the main screen capture programs and gave a synopsis of the good a bad qualities of each. He also introduced a few helper applications that went hand-in-hand with these programs to help you create better tutorials. A few of these were Backdrop, ScreenshotHelper, and XScope.
Backdrop is a simple utility to fill your screen with a white window so you can take screenshots without having to clean up your desktop.
ScreenshotHelper shows a full screen window with a solid color or a desktop picture so that you can take a clean screenshot without having irrelevant windows and desktop icons in the background.
xScope is a useful utility that can give you the dimensions of any image on your web page, it can find distances in pixels between images,it can add pre-defined backdrops, rulers, guides, but most helpful for screen captures is its Loupe function. The Loupe can magnify any portion of your screen under the mouse.
Grab is a utility that is shipped with all Macs that can do screen captures. It can include the cursor in the screen capture as well.
Screenshot Plus is an enhancement to Apple's Grab tool. It uses Grab to capture the image, but then allows you to scale and capture in a select format such as JPEG, TIFF, PSD, and more.
Mousepose' is a tool that can dim the screen and put a spotlight on the area around the mouse pointer, easily guiding the audience's attention to an area of interest on the screen.
Omnidazzle is a set of fun and useful enhancements to help you highlight certain areas of your screen, create visual effects, and track the location of your mouse pointer. Some examples are that you can do a flashlight effect to highlight certain areas, draw odd-shaped boxes around certain information, auto-hightlight form fields with a box around them, yellow marker hightlighting, draw circles around words and object, a water-ripple effect wherever you click the mouse, comic book action stars with Pow!, Biff!, and Zot!, a footprints effect that walks across your screen, and also a zoom plugin.
He also showed the built-in ability of the Mac OS to zoom in and out of anything on the screen. This must first be enabled by going to the System Preferences/Universal Access settings and turning Zoom on. Default key command is SHIFT+APPLE+EQUALS and SHIFT+APPLE+MINUS.
Another built-in Mac trick is to get great-looking icons by copying any application and pasting it into Preview. You will get a perfect icon of that application along with any alpha channel that may be associated with ti.
Soundflower lets us record the audio being played from the system
Snapz Pro: Good a still frame screen capture, but video takes a long time to render when you complete your screen recording. Good quality video, however, the audio export options are lacking. No AAC audio export option.
iShowU can record video and audio on the screen into a QT movie in real time, it can pause and continue, the mouse can be recorded as a separate track, and it can record mic and system audio via Soundflower. The HD and HD Pro versions can also record keystrokes, and output from an iSight or DV camera.
Jing only records as SWF formatted movies. It can do still shots or video, can pause and continue, can record mic or system audio (however it is only at 22 kHz). The Pro version will save as MPEG-4 with no watermarks and can share directly to YouTube.
ScreenFlow was the presenter's s/w of choice for doing screen capture presentations. ScreenFlow gives you an audio and video timeline that allows you to edit your production afterwards, you can set markers that can make QT movie chapters, it can highlight an area in a circle, and titles get treated like any other video track.
I attended this pre-conference workshop on using multimedia for scholarly writing. This would include scholarly journals, theses, white papers, and other formal writing that has always been done on paper until recent years. Using embedded media in scholarly writing is starting to catch on, but still has some resistance. Online journals especially have been leading the way. Some examples include:
• http://www.scivee.tv - Research publication via video, podcasts, postercasts
• http://ijlm.net - International Journal of Learning and Media
• http://www.jove.com - Journal of Visualized Experiments
Media is being peer-reviewed as scholarly work, but it is also introducing new problems like setting standards for citing examples used. What happens if the peer-reviewer goes to check out the embedded work, but it is no longer available on the Internet? Do we need to embed the media instead of just linking to it to assure it will still be there? Is this a copyright violation if we do? There is an extended conversation going on at Academic Intersections http://www.academicintersections.com/ about these issues. They also showed the Apple Learning Interchange http://edcommunity.apple.com/ali/ which I thought might be a good replacement for our MTO project repository. However, as I have read on their discussion board, some people have been waiting for weeks and months for their submissions to get approved. It must be one guy reviewing everything.
