Work and Stuff: Comments

Comment on "HTML5 Re-programming"

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 19:39:34 -0500

Yes, that's the good thing, and what I like about Edge as opposed to trying to code the canvas/web page manually to do all that. What a nightmare that would be! You do have to remember to include all the files with the html file, though or you're not going to see what you designed. For this little animation I have a folder of 4 .js files, 3 more that live next to the HTML file, and a folder of images. I wouldn't have even attempted that using javascript on my own. Would have taken me a week to figure it out (if I could). I think Edge shows some real promise, but if they can get the cloud computing figured out like they did for OnLive, none of this would matter. The Flash plugin could live on the computer farm in the sky and it would zap down the content without anyone needing to download a plugin. I think that's the way to go ultimately.

- PATRICK JOSEPH BESONG

Comment on "HTML5 Re-programming"

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 17:53:01 -0500

I thought about taking the training, but I couldn't justify paying so much to train an idiot like me when the web seems good enough. The bit that I've found useful with Adobe Edge is that I don't need to worry about those seven .js docs and the jquery calls- the software worries about it for me. I don't have the time to really work at it, and I really question whether I'm the one who's best suited, but it seems to be a piece of software that's coming along nicely. I view all those .js files as the crap I'd have to deal with if SWF files weren't sealed up and packaged so nicely. With Edge, I can go in and tweek, if I can figure out how. I think you'd be able to... Me? Not so much!

- DAVID R STONG

Comment on "Sharing Student Notes"

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 08:27:46 -0500

Thanks for the link. Yes, this is exactly what I was thinking. I like the idea of rating students notes and the best rising to the top. They even earn badges for status, which is big in gaming. The video on the home page was pretty helpful to give you an idea how it works. I wonder if we could get a faculty member to try this out? May not take that much to build our own version, too, I'll bet. This could be an important educational support network that would help a lot of students.

- PATRICK JOSEPH BESONG

Comment on "Sharing Student Notes"

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 15:38:36 -0500

Hey Pat. This is the service that I was telling you about which does something similar:

http://www.gradeguru.com

We could probably set up a local solution to do something along these lines using existing platforms.

- ALLAN SHAWN GYORKE

Comment on "HTML5 Coordinate Plotting"

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 09:51:50 -0500

connect the dots contest? was wondering if there was a good way to capture what was plotted for an assignment. saving as PDF doesn't make for a good image (goofs up the grid a bit), but a screenshot looks good.

- PATRICK JOSEPH BESONG

Comment on "HTML5 Coordinate Plotting"

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 09:36:28 -0500

This is very cool, Pat.

With some patience, I can plot a series of points that form an image. Might make a good contest... screen caps uploaded to comments? Can comments show images? Regardless- this is a nice piece of code.

- DAVID R STONG

Comment on "Captioning Videos Made Easy"

Tue, 11 May 2010 10:59:07 -0500

MacSpeech is based on Dragon Naturally Speaking, but I believe this process might afford some efficiencies that will make it more cost-effective. That is something we hope to find out, though.

- PATRICK JOSEPH BESONG

Comment on "Captioning Videos Made Easy"

Tue, 11 May 2010 10:48:51 -0500

We have been captioning course videos for a while here in Liberal Arts, and have been using a company called Automatic Sync Technologies (https://web.automaticsync.com/capstart.php) to create our transcripts. They produce a file which can be uploaded directly to YouTube, or, using MacCaptioner, can be added to videos for either the PSU Streaming Server or Vimeo. We found them much less expensive than having a student type out the transcripts. We hadn't tried MacSpeech, but did try having a faculty member use Dragon Naturally Speaking and it wasn't much of a success.

- CATHY J HOLSING

Comment on "Captioning Videos Made Easy"

Tue, 11 May 2010 09:33:03 -0500

I'm happy to see that there is support for this, and will be glad to create some sort of video on the process. I would also be available to assist Media Commons in any way that I can. I would certainly like to gather any data that we can about things like:

• How long it takes to caption different types of videos (1 speaker vs. several)?
• How long it takes to get a person up to speed with the process?
• What efficiencies can be gained?
• Will some people prefer typing to MacSpeech?
• Is the work too tedious? Will people burn out? This job could be

I'm sure there are tons of other questions to consider as well. From that we can create a white paper to share and also some possible presentations would be possible.

- PATRICK JOSEPH BESONG

Comment on "Captioning Videos Made Easy"

Tue, 11 May 2010 09:13:26 -0500

Accessibility is certainly a reason in and of itself to take on the time and cost of captioning. I would also say captions are valuable to everyone, as they have the ability to reinforce and clarify what's being said on a video. I'll definitely have a conversation with the Media Commons team about this. We do quite a few workshops on digital literacy, and captioning and the larger subject of accessibility are certainly topics that belong in that conversation.

- Chris Millet

Comment on "Captioning Videos Made Easy"

Tue, 11 May 2010 08:59:36 -0500

Very nice post Pat. It seems like there could be a "7 things you should know about video captioning" paper or something similar that comes out of your investigations - that we could use to discuss this topic with faculty and students. I like Cole's idea for creating a video that explains the steps as well.

