Streaming Video Playback Speed Controls - Two Innovative Methods
One of the coolest playback features for online video, especially
academic video, is a player with the ability to speed up (or slow down)
the playback speed of a streaming video. Way back in the
early 2000's there was a tool called Enounce that acted
as a plugin to
RealPlayer or Windows Media Player and would add a control slider to
the player. Everything from half-speed to 5x playback, with
no pitch change on the audio. It was very effective for
watching lectures or news content - for much material, you can really
absorb it much faster than it's spoken. Turns out
that Enounce is still available, and works pretty well, and they
announced a version called MySpeed
which supports embedded Flash video.
End-users can buy and install Enounce and use it on their systems.
It's a native Windows-only application and must be installed
individually on each system.
OK, that's great, but I want this as a feature of my website - I want
all my
Flash videos to appear with a speed control for all users.
To date, I'd been unable to
find any way to do this - no one I've spoken with seems to know how to
write code for Flash Player that will permit a speed control.
I'm told it's currently not possible.
Then I came
upon Bloggingheads.tv.
Bloggingheads.tv includes a
Flash-based player (derived from the JW Media
Player 3.2)
that has a "1.4x" button that bumps up the playback speed --
perfectly intelligible, but much quicker playback for taking in a long
talk in a jiffy. They did the impossible!
I had to know how they did it, so I did some poking around. Turns out
they didn't do the impossible, they did an end-run around it.
The playlist that their flash player reads for each video
program references two media files. Here's the relevant code
snippet from the XSPF-format
playlist:
So, they created an alternate encoding of each video, one with the 1.4x
timeline baked right in. The player needed some modification
to play this, but only so that the time, duration, and the location bar
all showed an appropriately scaled value as this video played. After
all, a 30 minute video encoded to play at 1.4x is actually only a 21
minute file, but the timeline still needs to show it like it's the 30
minute length of the original content.
When you switch from one speed to another while playing, the stream
rebuffers and seeks to the same spot in the video, so there's just a
momentary pause in playback switching from one stream to another.
It's a great workaround - although for my purposes (user-generated
content, thousands of contributors) I'd still prefer a player-based way
to do it so it can apply equally to video from all sources without
requiring added backed processing. Still...this is the only
solution I've ever seen to this issue a) for Flash video, and b) not
requiring an additional plugin.
Facebook and Academic Institutions - Content or Context?
In the world of enterprise and educational IT, the question I
keep hearing asked about Facebook is, "will this supplant our
intranet/course platform/LMS/[insert your enterprise application
platform of choice]? Students want to know if they can get
their course content in Facebook. Administrators want to know
if allowing students to use Facebook for anything academic will drive
users away from their school portals or course environments. Part of
the confusion is an as yet immature understanding of what Facebook and
the custom applications you can develop for it are really best at.
One of major flaws of
existing intranets, even when they work to find stuff, is the lack of
social context. It is difficult to find anything about people.
Serena wanted to promote a greater connection between people. Facebook,
which is both free and a great example of web 2.0, seemed to be the
right answer. They established a private Facebook group for Serena
employees and they built a few simple custom Facebook apps to better
enable intranet functions. Now they provide links through Facebook to
documents stored securely behind the firewall.
Facebook is really good at one thing - providing a social graph that
connects users to each other. Developing a Facebook
application makes the most sense when you're trying to intersect a
social graph of your own (such as the enrollment in a course, the list
of students with the same concentration, or those in the same study
group). When developing an application to do exactly this for
students, it became clear to me that Facebook's value was not in being
the container through which large bits of course content, school
administrative information, or academic discussions would be delivered.
We already have excellent applications for all of that, and
they provide a level of access control, administrative options, and a
cultural "fit" that is useful and durable.
What Facebook does do, however, is let us publish snippets or updates
to students sourced from these university systems, and drive traffic
back to them for the "full story". It lets us give a student
a page within Facebook with their course schedule, links to the course
sites, lists of their Facebook friends (and other participating users)
who are in their courses, and various ways to message between these
groups. Facebook's friends is social graph A, the various
university roles and identities of students are graphs B/C/D/etc.
Facebook provides the means to intersect and display them in creative and student-focused ways. It's about
context for your content, not really about delivering your content.
As Serena found out in its implementation, Facebook's API that allows
iFramed applications to run inside its framework mean that you can
develop secure programs that combine a user's Facebook identity with
their institutional identity, all without exposing any of your data or
your users' institutional login credentials to Facebook. I
suspect that as more institutions explore this realm, some common
understanding will emerge that Facebook and social-graph platforms like
it are not a threat or a replacement for the portal, LMS or CMS, but
a complement to them.
CNN has presented a unique
and powerful UI for viewing
and navigating the video of one of the recent Presidential
debates. Aside from having done a great job presenting the
transcript alongside the video (with appropriate
click-to-play-from-here functionality), as well as a table-of-contents
by topic; CNN has created
a unique "map" of the debate, allowing a user to single out a
moment, a particular speaker, or the results of a search by spoken word
in a brilliant, graphical display.
It's one of the finest
examples of this kind of thing that I've seen. I'd love to
know if anyone has thoughts about other situations in which this kind
of interface could really add value. The cost would be an
issue - transcripts are expensive, as is massaging a transcript into
the descriptive XML required for this tool. Automation using
tools like the Virage
VideoLogger and Pictron's
Audio Gateway can identify speakers and generate text from
speech - the accuracy would certainly be far less than what CNN has
done here, but for some purposes, would it be "good enough"?
Download: A 13MB
download, but no questions asked and no prompting for personal info
Installation: At
about 80 seconds on my MacBook Pro (WinXP under Parallels), still not
zippy, but it asked just a few simple questions about configuration on a single screen. Much simpler than prior versions.
Loading: Loads up
quickly - much more quickly than older RealPlayers. Feels
fast. The UI still includes tabs for managing your media
library, looking at the RealGuide, etc. But interestingly,
the RealGuide, rather than be full of links to teenybopper pop
stars, is full of links to top content on YouTube, Metacafe, and the
like.
Downloading video from the Web:
Of course, the feature everyone's talking about, RP11 adds a "Download
This" link to videos that appear on any Web site with video.
Shown is a screenshot showing the button added to a
Brightcove page:
Clicking the
download button gets you a
download manager that resembles Firefox's download manager.
