November 29, 2007
Making the Most of Video
A few posts ago, I posted a link to a 3D visualisation of a video clip that allowed you to navigate within a video sequence in a novel way. I just came across a more traditional looking tool on the Yahoo research site going under the name of Yahoo Timetags (the link is to a tagged version of the Yahoo London Hack Day):
The interface allows you to find particular sections of the movie via tags, which are displayed in the right hand, sortable column.
Another in-video search tool I came across last week is the MIT Lecture browser (here's a review of how it works):
a web interface to video recordings of lectures and seminars that have been indexed using automatic speech recognition technology. You can search for topics, much like a regular web search engine. If any results look relevant, you can play the video starting at the relevant point and see the synchronized transcript.
This tool has transcribed a large number of the MIT OCW lectures and lets you search within them, deep linking once again into particular points within the video.
For educational use, where students may want to find and replay particular sections of a video several times, both of these approaches look attractive, and I'd suggest are far more useful than just sticking the content up on Youtube (although putting stuff on YouTube content does have certain advantages, like the ease with which you can produce mashups like my own version of UC Berkeley Lectures on Youtube, via Grazr).
Video search aside, I've been wondering what sorts of circumstances there are under which we might be able to provide our students with 'enrichment' audio/visual content (I'm thinking - old BBC TV and radio programmes here). That is, programmes that are sort of related to a course, but not required viewing in order to complete the course.
A common question at this point is - "but why would students want to watch it if they don't need to for the course?" My answer to that is that presumably some of our students watch TV and/or listen to the radio, anyway, and presumably some of them are actually interested in the topic they are studying - and might watch related programmes out of general interest if they knew they were on.
And then it struck me - changes in broadcasting mean that the broadcast schedule is starting to be replaced by the viewer's personalised schedule. And as viewers/listeners take ever more more control over their leisure time viewing schedule, it provides us with ever more opportunities to slot in enrichment content into those personal schedules that might support - or provide a wider context for - issues covered in particular courses.
For example, I'm working on a course on computer gaming, and it could be interesting to offer students the option - in their own 'leisure' time - of watching the BBC documentary on the History of Tetris, or listening again to Second Lives, which was Radio 4's Book of the Week earlier this year. (Linking up with someone like audio book download specialists Audible might also be interesting?)
The OU's Broadcast Strategy review has already gone in, I think, but I'm not sure it considered the extent to which we might become a "scheduler" or "recommender" of full length archival, broadcast content based around the topic areas covered in a particular course.
The effect of this would be to wrap carefully selected informal content around our formal offerings, and provide a culturally immersive wrapper around a course that would provide enrichment, broaden the student's appreciation of their course (hopefully) and help reuse high quality archival material we have access to.
PS I just picked this up from Jon Udell's blog: a US Presidential debate analyzser from the NY Times. Well worth a look... It reminded of this Presidential debate transcript analyzer from Neoformix, too...
Jon also mentioned the transcript analysis tool available in Flashmeeting, which I probably should give a quick plug to...? ;-)
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Tags: bbc, broadcast, broadcast strategy, video search, timetags
Posted by ajh59 at November 29, 2007 01:43 PM