As for the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, here is a good description of it:

http://www.nad.org/issues/civil-rights/communications-act/21st-century-act

The requirements apply to organizations that are currently under FCC control and applies to television-type programming delivered through televisions or through the Internet. However, it's still a good yardstick for measuring our own accessibility efforts - and a good educational topic to discuss with students who may want to get into the media/communications industry.

- ALLAN SHAWN GYORKE

Comment on "Captioning Videos Made Easy"

Tue, 11 May 2010 06:54:33 -0500

Pat this is really interesting stuff. I would love to see this in action ... As a matter of fact, this process would make a killer instructional video. I doubt other people on campus share your passion or have these skills developed. I sent the post on to Chris as i agree this should be part of the media commons conversation with students. I am all for hiring a wage person to do just what you are discussing.

BTW, I was wondering who was captioning all our videos!

- Cole W. Camplese

Comment on "Captioning Videos Made Easy"

Mon, 10 May 2010 16:55:42 -0500

Dave and TK. Thanks for your comments. Nice to know somebody's actually reading what I write.

TK, I ran some numbers based on my experience and the website you mentioned. It roughly took me about an hour to do a 10 minute video the first time I tried this. That would cost us $15 thru escriptionist ($1.50/minute). A student working at $8/hour would cost us $8 and the text would already be synchronized with the video with the click of a button. We would still have to import their text into MovCaptioner and time it out, which would take another 10 minutes or $1.33 in student time, bringing the total to $16.33. So for half the cost we can do it in house. An hour long video I'm assuming might take us 6 hours, totaling $48. Sending it out would cost $90 + another $8 to import and synchronize the text with the video. So again, half the cost to do it in house. I haven't timed this out exactly, but I'm pretty sure that it took me 10 minutes to do an 11 minute video. I also think that after doing a few that there would be some time savings that you would normally pick up along the way as well.

- PATRICK JOSEPH BESONG

Comment on "Captioning Videos Made Easy"

Mon, 10 May 2010 15:38:31 -0500

There are a lot of affordable (overseas) services that do transcriptions for, particularly, medical doctors' notes. You send them the sound file, and they give you a transcribed script.

http://www.escriptionist.com/ is one of them. And there are a lot more.

I'm not sure whether they do video captioning, but I don't imagine that being too much of a stretch. Even if they don't, having everything already typed up waiting for time-codes is still easier than starting from scratch. Or perhaps you can even get the time code from auto-transcription programs and the more accurate manual scripts and merge them into one subtitle file.

- TK Lee

Comment on "Captioning Videos Made Easy"

Mon, 10 May 2010 07:09:20 -0500

In an academic setting, captioning needs to be taught as a part of media production. Universal access is not an add-on for when there's time. The idea of captioning all of our media as an example is a good one, and hiring students is a practical method. The concept of using one trained voice being used for live captioning is common; integrating MacSpeech Scribe with MovCaptioner is a natural. This makes so much sense.

- DAVID R STONG

Comment on "YouTube's new auto-captioning feature does the heavy lifting"

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 14:57:20 -0500

I use Google voice and my name along has been transcribed into various random words. Sometimes content in a different language would end up in non-sensical English sentences.

Amusement aside, I agree with you. It is significant that this is opened to the general public -- we will soon be able to search video _content_ (as opposed to just the title of the video). Thus information is much more accesible.

- TK Lee

Comment on "Decision-based Simulations, Flash, and myUdutu"

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:17:13 -0500

good summary, pat. very interesting to see the comparisons between the final products. I remember actually checking out Udutu a few years back & created an account and a test course. The one step I didn't do was export a zip file and upload to ANGEL. would be interesting to see how that process went.

- Gary M. Chinn

Comment on "Edu-Communism"

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 16:51:11 -0500

I'm just trying to organize our community. ;-)

- PATRICK JOSEPH BESONG

Comment on "Edu-Communism"

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 16:35:38 -0500

Pat, spouting such communal sharing and savings might get you labeled as an education "re-distributor"! :) I agree with the overall concept. The technology and capabilities are all going in that type of direction and the ability to make this work will become increasingly clear. I'm not sure it will happen in our working lifetime but probably just after. The model you describe is similar to the ones that midwestern farmers have used for decades: called co-ops. Yes, it is a form of shared community resources. But don't try to tell them they are practicing communism!!

- MATTHEW N MEYER

Comment on "MacSpeech Dictate for Speech-to-text Video Captioning"

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 09:47:22 -0500

When I was at NMC this year, Morgan Reed from the Univerity of British Columbia did a demo at the 5 Minutes of Fame on transcribing digital recordings. If you go to http://www.nmc.org/2009-summer-conference/videos and select the NMC Five Minutes of Fame video from the list you can skip to about 46:20 to see his demo using MacSpeech. He is using headphones and a mic to repeat what he hears.

- PATRICK JOSEPH BESONG