Videos
go into your video
library in their native format -- no conversions or
obfuscating file names -- it's just there in plain view in the home
directory (\My Documents\My Videos\RealPlayer Downloads by default)
One
interesting thing about RP11 is what it will not download:
RTMP
Streaming Flash video (from a Flash Media Server or equivalent) will
not download. Only HTTP-delivered FLV will work.
DRM-protected
video will not download.
The built-in "Share This"
button on RealPlayer sends a link to the original video content.
All
in all, I found that RP11 downloads video successfully from a
wide variety of sites, including YouTube, Metacafe,
Brightcove, CNN and others. My first "cannot record this" hit
came from Harvard@Home's Human
Systems Explorer site, which uses true Flash rtmp streaming
from Akamai.
Not a bad first impression.
Some things need further exploration. For example, I
haven't yet found out how to hide, when the player first opens, the
window that shows the RealGuide, the Library, and other stuff that's
not "just the video, please". Maybe this fits with Real's
apparent strategy to make the standalone player into a good media
download/management center and leave the embedded player for "video only" uses. I'll post more info as I learn
more.
Real
Networks' newest RealPlayer player appears to be a huge departure from
their earlier client-side products. While the Helix server
technology and the RealVideo codecs have been ones-to-beat in streaming
media technology, the RealPlayer has been the face of the
company
to the user community - and it hasn't always been a pretty face.
Real's marketing folks, in the heat of their battle for
survival
with Microsoft, saw RealPlayer as a the company's direct pipeline to
users' pocketbooks.
Let's face it - the
RealPlayer,
despite its technological excellence (SMIL 1.0 & 2.0,
universal format support, the
industry's best codecs, and support for
nearly every OS and browser out there) became an abomination - big
heavy download, cumbersome registration required, ads and eye candy all
over the place, "notifications" that pop up and annoy with marketing
messages.
Fast-forward to today -- In the new world
of the Web,
Flash is taking over because its player is everywhere and its user
experience is simple, unmarred by distractions, and an easy download in
the unlikely case you need it. I've even been able to install
the Flash player
using Firefox's
XPI Flash installer - no UI whatsoever, just one click and
it's in.
So
with many of Real's remaining customers (there are many, especially in
the higher-education industry) avidly looking for alternatives
to RealPlayer, and Real rapidly
approaching irrelevance in the video technology space, RealNetworks has
come up with a new approach. Real's new player (RealPlayer 11) boasts
two major innovations:
The player is small
and unobtrusive, with a quick, easy install that asks no
questions, takes over nothing, and generally leaves you alone.
In
what could be a stunning new capability, RP11 will download
non-DRM-protected video from any website, in any format (Flash. Real,
QuickTime, WindowsMedia, etc). While you're watching that
video on YouTube, Google,
Metacafe, Brightcove, or anywhere else, RP11 will add a little "save
this" button to the video itself.
The idea is that RealPlayer becomes the base of your personal video
library. You can share (by sending around links to the original
source), or with a $30 upgrade, burn to DVD disc. Presumably, one of
these options will let you easily flip content to your iPod.
There's a pretty good video
demo given by Real VP Jeff Chasen at Scobleizer.com.
Now aside from the obvious idea
that content owners may revolt at the idea of people being able to save
their content whether they want them to or not, I just don't see the
value to RealNetworks in a new player. Why offer it?
And I think the bigger question is, do we really need more players in
the industry? Isn't it already hard enough for consumers? How many more
players and plugins are we going to try and force viewers to have to
download?
The new RealPlayer gives the
users lots of control over Internet video -- watching it offline,
burning it to CD or DVDs, storing it in a library, etc. Sharing content
links directly from the RealPlayer library can be really useful. A
number of people who’ve tested the pre-beta have told me that they love
watching a few seconds of a video on a web site, then using RealPlayer
to download a copy for later viewing.
My take?
Looking at the education industry, up to now I see a large
investment in Real's technology that's been feeling more and more like
a liability, strictly because of the horrendous RealPlayers of
the RealONE/RP10 generation. Folks are looking at
costly switches to Flash video infrastructure not because the video or
server technology is so great, but mainly because the player has
mindshare and doesn't do anything to piss-off its users.
So,
if Real's new player is something that a) is a no-brainer to install
and use; and b) provides truly useful functionality on top of
the enormous-and-growing world of online video content, it may just
become relevant again to online users. And that's good for Real's
existing customers, for sure. How that helps Real acquire new
paying customers isn't clear to me, but I'd guess that anything that
makes RealPlayer more relevant in the marketplace has to be a good
first step.
Image, Audio & Video Search - Reading Content and Context
In his article, Improving
Image Search, Harvard's Michael Hemment writes about a
research project at UC San Diego that uses
human-generated sample data to train an engine that analyses
images to extract searchable metadata.
Supervised
Multiclass Labeling (SML), automatically analyses the content of
images, compares it to various “learned” objects
and classes, and then assigns searchable labels or keywords to the
images. SML can also be used to identify content and generate keywords
for different parts of the same image.
This is an interesting topic. I'm reminded of several related topics --
all involved in extracting useful metadata from binary media objects :
The Music Genome Project and their Pandora site. Uses
human-generated metadata to describe the music, but using fields very
similar in concept to the data in VIA or the seed data used in
SML.
Using OCR tools to identify and index text that appears in
an image. Google's Orcopus
project is an open-source way to do this, although commercial products
like Pictron
do it for images and video.
Speech-recognition on audio/video content is similarly a
way to try to index the otherwise opaque contents of a binary media
file. What's odd is how little use this has gotten in the real world,
even though the technology has been around for quite some years.
I read somewhere on the web recently, (can't recall the source) the
correct observation that hugely popular video sites like YouTube are built on
making video findable by using very primitive metadata combined with
the all-important context. Who else likes this?
What else has this person created/bookmarked/shared? What comments and
tags have users applied? All have turned out to be far more useful than
a full transcript or speech-recognition search.
One burning question for me is, why is searching inside a PDF massively
useful, but searching inside a video just doesn't quite hit the mark?
What's holding video or image searching back? Is it
the quality of the metadata we extract and index? Does video simply contain
less information density (in its transcript) than a written article (i.e. have you ever read the transcript of a half-hour program, only to realize that you can read/skim it in less than 3 minutes?)? Or do
people simply use these kinds of assets differently than they do
text-based documents, so different rules and benefits apply when
searching?
