January 16, 2009

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:

<location>
    rtmp://mirror-image.bloggingheads.tv/bloggingheads/flash
</location>
<identifier>bhtv-2009-01-13-pb-jg-100x.flv</identifier>
<meta rel="alternate">
   rtmp://mirror-image.bloggingheads.tv/bloggingheads/flash/bhtv-2009-01-13-pb-jg-140x.flv
</meta>

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.

December 13, 2007

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.  

Harvard Business School Professor Andy McAfee writes, in Facebook on the Intranet? No -- Facebook AS the Intranet, about Serena Software's employing Facebook as its intranet portal.   Bill Ives goes into more detail:

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.

December 03, 2007

Video Transcript Browsing Interface

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.  

What's also interesting is the implementation:  a client-side Flash applet handles the whole thing by reading a single XML file that contains the entire contents of the debate in text form.  

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"?

June 26, 2007

The New RealPlayer 11 - A First Look

The new, "web-video-download-center" version of RealPlayer (Is RealPlayer Going to Make a Comeback?) is out this morning. [Download RealPlayer 11]  Some first impressions:
  • 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. Screenshot of RealPlayer download button on Brightcove page
  • 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.

June 21, 2007

Is RealPlayer going to make a comeback?

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:
  1. The player is small and unobtrusive, with a quick, easy install that asks no questions, takes over nothing, and generally leaves you alone.
  2. 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.

Dan Rayburn at the Business of Online Video blog wonders what's the business advantage to Real?

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?

He's not alone.  Real's CEO Rob Glaser makes his case in his post The World Isn't Flat, and responds directly to Rafat Ali's "Open Questions to Rob Glaser" in his own RealNetworks Blog post.

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.

April 13, 2007

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?  


April 12, 2007

e-Learning 2.0 - The End of the Course?

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.


February 16, 2007

Online Video Industry Index

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.

January 04, 2007

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. 

A new whitepaper from Akamai (also available free from streamingmedia.com) goes into some depth about the special factors that affect social networking sites.  Some highlights:
  • 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.  

December 01, 2006

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.  

November 15, 2006

Is Learning Online Like Watching Football on TV?

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. 
  

October 30, 2006

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.  

Anyway, shortly after reading Denis' thorough summary of learning simulations (and a great outline of Clark Aldrich’s Learning By Doing: A Comprehensive Guide to Simulations, Computer Games, and Pedagogy in e-Learning and Other Educational Experiences), I came across the Federation of American Scientists report from their recent Summit on Educational Games (2006).  

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. 

October 19, 2006

Code snippet to embed video in a page

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:
<script src="http://www.learningapi.com/blog/scripts/embedRealVideo.js" type="text/javascript" 
clipUrl=""rtsp://video2.harvard.edu/newsoffc/EOWilson.rm" >
</script>

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");
    }

document.write('<embed type="audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin"
src="'+pClipUrl+'"
width="320" height="240"
controls="ImageWindow" autostart="FALSE" console="Clip1"></embed><br>');
document.write('<embed type="audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin"
src="'+pClipUrl+'"
width="320" height="30"
controls="StatusBar" autostart="FALSE" console="Clip1"></embed><br>');
document.write('<embed type="audio/x-pn-realaudio-plugin"
src="'+pClipUrl+'"
width="320" height="26"
controls="ControlPanel" autostart="FALSE" console="Clip1"></embed>');


June 13, 2006

Podcasting and MPEG4 video -- the PSP problem

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.

January 06, 2006

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”

December 20, 2005

A Wiki, turbocharged

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. 

December 09, 2005

Use DITA XML to develop reusable learning content

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.  

IBM Developer Works ImageIn 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.   
IBM Image - a learning topic mapFor 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.

November 27, 2005

How to discourage innovation: measure everything

(title borrowed from Idea Festival) Of all the quotes that I came across in my exploration that started at Rod Boothby's Rigid Process can Kill Innovation post on his Innovation Creators blog,  my favorite is this: "process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity."  (From Ross Mayfield's essay: The End of Process).  Mayfield says:

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

He goes on to reference work by Harvard Business School's  Michael Tushman and  Wharton's Mary Benner  that show how process management programs discourage innovation.  

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.

The other lesson to that success is about loose coupling between enterprise applications. I'll be talking about that in my talk at the Gilbane Conference on Content Management in Boston this week. More to come on that...

November 06, 2005

Learning Technology Blog

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...

June 14, 2005

"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?

This is immediately followed by a rebuttal in the Campus Technology forum.  The author quotes the original article further:

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.

February 03, 2005

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:
  • unique lab environments, 
  • case-method teaching, 
  • or other experiential learning.

September 08, 2004

"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:

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.

February 11, 2004

Screen recording for fun and profit

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.

November 10, 2003

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.


October 23, 2003

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?

August 27, 2003

Open Courseware

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."

June 23, 2003

Blogging and Education

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.

June 12, 2003

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.    

June 10, 2003

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.