Penn State Learning Design Community Hub

Google has added a tool to generate automatic captions on videos based on automatic speech recognition. As with Dragon Naturally Speaking, you have to check output captions for accuracy, but it's free (or at least cheap) and it's a start if you post content to YouTube. This would be especially helpful for student project videos.

See info and demo at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/automatic-captions-in-youtube.htm...

If you or a faculty member wish to submit a proposal, you can do so at http://symposium.tlt.psu.edu/conference/proposals.

You can watch the Oct 12 presentation on accessibility live on Adobe Connect at  https://breeze.psu.edu/accessibility/

It will also be recorded.

FYI - There will be a session on accessibility in online education. It will feature David Cunningham  demoing how real users process documents on a screen reader and Elizabeth discussing NEW examples of implementing accessibility online.

In recent years, Pat Besong of ITS had developed and offered a captioning tool for the Mac called "Parity." This tool has now been released as MovCaptioner from http://www.synchrimedia.com.

It is still free for Penn State users. You can contact Pat Besong (pzb@psu.edu) for information on how to obtain a license.

The cost for users outside of Penn State is approximately $40, but it does support a wide range of caption types including Quicktime, Flash, YouTube, video poscast and more.

I will be presenting two overview sessions of the TWT Certificate program in the Thanksgiving week Fall Fest. The talk will cover the structure of the program, resources and show example portfolios and answer questions you may have.

If you know graduate student instructors at UP or Harrisburg interested in creating a tech po sure about some details, this may be a good session for them.

I've been in contact with our eInstruction consultant asking whether his company would be addressing the high cost of clickers, considering the free applications becoming available including the possible use of cell phones instead of clickers. He said that an option available for the University for piloting beginning in January 2010 is pay-as-you-go for students. Students would be able to purchase clickers at the bookstore for $24, and then pay a registration fee of $13/semester (that's per semester and NOT per class) for the first 3 semesters.

You may also join in via Adobe Connect at  https://breeze.psu.edu/psuldc/  . NOTE THE NEW URL!!!!

Gary Chinn will lead a discussion on a recent study of effectiveness of online learning methods down by the US Dept. of Ed.

I've attached two docs - One is a 2-page summary Gary did on this; the other is the study itself.

Please do read the summary, and feel free to dive into the study itself.

Does anyone have any other agenda items? Please let me know!

From ITS News

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ITS has  increased the amount of personal storage space available to University community members from the current 5 gigabyte (GB) maximum, to 10GB. Participants are initially allocated 500MB of online storage space upon receipt of a Penn State Access Account.

Users can increase their storage allocationsfrom 5GB to 10GB via the ITS Secure Server's quota utility at https://www.work.psu.edu/.

For more details, read the story at http://news.its.psu.edu/story-1132