Will blogs, wikis, Web search and other implements of informal
learning replace the instructional designer, the teaching faculty, and
the very concept of an academic course?
Tony Karrer of TechEmpower spoke at a session of Harvard Business
School's BrainGain instructional technology speaker series yesterday about the impact that these technologies
are having on transforming corporate training, and to some extent
traditional education. When can a
collaborative wiki take the place of traditional course
materials to facilitate learning in an organization? How do
blogs extract value from personal communication in ways that email does
not? Tony's recent blog entries eLearning
Business Alternatives, Disruptive
Changes in Learning and Content
Vendor Value address these trends.
I'm a strong believer in the unmatched information-gathering
capability Web tools give learners. The growth of
Web 2.0 technologies serves to multiply the effect, with mashups,
add-ins and simple cross-publishing of content from one site to another
providing the free-form platform that allows end users to create new
value in the ecosystem. Online reference resources
created by user communities can be more effective means of compiling
and distributing the right information in the right-sized
chunks.
But I'm not a believer that all of this is always going to be an
effective substitute for an educational curriculum. Education
is more than skills training. It's challenging the way
students think. It's walking them down a path that builds on basics,
builds a knowledge base that grows eventually to become more than the
sum of its parts. It's providing a context that helps
motivate and direct the learners' efforts. If information
were the same as education, we could plop a set of Web resources and
books in front of first-year college kids and say "Have at it! Become
chemists!" and they'd do it on their own. (Actually a very
few students could probably pull this off, due to their intrinsic
motivation, ability, and interest in the topic.) In real
life, people often need teachers, coaches, trainers, and leaders to
help them deliver their best.
At their worst, courses can be boring, irrelevant, or wrongly-paced for
their students. At their best, they are highly
motivating, are transformational experiences that give the
learner an entirely new context for how to think about a problem, and
provide a framework of basic knowledge that serves as a solid
foundation for future learning (formal or informal).
Alternatively, collaborative E-Learning 2.0 resources at their worst can
be random piles of facts (of unknown accuracy), filtered by groupthink
and presented with limited context. At their best, they are
the collective, first-hand knowledge of countless experts, organized
and interlinked in a way that creates rich context that no
instructional designer could have imagined (let alone implemented).
I'm thinking, there's going to continue to be room for both for a long
time. Tony's blog post mentions
Valerie Bock, whose assessment I agree with:
Subscribing to RSS feeds, tags and searches is a great way for an individual to keep abreast of what’s happening in her field. Contributing to communities of practice is a terrific way to pass on hard-won expertise. It’s all good.
But it’s not sufficient. In the frantic, multi-tasking environments in which we all work, there is perhaps a more urgent need than ever for content which is the product of careful reflection about just what is essential, and how it fits into an overall framework.
We think the future of learning is in the engagement of learners with each other, and with skilled facilitators, around that content.
The folks at Read/WriteWeb have put together a terrific Online
Video Industry Index that provides a snapshot of the current
online video marketplace. It's not about hardware or software
vendors, like Sorenson,
Accordent, or
Adobe, but rather
sums up the online services space very well. This
list breaks the industry down into categories that include Video
Sharing, Video Search, Video Editing & Creation, Video
eCommerce, Video Streaming, and others.
I've been working in this space a lot lately, and have worked with many
of the providers on this list, including some as-yet little-known ones.
While the authors disclaim the index as "not complete", to my
eye it looks pretty comprehensive. One useful addition would be Sorenson Media, which is getting into the space with its Squishnet video management service.
This is a great resource. In particular, many of the vendors in this index, as well as being consumer-oriented destinations for video, offer enterprise services and developer APIs that let companies and educational institutions build custom, branded video services on hosted infrastructure. Because of this, the consumer video Web is relevant far beyond the entertainment focus that's driving its growth.
User-Generated Media - Challenges & Solutions for Business and Academia
Social networking and user-generated content (UGC) sites present unique
technical challenges, which lead to unique business challenges.
While unexpected growth is a potential problem for any online
site, it is both the holy
grail and (in the spirit of "be careful what you wish for") a ticking
time bomb for social networking sites.
User-generated content sites are the fastest-growing
category of web site (by unique visitors) on the Net, showing, in some
cases, triple digit year-over-year growth. Of the ten fastest growing
web brands, five are UGC sites (for example, Flickr and
Wikipedia).
Social networking/UGC sites have, by definition,
unpredictable storage and bandwidth needs, making technical
infrastructure (and therefore, budget and capital expense) planning a
crap shoot. Outsourced capacity on-demand is an important
option to consider before you're faced with site-crippling runaway
success.
Success is tied closely to having a fast innovation cycle
-- try stuff out, see how it works for your users.
Continually sense-and-respond to user needs to find that sweet spot of
simplicity, functionality, and sustainability that makes your site
sticky and social. One way to do this is to minimize the time
and effort you put into infrastructure build-out and put it into more
creative endeavors.
If you're an ad-driven site, performance is directly tied
to revenue, as faster loading pages keep eyeballs on the site, lead to
more page views per user, and therefore register more ad impressions.
When Friendster moved to Akamai's delivery network in March
2006, they saw an immediate
33% decrease in page load times, and a threefold
uptick in page views.
Even for an educational institution, outsourcing certain infrastructure
is appealing. With service-oriented Web APIs, it can be
easier now to work with a vendor/partner than it is to build it myself.
If I want to put up a quick video recording/encoding/sharing
service for my users, I can:
Build it myself - not always a bad idea, and definitely a
quick-and-dirty solution for a pilot or proof-of-concept, provided I
have to staff and the time to move it from P-O-C to production-ready if
the need arises.
Acquire and deploy an inexpensive product. I was
surprised to find YouTube clones like Clip'Share
and Altrasoft
VideoShare for a few hundred bucks or less. Again -
good for a proof-of-concept. May or may not offer enough for
coping with real success.
Use a Web Service API like that from Video Egg or JumpCut
to handle all the media operations, while you focus just on your
website. These services handle media input (in the case of
Video Egg, from webcam and cell phone, as well as file upload).
transcoding, online editing and delivery. It can provide a
platform for rapid development of your own custom solutions,
as well as a scalable solution in case your solution takes off.
I'm generally a big fan of institutions building their media solutions
in-house, but the combination of the unpredictable needs of
user-generated media, the ease and excellence of some of the vendor
service-based APIs, and the need to be able to innovate quickly without
up-front investment in big infrastructure creates some interesting
possibilities.