The instructors of the workshop went on to outline the components of a published work (at least their standards, that is). It can be broken down into the following:
1. Abstract
2. Intro
3. Body (3-4 sections of content)
4. Future Directions or Conclusion
5. Acknowledgements
6. Bibliography
7. Author's Statement
Peer reviews were discussed. Even the online journals have problems with editing and proofreading. A person in the class pointed out a typo in one of the published articles that spell check would not have caught. The peer review criteria should make sure that the work:
• Is related to the journal's purpose
• Presents a media-rich academic/creative work
• Is grounded in the literature in a manner that is relevant and accurate with respect to the expectations of the home discipline
• Provides adequate documentation
• Not published elsewhere in its present form
• presents new perspectives, new techniques, new pedagogy
• Is not a commercial
Everyone wants to be good at something, but often times, they never get out of the "I am no good at this" phase to reach a deeper level of understanding where their knowledge will allow them to do great things. Do people say, "This company kicks ass", or do they say, "This product kicks ass?" What we really want them to say if we design their learning experience right is "I kick ass," which means that we have empowered them to learn so well that they feel they can accomplish anything. This is what is meant by creating passionate users. Kathy showed a Nikon camera brochure. It was a slick 3-color glossy brochure that really sold the product with its flowery conversational voice. She said, "This is how they treat you before the sale..." Then she went on to show an ugly monochromatic user guide for the same camera on cheap paper that spoke to the user in formal technical terms. "And this is how they treat you after the sale." Point well taken. If the same care was taken for the manual as they took for the brochure, wouldn't it create real power-users of this camera? The people who used it would think what great photographers they were after learning to use the camera well and being able to take great photos. So it's really about the pictures, not the camera that elicits the response from the user, and in the end creates dedicated customers. She went on to say that we need to learn to look at what the brain pays attention to (Kathy has been interested in the brain and artificial intelligence since her days as a game developer). What does the brain pay attention to? It pays attention to chemistry, the very thing that it feels. But what creates that chemistry? Emotion-invoking things create chemistry. Things that are scary, things that are different, things that make you wonder, cute things like a puppy or a baby, in short anything that elicits an emotional response. We need to somehow tap into that emotion to create passionate learners. The human brain is very good at filtering things it must pay attention to. It lets very few things into its inner core that will involve one's whole attention. We need to talk to the brain, not just the learner's mind. If we can elicit an emotional response, we can get past the brain's filtering mechanism and engage the learner in a deeper way. She outlined 10 tricks to do so. I hope I've gotten them all right, they weren't all numbered in her slides:
1. Focus on what the user does, not what you do. Don't ask "How do we build a better camera?" Instead ask "How do we build a better photographer?"
2. Electric Rain, makers of Swift-3D s/w has a motto that says "Every user must be able to do something cool within 30 minutes of learning the software."
3. What makes the user smarter?
4. Don't focus on X, but focus instead on what X is a subset of. Don't blog about your kitchen appliance, but instead blog about cooking.
5. Shrink the 10,000 hours it takes to make someone a master. You do this by learning the patterns. She spoke of a man named Bruce Wilcox, who mastered a game called "Go" in record time by writing s/w for it, which made him identify the patterns of the game.
6. Make your product or documents reflect the their feelings. If you want them to RTFM (Read the F***ing Manual) then you should try to make a better F***ing Manual.
7. Create a culture of support. Talked of the javaranch.com user site for java programmers. The terms of service were simply "Be nice". There are no dumb questions and no dumb answers. People will sooner become participants instead of lurkers if they see the water is safe.
8. Do NOT insist on insensitivity. Passionate users "talk different". Remember that success = more users kicking ass.
9. Make the right thing easy and the wrong thing hard. You don't use the treadmill in the corner of your room, because of the very fact that it is in the corner of your room. Move it to the middle and you will use it.
10. Total immersion jams (this seems to go back to #5 above). You will be more successful at learning something when it's crammed into 16 hours over 2 days rather than 16 hours over 2 months.
11. Be brave (an extra tip thrown in)
Kathy was a very compelling speaker. She would be a great guest speaker at our symposium some year. Everyone fully enjoyed her presentation.
