Google announced last week that they are introducing an automatic captioning facility for YouTube videos. In the official Google blog they state that every minute 20 hours of video are uploaded. The chances of each individual video owner taking the time and effort to caption each of their videos is unlikely. It means that most user generated content on the video sharing site is inaccessible to people who are Deaf or hearing impaired.
It uses their own automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology combined with the existing YouTube captioning system to automatically produce captions – auto-caps for short. It is initially only available on a number of mainly educational channels. Although ASR has been around for a while in the GoogleVoice application it has never been deployed on such a large-scale before.
An additional facility that has also been introduced is automatic timing. If a video owner already has a transcript, they can upload this as a text file with the video and the software will automatically link the words in the transcript with the sounds on the video.
Both of these features are not only suitable for viewers with hearing difficulties but make content available in more languages. The facility is only available in English but using the Google translation tool they can be translated into a number of languages.
Obviously this is not an exact science and mistakes are bound to occur but even with the problems, auto-caps is a major step forward in making all videos accessible.
This week I was fortunate enough to be able to attend Handheld Learning 2009 at the Old Brewery in the Barbican in London. This was the ‘world’s leading event about learning using mobile and inexpensive access technologies’. There was an impressive list of speakers and for most of the conference more than one strand happening at a time.
The first day is known as the Festival and is free. In the afternoon there were very well attended sessions on ‘Learners Y Factor’ hosted by Jason Bradbury from the Gadget Show. This involves selected school children showcasing the work they have been doing to a live audience and a panel of judges. Having learners talk about their work is an excellent idea and probably something we should think about for our annual event. Alongside this was the ever popular Pecha Kucha, an idea which we did use this year. Both these events were very over subscribed and it was difficult to even get into the room never mind find a seat.
Tuesday was the first day of the conference proper and was opened by an interesting speech by Zenna Atkins who is the non-executive chair of ofsted. She certainly surprised me with her discussion on a possible future vision of education. She envisaged an education system which allows learners to ‘benchmark’ their abilities against others as and when they felt able. She repeatedly referred to pupils and their parents as consumers and their role in pushing educational reform. One memorable comment of hers was that ‘Schools are not about education and learning they are insitutions’. She did however, frequently state that these were her opinions and not those of ofsted.
Malcolm McLaren followed her with an entertaining wander through his early educational experiences and how he was inspired by early art professors to strive for ‘magnificent failure’. His tirade against what he termed ‘karaoke culture’ was thought provoking. Yvonne Roberts managed to alienate me in her first sentence by making a facile remark about dyslexia and then went on to offend the whole room. I think she probably had something valuable to say but as an example of how to turn an audience off it was priceless.
I’ll just mention a few of the highlights for me. John Davitt opened the afternoon session on Creativity and Innovation. He started with a slimmed down ‘Blooms Taxonomy’ – Know – Show – Grow- Flow. He showcased his random activity generator for the iPhone to – “put lesson planning back where it should be – in the corridor on they way to the classroom”. The audience produced a new font using fontcapture.com and also a ‘twit-school’ using google apps.
The final morning had the sub-title Inclusion. This was inclusion in its broadest sense with speakers talking about home access computers, One laptop per child and game based learning. Professor Elizabeth Hayes is doing some fascinating work on gender and social exclusion using a version of the Sims game. It is a mod based on the best selling book by Barbara Ehrenreich on (not) getting by in modern America. Finally Sal Cooke from Techdis highlighted the good work that is already going on in all sectors and thanked the delegates themselves.
As well as the conference there was an exhibition and I was particularly taken with the product from Sanako. This was developed as a language teaching facility but it is an excellent classroom mangement system which could be used for many subjects.
The conferece had a hash tag – #hhl09 which managed to get into the top 10 globally on the Tuesday morning. If you search twitter for this be prepared – there are thousands of posts and shows how twitter can be so effective. A couple of memorable tweets included ‘great – if I miss anything , someone else will tweet it’ and ‘are power sources the new water coolers’ a reference to the sight of lots of people sitting in huddles round the plug sockets!
Finally I’d like to say congratulations to Sandra Taylor from Ashton Sixth Form College who won the secondary teacher award at the award ceremony on Monday night. It was a great conference, one of the best, well done Graham and the team from Learning without Frontiers.
For those not familiar with AccessApps and its now full suit of applications – EduApps, the team at RSC North East Scotland have produced a ‘Common Craft’ style video.
On a personal level AccessApps has provided access to learning providers that I had previously not been in contact with. I’ve done staff development for learning support staff and only a week or so ago was doing training for the inclusive learning team at Preston College. What a creative bunch they were with some excellent versions of ‘Let it Be’ and ‘My favourite things’ amongst the work done using Audacity. On a more flippant note – AccessApps has provided more free lunches than any bit of kit in the last 3 years! So thanks Craig and the chaps at NE Scotland and keep up the good work!
Nokia Labs have produced a application that reads sms messages in braille. No it doesn’t produce raised bumps on the screen but vibrates for each letter according to which of the 6 dots in the braille cell are raised. The buzz will be loud or soft according to the status of the dot. This in effect means that there are 6 different ‘buzzes’ for each letter.
Braille users are very enthusiastic about using braille but I wonder how difficult it will be to wait for 840 buzzes for a full 140 character text message. the application is free to download here. As I’m not a brailler, I’ll wait for feedback from those who are.
The LSC has announced that a further £2.5 million capital funding will be available for MoLeNET 3. For those not familiar with MoLeNET it stands for ‘Mobile Learning Network‘ and is a scheme administered by the LSN (Learning and Skills Network) to encourage the use of mobile technology for teaching and learning in the FE sector.