The Akamai white paper, Successful Social Networking and
User-Generated-Content Applications: What You Need to Know, (which, by
the way, I wrote) addresses some other challenges of social and UGC
sites -- how edge-caching works with dynamic content, how to control
costs when growth is unpredictable, options for exercising editorial
control over UGC sites, and some examples of how social networking is
being used by businesses to build revenue and create new opportunities.
A Magnificent Resource of Educational Technology Case Studies
The National Center of
Academic Transformation (NCAT) website contains
a treasure-trove of case studies that will interest anyone involved in
educational technology. From 1999-2004, NCAT worked with 30
higher-ed institutions to redesign selected courses to meet
goals like
reducing costs, handling increasing enrollment, and improving quality
and student outcomes. NCAT focused on using technology to
support several
models of course design, from supplementing a
face-to-face class with technology aids to moving an
800-student course to an entirely online format.
The entire projects are described, including planning,
budgeting, outcomes, and lessons learned. Some of the lessons learned
are important and counter-intuitive, others are firm confirmations of what you might expect.
But it's worth taking some time to read through some of the studies, as there's something
to be learned from each. Here are a
few interesting extracts from the studies:
Having a "buffet" of course information, related
resources and activities available to students sounds like a better
idea than it really turns out to be. A
carefully designed "buffet" of varied course
materials (videos, lectures, labs, online tests) at Florida Gulf
Coast University (FGCU) went
entirely unused by the 387 students in the
course. (The FCGU course, which moved a large
lecture-format
face-to-face course in Visual Arts to an all-online environment, was
nonetheless an unqualified
success based on other attributes of its design.) This
supports the results found by
Lonnie Harvel at Georgia Tech, in which students' own course
notes (in electronic format) were enhanced by turning subject-related
keywords into links to related resources. In the trial,
students never clicked on any of the links to related material,
choosing instead to stick to the linear path of required material.
Supporting multiple learning styles means more than
making varied materials available. Ohio State
University found some measurable benefit to providing learning-style
options, but only students who attended orientation sessions
on how to choose saw benefit. OSU
methodically associated every item of course material to a
90-term taxonomy of learning objectives, giving students a clear
understanding of what was expected, no matter the learning
style they chose.
Required for-credit practice
quizzes directly affect
student performance. At the University of New
Mexico,
"students in one section received course points for completion of
weekly online mastery quizzes; students in the other section were
encouraged to take the mastery quizzes, but received no course points
for doing so. On in-class exams, students who were required to complete
quizzes for credit always outperformed students for whom taking quizzes
was voluntary." FGCU had similar results.
At FGCU, students
worked in teams via online
threaded-discussion boards to analyze and critique essays.
"At FGCU, students completed Web Board discussions where they
analyzed sample short essays in preparation for writing their own short
essays. One of the essays was a strong essay and the other a weak
essay. Working in peer learning teams of six students each, students
had to determine which was strong and which was weak and explain why.
The Web Board discussions increased interaction among students, created
an atmosphere of active learning, and developed students’
critical thinking skills." Student performance on subsequent exam essay questions exceeded that of previous semesters under the face-to-face teaching model.
In all the cases, details including gains (or not) in student
performance are provided. Many schools were able to compare
control groups to redesigned-course groups, which makes this a uniquely
informative resource.
The challenge of effective eLearning is finding ways to leverage the
medium that simply can't be equaled in solely traditional teaching environments.
Can students learn better from online-instruction than from
in-person instruction? One example pointed out to me was the
wildly different experience of listening to a string quartet
play live in a real space as compared to listening to the
radio or even a CD on a good audio system. Does the presence,
energy, acoustic power, and ambiance of that live performance extend
through the electronic realm? Sort of, but it's just not the
same. Would you willingly deny anyone the option of the
in-person experience without good reason?
To me, the alternate example is the professional football
game. Sure, sitting at the top section of a stadium with
85,000 of your closest friends is a social experience with an
energy that's hard to beat; but for actually watching a game,
nothing beats a TV (even a small one) with instant replay, close-ups of
the action, and that bright yellow line that marks the yardage for a
first down.
Which led me to this: The challenge for eLearning and
distance education is to identify the "yellow lines" of the medium --
those things that represent something inherently valuable but simply
not possible in the traditional-teaching realm. Maybe
eLearning's real advantage will remain rooted in the fact not that it
competes with in-person teaching, but that it allows learning where
in-person teaching is not possible or practical. But I think
there's also some "yellow-line" capabilities waiting to be explored,
even where educational technology supports (rather than supplants)
in-person learning.
One example of a genuinely new and interesting capability is
the digital
pen note-taking integration done by Tegrity in their
classroom capture system. I've long been a user of Logitech's
digital pen. The pen allows you to write on special
notebook paper, and captures everything you write to your computer as a
perfect digital image of the page you wrote. You can print
pages, share them via email, as well as add text and drawing
to the page in the computer, making pages indexable and searchable.
What Tegrity has done is to tie the
note-taking with the digital pen to the timeline of the video/slides
(marketing demo video) captured during a live
lecture. Students who took notes during the class can, at
their own PCs, bring up their notes on-screen alongside the lecture
video. The lecture video, the instructor's notes, and the student's
notes all become part of a synchronized presentation. Notes
can go from being a one-shot chance to get the main points down
(sometimes at the expense of really listening) to being a guide to
review and further exploration. I don't know if it will
transform teaching and learning, but it struck me as an example of a
stunningly clever and useful application of technology to do something
that was previously quite impossible.
There's a lot of activity in researching the effect of these
technologies. One interesting study is Lonnie Harvel's
dissertation Using
Student-Generated Notes as an Interface to a Digital Repository
(pdf). Harvel explores the surprisingly low use of
digital repositories in education by experimenting with methods to
integrate lectures, student notes, and external resources in
deeply integrated ways.
Simulations and Games for Learning - the Federation of American Scientists gets involved
In his Learning Technology blog, Harvard Business School
Publishing's Denis Saulnier recently published an
informative overview of educational simulations and games.
Having worked with Denis at Harvard Business School's
Educational Technologies and Multimedia Development (ETMM) group on
over a dozen simulations (a few are
profiled here), I know the amazing pedagogical power
of a well-designed simulation to evoke tangible, experiential learning
among students. I also know the more-art-than-science nature
of effective simulation design - it's hard to define what
facets make will the game an effective learning experience, but you
know 'em when you see 'em.
The FAS is concerned with American competitiveness in science and
engineering. FAS points out that:
The success of complex video games demonstrates games can teach
higher-order thinking skills such as strategic thinking, interpretative
analysis, problem solving, plan formulation and execution, and
adaptation to rapid change. These are the skills U.S. employers
increasingly seek in workers and new workforce entrants. These are the
skills more Americans must have to compete with lower cost knowledge
workers in other nations.
The report notes that game designers have instinctively implemented
many of the features of "optimal learning environments": clear learning
goals, broad (and reinforcing) experiences), continuous adjustment of
the challenge based on performance, encouragement of inquiry, time on
task, motivation, personalization and others.
The summit's major findings include:
Educational games require players to master skills
that employers want; with the potential to impact practical
skills training, training individuals for high-performance situations
that require complex decision-making, reinforcing skills seldom used,
teaching how experts approach problems, and team-building.
Designing games for learning is different from designing
games for entertainment.
Research is needed to develop a sound understanding of
which features of games are important for learning and why, and how to
best design educational games to deliver positive learning outcomes.
High development costs in an uncertain market make
developing complex high-production learning games too risky for video
game and educational materials industries.
Educational institutions aren't set to to take advantage of
educational technology in general, and games in particular.
Large-scale evaluations of the effectiveness of
educational games are needed to encourage development and adoption of
gaming technology.
The report goes on to detail the roles of government, the gaming
industry and the educational institutions in filling in the knowledge
gaps and figuring out how to make the clear benefit of learning
simulations more available to all learning environments.
Issues of how scale up and reduce the cost of
design, production, deployment, and assessment of games are addressed.
The full report is about 50 pages long, but is well-written,
to-the-point, and a highly recommended read for anyone interested in
educational games and simulations.
YouTube and its ilk have made embedding video into a web page simple
for people who are not developers and HTML gurus. For
institutional video installations like ours at Harvard, it can be just
as simple for our users to embed internally hosted video in their
course pages, Websites, and blogs. All you need is to have a
small Javascript file that generates the HTML that embeds the player.
This file lives somewhere on your Web server, and people
wanting to embed video in their pages simply reference it with a small
snippet of HTML they put into their Web page. Here's a simple
snippet of HTML that
users can use to generate an embedded video player:
The embedRealVideo.js script generates the EMBED statement that
displays the video in the page. Its source code can easily be
modified to support Windows Media or Quicktime plugins as well.
The user embedding video just has to paste the above code
snippet into their page, making sure to edit the clipUrl field
appropriately. For this RealPalyer example, that URL can be a
direct rtsp:// link, or an http:// link to ramgen or a .ram file.
Here's the source of the script, embedRealVideo.js: (you may have to remove the line wrapping in the document.write statements for this to work)
pClipUrl=""; var scripts = document.getElementsByTagName('script'); var index = scripts.length - 1; var myScript = scripts[index];
if (pClipUrl=="") { pClipUrl=myScript.getAttribute("clipUrl"); }
My prior post on the
travails of podcasting, MPEG4, and supporting multiple devices
detailed the differences between MPEG4 as it's supported by three of
the most popular portable digital media devices: the iPod, the Creative
Zen Vision, and the Sony PSP. After further exploration, I've
learned a few new things.
MPEG4
Woes
The MPEG4 format supported by the PSP is structurally the same
as the iPod format: MPEG4 H.264 (AVC) w/ AAC audio. For some reason that escapes me, Sony
employs a customized header within the file that makes it look
different -- and incompatible. To get an iPod-format MPEG4 to
play on a PSP, you have to either convert the file using software like
the free PSP
Video 9 or Sony's own PSP Media Manager; or use a utility that is supposed to flip the header bits: AtomChanger.
I didn't have any luck making AtomChanger work, but truthfully, I
didn't spend a lot of time working at it.
Podcasting For podcasts, PSP Media Manager software is excellent and makes it easy for the user. Although Sony sells it separately, it
should be included with the device, in my opinion. It handles
RSS subscriptions, automatically does any file format conversions
necessary for the PSP, also manages photos, music and games on the device, and makes the process seamless for the user.
Alternatively, PSP Video 9 combined with Videora
provides a no-cost, although less seamless, solution for podcasting and
file conversions.
For those of us producing podcast content for these devices,
I think the best answer is still to encode for the iPod.
Audio, of course, should be MP3 - then you support everyone.
For video, software like PSP Video 9 and PSP Media Manager mean that PSP
users can use the same media that iPod users can. But if
you're looking to deliver video content directly online to PSP Web
surfers (see the next paragraph), you'll need to provide MPEG4 files in the PSP
format.
PSP for Browsing the Web
The Sony PSP is a fine wireless Web device in its own
right.
It took me about ten minutes to get it up and running on my
home WiFi network
(802.11g), complete with WEP authentication. The internal Web
browser is
adequate, although the way you "type" text (a URL, for
example) on the
device is clunky. You can surf the Web, and download audio and video files directly to the device.
Instructional Technology Innovation for Business Education
Business Week has done a quick rundown this week of how B-Schools
Promote Better Learning Through Technology.
They surveyed 27 top B-Schools
about how technology is
affecting teaching and learning at the school. Topics range
from Wikis to Blogs to Podcasts, as well as some interesting
technology
hybrids (such as audio-annotated Excel spreadsheet tutorials) and
classroom technology. HBS isn't among those schools profiled, but some of our
work in these areas is detailed on the HBS IT Website.
One point raised by the article is a most important fact about
education - business education is fundamentally a social
process.
Will
these technologies eventually make face-to-face classroom meetings
obsolete? Not a chance, say B-school faculty members. Instead,
implementing these new technologies is a way for them to free up time
in the classroom for activities like business games, simulations,
debates, and discussions.
In his recent book,
In the Bubble:
Designing in a Complex World,
John Thackara echoes this theme, and talks about HBS' approach
to Instructional Technology as a means to enhance the interpersonal
experience of learning rather than to replace it. Here's a
snippet.