As a team we held a collaborative event at Preston College last week. We had 31 delegates from learning providers across the North West of England and were delighted to welcome Dr Geoff Foot, the MoLeNET project manager. Among the delegates were some college who had already had successful phase 1 or 2 bids and they shared their experiences. It was clear that there is a considerable amount of work involved in running a project and the actual cost is over and above the 20% paid in advance to LSN.
As the deadline approaches, we are aware that there are colleges who would still like more information before making any decisions, so we have organised a further online event on Tuesday 1 September at 12.30. We’ll be using Adobe connect and again Geoff Foot has agreed to be online to answer questions from learning providers.
Details of the event can be found here with a booking form here.
I’ve been to a couple of events showcasing the rollout of the new in-folio eportfolio system developed for specialist colleges by JISC TechDis and the Rix centre. The system is simple and can be built up to produce a good body of evidence of achievement and progress. I’ll be building up my own in the next few months with a view to using it for presentations. There are still a few bugs, but they are small and they should be ironed out by September for a full start up with a number of colleges.
As part of the day Nick Weldin from the Rix Centre (named after the actor Brian Rix – head of Mencap) also did some demonstrations of some of the things they are looking at currently. These include the Asus smart log-in (and he is the only person I’ve met who can pronounce it properly! – Asus that is) and the Wii tap. I’ve just got to get one of these – how cool is this for specialist college learners.
I’ll report back on other stuff when I’ve had a go – if I can make it work then there’s a chance it should be easy.
Nice to see that the good people at CommonCraft have got some mainstream coverage. See this report in Newsweek magazine. In the meantime here is another of their videos. We are so looking forward to having Lee with us online for our conference.
Wednesday was the CETIS Accessibility SIG (special interest group) meeting in Bangor in North Wales. My what a long way away that is! The taxi picked me up at 5.50 am and I got home at about 10 pm. However, it was an excellent day with some really good presentations and the chance to talk and meet other people in the same line of ‘business’. The first presentation was from Dr Elaine Pearson from Teesside University, Accessibility Research Centre on a symbol based VLE for learners at Portland College. They’re doing some really interesting work on adaptable learning objects and VLEs.
E A Draffan gave an introduction to the Lexdis project which is exploring the eLearning experiences of disabled students at Southampton University. It contains a whole range of useful resources including guides for making accessible learning materials, . It’s worth while spending some time hunting round the site – lots of good stuff there. She also went through the Techdis Web2Access site which comments on the accessibility or otherwise of various Web 2.0 applications.
After lunch Craig my colleague from RSC North East Scotland did his presentation on AccessApps. This started as a small project to provide free assistive software on a USB stick and it’s grown and matured into a fantastic resource for both teachers and learners. They are now developing TeachApps and LearnApps to complement the orignal. We heard this morning that the team have just won a prestigious IMS Global Learning Consortium Award for accessibility. Well done guys.
Finally it was my turn and as usual I didn’t stick to what I’d prepared and wandered about the subject (Accessible Log-ins) with the promise to send the presenation for later. The Specialist Colleges in the North West had given me some really good resources and I emphasised that there were no actual ’solutions’. I’ll post seperately on this. All in all an interesting and constructive day .
On Tuesday we held a mobile learning event at the Leyland Hotel, just off the M6 near Preston. We’d had quite a few problems with the organisation, totally down to me being unprepared and not giving myself time to do things. Fortunately, Kev stepped in and he and Helen our events organiser managed to put a programme together. In the end it was a really great day. Dave Sugden gave a brilliant introduction to mobile learning and the MoLeNet projects and then Paul Coulton from Lancaster University showed some fab stuff that he’s working on. He’s part of a Nokia group of developers and a lot of their work can be found on the MobileRadicals wiki. He demonstrated locoblog in which photos and GPS can give an accurate representation of where you’ve been and various games which incorporated a heart monitor and involved jumping in order to ‘fire’ – who needs a Wii fit? The list of applications that the group are working on is huge and it’s worth checking out the wiki – I’m sure someone will be able to use these for learning out in the FE community. one of the applications was the production of 3d photographs. This of course involved wearing the silly glasses – so attractive.
For the rest of the day we had presentations from 8 different colleges and all very different. We saw and had a go at using Nintendo DS, iPods, PSPs and saw lots of evidence of learning taking place in a less traditional way. If the Nintendo DS have done nothing else they have made mental arithmatic cool! Interestingly, 5 of the 8 presentations involved projects for learners with some sort of learning difficulty or disability.
Sheena from Trafford had the delegates lined up and ’speed dating’ discussing steps to acheiving collaborative learning. As someone who bangs on about collaboarative learning it was a bit of an ‘Allelluia’ moment for me.
The final presentation of the day was from Colin Hawksworth from Birkenhead Sixth form on encouraging learners to use their own devices – another Hallelluia from me!
We’d set up a hashtag for twitter and other feeds - #MNW09 and were delighted to get nearly 4 pages of posts! – definitely a something we’ll use again. By the end of the day, I was pretty exhausted and so probably didn’t do a very comprehensive feedback but it was a great day with lots of sharing of ideas and discussions.
As well as getting ready for the conference the day to day activity of the team goes on. One amazingly productive member of the team is our own John Dalziel (pronounced Dee-ell). He has produced a wide range of e-books and is the sole writer, editor and publisher of our monthly e-magazine. He unbelievably also manages the output from our TV station – yes a TV station. RSC TV runs a 20-30 minute loop of material which is changed every month. It usually includes one or more of the Commoncraft videos mentioned in the previous post. Some subscribers to the e-magazine have asked that the information is – fed in a more drip-feed way, and so he now has a blog ‘What DL is happening’ so you can keep up with the new stuff a he finds it. He kindly sends me links for stuff that would be useful for those teaching more complex learners so I’ll put them up here as and when I get them. As well as all this, he does find the time to be our ACL adviser.