Simulations,
databases, statistical and industry analyses, are intensively used
learning 'objects' among
Harvard's MBA students and researchers. Online cases, audiovisual
material, and
computer-based exercises are useful extras, and "online is a microcosm
of the new working environment graduates will encounter when they
leave". "The goal", says Bouthillier, "is the emergence of Harvard
Business School as an integrated enterprise that organises and connects
information, and people, in a dynamic and
continuous way".
Business schools like Harvard's are working hard to add value to
– not substitute – a central function of
universities: connectivity among a community of scholars and peers.
Their approach uses the internet to
bring people together –
not the opposite, as with pure distance education. Learning at all
levels, as John Seely Brown has observed, “relies ultimately
on personal interaction and, in particular, on a range of implicit and
peripheral forms of communication that technology is still very far
from being able to handle”
I've been working on solutions for a learning exercise that will team
up students from a dozen universities around the world. The
teams will collaborate to produce a business plan, but they need to
work asynchronously due to the global time issues. I've been
looking at Wikis as one part of the solution - a common workspace where
teams can group-edit a set of documents they're preparing.
But Wikis have disadvantages -they're too geeky to use, and very
limited in the kinds of documents you can build. If you're
used to Word, Excel, or even a decent HTML builder like Nvu,
the best wiki may still cramp your style. But then I came
upon Writely,
by way of Dave Lee at the Learning
Circuits blog and Harold Jarche's blog.
Writely is a lot of things - you can start with a Word or OpenOffice
document, edit it online as HTML, upload it to your blog, export it as
Word, OpenOffice, or RTF. It tracks versions, revision
history., diffs, all by user and date. From the point of view
of my immediate need for collaborative workspace for globally
distributed students, it's a wiki with rich formatting and
tons of input and output options.
Officially a Beta, Writely may not be useful for my immediate purpose.
As with many corporate or institutional uses, I'd need some
kind of custom branding, an easier way to manage accounts and access,
and more peace of mind than that provided by a "beta" site.
For this project, we'll continue to look for a wiki that isn't awful...but something like a
fully-baked Writely will be the standard to meet.
The DITA team at IBM has developed an
XML-based information architecture for learning content.
DITA is the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, a design
pattern for assembling topics into deliverables. Say what?
I didn't get it either, until I shared the stage with IBM's
John Hunt at last week's Gilbane Conference on Content Management in
Boston
[Developing Sustainable Content Strategies].
After seeing John's presentation, I realized that what his
team did with DITA gets to the very heart of a longstanding problem
with creating reusable learning objects.
In
a nutshell, DITA provides an extensible structure for organizing
content into reusable blocks. At the lowest level, a "DITA topic
forms the most basic information unit -- short enough to be easily
readable, but long enough to make sense on its own." At the
top level, a map
applies context to topics and organizes them into a deliverable
information product. DITA is totally generic with respect to
the content it can organize, but what John's information architecture
team did is to extend DITA to represent an academic learning curriculum.
There've been two great challenges to widesperead adoption of
reusable learning objects (even though it's what everyone who develops
learning content says we want).
First, breaking
content down into truly useful reusable chunks is and remains
a daunting challenge. A chunk too small can be too bereft of
context to be practical to find and then assemble into larger learning
topics. A chunk too big and context-rich is likely to require
modification in order to fit smoothly into a larger topic.
And even if "chunks" are right-sized, stringing them together
might create a learning module with the right content but be cold and
uninviting to a reader. The transitions and continuity
that can bring personality and vibrancy to courseware are
lost.
Second, is the lack of a
standard technical architecture for containing and assembling reusable
chunks. Standards like SCORM describe the delivery and
packaging model for learning content, without addressing the
structure of the content itself at all. DITA fills that gap.
It says nothing about how you package and deliver
material, but focuses entirely on the structure of the educational
content itself.
For
organizations developing learning content, a framework like DITA can
help instructional designers think about common structure that can
apply to all learning objects. Having to create subtopics
like the learningAssessment can help guide decisions about right-sizing
a learning topic.
On the technical side, organizing content into an XML
structure creates opportunities for authoring/assembly tools,
template-based delivery, searchable learning object databases, and
content that can be shared amongst organizations.
One project I've been involved in, the HBS Tutorial Platform, has created an entire XML
data model to do exactly what the DITA has done, but with a narrower
focus on meeting the immediate needs of the institution and the
delivery system. The beauty of the DITA framework is its
practicality - in the first moments of looking at it, I could see how
it fits perfectly with all the needs of our existing system, as well as
adding significant new opportunites to organize our content for reuse.
Because
of constant change in our environment, processes are
outdated the immediately after they are designed. The 90s business
process re-engineering model intended to introduce change, but was
driven by experts which simply delivered another set of frozen
processes.
The discussion is about innovation, and running an
innovative organization. Boothby addresses the
balance between necessary process and empowering standards.
I
think it is important to note that a structured environment for
supporting innovation, with some process for sharing information and
ideas is fine - but those standards are standards of interaction - they
are not standards of thought and not standards for what innovative
solutions are built
Process
management can drag organizations down and dampen innovation.
"In the appropriate setting, process management activities can help
companies improve efficiency, but the risk is that you misapply these
programs, in particular in areas where people are supposed to be
innovative," notes Benner. "Brand new technologies to produce products
that don't exist are difficult to measure. This kind of innovation may
be crowded out when you focus too much on processes you can measure."
As someone who runs an innovative software development organization, I
can attest to the challenge of maintaining balance. You need
enough process to keep the business running, but overall, the
innovation comes from highly talented, informed people
working in a relatively process-free environment. A former
boss and mentor recently showed me the body of work her small,
innovative team is doing at her new job. The services and
architecture being deployed online are dramatically impacting the
entire business of a major institution with over 20,000
employees. Her comment says it all:
The reason we can do this because we minimize process.
One of my colleagues at Harvard Business School has started a new Weblog to explore the uses of blogging for instruction and collaboration. Denis Saulnier's Learning Technology weblog is the kernel of a great Learning Technology resource.
Speaking of which - this weblog has been dormant for a time as I've been flat-out with other work. I spent a good part of the day upgrading Movable Type from 2.6 to 3.2 and upgrading my templates and blog configuration as well. MT 3.2 is a vast improvement, with nestable template modules that work kind of like Server Side Includes and lots of new plugins.
The last few months I have been consumed with explorations in Podcasting, Video Podcasting, authenticated iTunes feeds, tools and APIs built upon Google's Map API, an Endeca-style guided navigation application driven entirely client-side (and with an Excel document as its data source!), Movable Type vs. the impressive but less-entrenched Expression Engine, educational simulations and games...Stay tuned for details about all of these...
"A Willingness to Tinker and Teach Themselves" Learning Technology Through Tinkering
Teaching
teachers how to effectively use technology for teaching is imperative,
according to Gary Kaye writing in his article in this
week's Campus Technology,
[The
computer] is not just for
PowerPoint presentations and browsing the Internet. In fact,
it’s imperative that we integrate AV-based and interactive
technologies into every element of the schools or we’ll have
a generation of kids that can’t pay attention and are bored.
[...] We’ve added PowerPoint, PDFs and even fancy
Web browsing to the
curriculum, but can we all agree someone who’s got a GameBoy
with them
in their backpack is going to be bored in virtually any lecture-style
course?
Then
came a host of other technological
gear and software that was well-meaning, but difficult to use.
Thousands of titles. All, cheap, readily available and ultimately better
understood by the pupil than the teacher. Why? No training.
And then responds:
The
bottom line is, they're more
comfortable tinkering. In fact, a willingness to tinker with
computers is what landed me a position as an Information Technology
director just a few years after receiving a Secondary Math Education
degree. And that's my main point: these instructors need to
develop a willingness to tinker and teach themselves.
It's a constant problem, even within IT organizations, that to stay on
top of new technology requires tinkering. This has happened
to me
many times. I'll write an article for streamingmedia.com
or a white paper for a corporate client on some technical topic outside
my usual day-to-day experience, and as a result of research and
tinkering, learn something new. For me, that knowledge
typically
becomes useful in other (unrelated) domains just about 100% of the
time. My review
of NetLimiter
was just such an example - within weeks of writing that, my group at
Harvard Business School needed just such a tool for stress-testing some
Flash components and I happened to have the right info top-of-mind.
None of this will be a surprise to folks reading this blog - we're all
techies and we know that often, the knowledge and connecting-the-dots
that comes from tinkering can't be achieved any other way.
But
here's why the teachers in Kaye's article above aren't as tech-savvy as
their students - the students often have little better to do than
tinker! Those of us with jobs, families, mortgages and lawns
to
mow can't always find the unstructured time to explore the uses for new
technology.
Bottom line: Too often, tinkering at work looks a lot like
"doing
nothing:" But properly valued -- and managed
(with an overall strategic direction, boundaries and
appropriate guidance)
-- tinkering time can be an essential training tool for
IT
workers, teachers, and anyone else working with (creating with!)
technology.
Distance Learning - Is Streaming Lectures "good-enough"?
In Simplifying
the Recording and Streaming of Instructor-Led Presentations, James Dias
writes that most College and University faculty don't have the expertise
to develop truly effective and exceptional instructional materials. Institutions
can either hire expensive teams of instructional designers and multimedia
developers, or they have to resort to Plan B.
Plan B is recording and streaming the classroom lecture as-is - a technical
process that re-uses the classroom format for distance learners. He
argues that doing simple lecture-capturing for distance learning isn't as
good as doing custom instructional media, but it's more accessible to most
schools and most students. ('Course, he works for a company that sells
classroom-capture stations, so he'd naturally be positive on that.)
But he inadvertently brings up a key point - that classroom capture as a
way to replace in-class learning will eventually relegate lecture-style learning
to being a commodity. If most students aren't really physically present,
then you don't need 37 colleges in Massachusetts all doing their own version
of Accounting 101.
On the other hand, institutions that create and distribute best-of-breed
original content (especially advanced-level content) will maintain (even
increase) their relevance in the market. Other winners? Eeducational
institutions that have classroom and distance learning techniques that add
value above and beyond the lecture, such as:
"Eyetrack" study of the effectiveness of multimedia learning
What do people *really* look at on a web page? Do multimedia,
graphics, and audio really help deliver a message? Does design
matter?
All these questions and more are addressed by the new study published
by the Poynter Institute. The Eyetrack III
report covers "Online news consumer behavior in the age of
multimedia". These folks looked at how people read dozens of news
site web pages and learned some things that won't surprise us and some
that will, such as:
ads that appear at the bottom of a page or far to the right
margin don't get looked at
that underlining a headline duscouraged people from reading the
text blurb below it. The underline serves as a visual break that
stops the eye.
brief paragraphs that contain only one or two sentences get seen
and read more
smaller text encouarages reading rather than scanning of pages
users recall specific factual information better when they read
it in text, but they understand concepts and processes better when they
see it in an illustration or animation
It's not a comprehensive, controlled study of a large population, but
it's some very interesting reading for folks who create web and
multimedia sites.
For producing streaming media demos and training materials, as well as
traditional MS Powerpoint/OpenOffice Impress-style slideshows, there's
nothing as elegant and simple as screen recording technology.
Using special lossless codecs, you can get a perfect reproduction of
your computer screen (or a portion of it) in less than 40kbps, less
than 8kbps if it's as simple as just flipping among slides.
In two pieces on streamingmedia.com, I take a look first at Screen
Recording technology in general, along with a brief overview of
TechSmith's Camtasia and follow up with a review of
OPTx's Screenwatch.
In a nutshell, these are two tools that do more-or-less the same thing,
but for very different kinds of users. Camtasia is a great tool
for the individual creator doing one-offs, while Screenwatch is an
industrial-strength product for creating a scalable process in
educational institutions and enterprises.
The Virtue of Disorder: Sloppiness, Serendipity, and Openness in Educational Materials
When I wrote my recent
tutorial article on Creative Commons licensing for video content, I
looked for examples of where the liberal terms of a CC license served
the purposes of a broad spectrum of society. It's easy for the SCOs of the
world, along with the RIAA and MPAA and other extremists, to paint CC
and GPL and other nuanced applications of copyright as being some
pinko-commie-leftie plot to undermine the economy and society and Mom
and apple pie and all that's good in the world.
I think I did an OK job demonstrating that that's not the case - that
reasonable people everywhere can benefit from applying copyright law
with a fine touch rather than the sledgehammer approach of "All Rights
Reserved". In this most excellent piece in this month's
Syllabus magazine, James Boyle reflects
on copyright and digital restrictions as they affect educators and
teaching. In the piece, adapted Boyle's keynote address, "The
Virtue of Disorder: Sloppiness, Serendipity, and Openness in
Educational Materials" given at the Syllabus 2003 conference, Boyle
explains the power of the Internet as...
...that which makes available to me
your thoughts on how to teach calculus to 10th graders; that nifty
little graph that you have for showing fractionation in a distillation
process; that beautiful animated GIF illustration of a molecule which
is sitting on your course Web page; the nice song that you made; the
photograph you took of the Civil War Memorial or the
battlefield.
Now can you use that stuff? He goes on to explain why Creative
Commons licensing can help educators.
Our new system of copyrighting
everything the moment it’s fixed ... means there are vast numbers of
people—and educators are the best example—producing things that they
affirmatively want to share, putting them out there, and having other
people say, “I just don’t know if I’m allowed to photocopy this to my
class. Every time I think twice about that. Every time, I try to
contact you, send you an e-mail, get your permission when you in fact
never wanted to copyright the thing in the first place or at least are
perfectly happy for me to reproduce it.”
That is a loss, a social loss, every bit as real as the loss suffered
when someone pirates a song. It’s a loss from failed sharing, a loss
from failed collaboration. It doesn’t mean we should give up on
fighting the losses from piracy, but it means we should counterbalance
that by [considering] other kinds of losses that are produced when we
have a system so ill-tuned.
eLearning and Knowlege Management - two sides of the same coin?
The recent Streaming Media CA conference was co-located with a Knowledge
Management conference (KM World). It turns out that many companies are
starting to realize that training and staff development are about
getting people the skills and knowledge they need, when they need
them. That's a pretty close definition for KM, too - being able
to find what you know, when you need to know it.
What brought this to mind was an instructional design meeting I had
this morning with a professor who is trying to transform the way the
quantitative elements of his discipline are taught. There are
tutorial handouts (Notes) that explain some highly mathematical
concepts that are necessary for complete understanding of the market
dynamics being taught. They're important supporting information,
but not the core point of the course. Since the Notes are
difficult for non-specialists to get through, and students are
massively overwhelmed with other, more central learning objectives, the
students rarely read them. The professor:
"They're not interested in what's in
the Note until they can't do something they need to do."
The solution? Contextual learning, bringing information they
didn't know they needed just when they need it, minimizing the amount
of time it takes to absorb and apply the learning to the task at
hand. Sounds a lot like Knowledge Management, no?
Here's a terrific piece in
Wired about MIT's OpenCourseware initiative and how it's affecting
learning worldwide. It's open-source for education. MIT
knows that information is not education - by giving away its courseware
they are not uindermining the value of an MIT education. What
they are doing is increasing their influence and prestige, and
furthering the goals of educating people everywhere. It's "make
the pie bigger" thinking at its best.
When
MIT announced to the world in April 2001 that it would be posting the
content of some 2,000 classes on the Web, it hoped the program - dubbed
OpenCourseWare - would spur a worldwide movement among educators to
share knowledge and improve teaching methods. ... At
a time when most enterprises were racing to profit from the Internet
and universities were peddling every conceivable variant of distance
learning, here was the pinnacle of technology and science education
ready to give it away.
In the world of just-in-time training and corporate "universities", how
will the mega-expensive Ivy League schools differentiate sufficiently
from the disrputive alternatives? In the words of Harvard's Clay
Christensen, insitutions like MIT can become the "Intel Inside" of
their educational areas. Primary sources, original research and
knowledge creation have always been the hallmarks of top-level
schools. Now, having immediate and relevant "reach" to
individuals and educational institutions worldwide is becoming part of
the currency that measures value in the knowledge economy. Says
program director Ann Margulies:
"Part
of our stated mission is to be more than just a project at MIT," says
Margulies, "to evolve into a movement, to help other universities
develop a model."
On the topic of weblogs and education, a great string of content-rich
comments follows this post
by Dave Winer at the Berkman Center's BloggerCon 2003 weblog.
Dave asked:
Who is leading in use of weblogs in
education? Who do you look to for insight and inspiration? That's who I
want for BloggerCon.
He got some great answers that will interest educators. It'll
take some time to explore the wealth of information that's linked here.
Is SlideML the solution to needing a vendor-independent synchronized media format?
I may have found a partial answer to my
prior question about a vendor-neutral and platform-neutral format
for describing synchronized sideshows for streaming on the Web.
OSCOM (Open Source Content Management) is developing the SlideML spec, which is an XML
format for describing the content of slides. Simple stylesheet
templates can transform it to be displayed in many display formats,
including HTML,
PDF, Docbook, and others.
Why is this cool? Several reasons that I find immensely
compelling. From the SlideML
website:
The first benefit of this is, that you
can display your presentation for different purposes in different
formats like HTML, PDF, SVG and others. The SlideML site will provide a
CSS version as well as several XSLT's so that you can start right now
writing SlideML.
The second benefit is, that your SlideML
will also be readable in say ten, twenty years, something Powerpoint
and other Binary Formats will have a lot of problems with for sure.
What's more, it enables delivery and client-side capability that
Powerpoint itself can never offer. For example, Jon Udell is developing a
slide search capability that takes place right in the browser.
In another example, someone's been doing SlideML with SMIL to create
the kind of synchronized media I originally was talking about.
Finally -- all this platform and vendor-neutral effort won't matter if
the major slideshow authoring programs don't support it. OpenOffice/StarOffice does
use XML as its native data format for all documents, so that's a
good start.
Streaming Media in Higher Ed: Possibilities and Pitfalls
Streaming media is an important, if not essential, component of
distance learning and eLearning efforts. Brian Klass, in this
month's Syllabus
Magazine makes a key point about your implementation and content
strategy:
Streaming media has been offered
up as a solution to a wide variety of problems: how to connect
students and faculty at a distance, to deliver core course content,
and where to find new sources of revenue for cash-strapped institutions.
Without proper consideration of the audience receiving streaming
media, however, the promise of this technology might quickly turn
into frustration for all involved.
To that end, he makes several important points that I would paraphrase
as:
Keep it simple (keep the technology simple straightforward and
easy to work with)
Keep it simple for faculty to do (low investment of faculty time
is essential)
Flash is a great tool, but not simple or cheap (for content
creators)
Don't skimp when it comes to the quality of A/V production - get
professionals with professional equipment
Audio often works as well as video, and is a whole lot cheaper to
produce and deliver
It's a gentle meander through some assorted topics in educational
streaming media and is worthwhile reading.