Penn State Learning Design Community Hub

 Just wanted to let everyone know that we will be holding Multimedia Community group meetings on a monthly basis. Topics will include Flash, video, audio, 3D, podcasting, and basically anything related to multimedia. Our first meeting will be held on Friday, September 26th from 10-11 AM in 202K Rider Bldg. Our first topic will be on transitioning to Actionscript 3.0 for Flash users. We welcome any multimedia developers or others that may be interested in the topics.

University Park

The Digital Commons just posted its Summer workshop schedule at: http://digitalcommons.psu.edu/workshops
Note: Workhops are listed with August workshops at top and July workshops at the bottom.

These are small-group, hands-on workshops, and are highly focused so you can learn the basics of a multimedia software package (such as iMovie, Garageband, or Final Cut Pro) in the duration of 1 hour.

Please register for workshops through ITS Training at http://its.psu.edu/training.

 I was pleased to find out that YouTube finally allows for captioning and annotation of movies. Google Video has supported captioning for some time now, but YouTube's implementation is a bit different. With Google Video, you upload a text file with timestamps (.SRT or .SUB) file and Google Video creates a CC button on your video's interface that allows you to turn captions on and off. With YouTube, you set captions a bit differently. When you log in to YouTube, you go to your My Videos page, find the video you want to caption and select the Edit Annotations button next to it.

Hey gang:

FYI - We've started a new Forum channel called "Multimedia" since there's been so much interest in video, podcasting and the classics like Flash.

As you saw from the recent note from Pat Besing of the ITS Streaming Server team, we're also encouraging our experts to contribute inews tems to the list.

I recently met with the rest of the ITS Streaming Services team, and we discussed the direction we should take with the ITS QT streaming server. One feature that has been asked for is to make it open to student use. This has not been possible in its current iteration due to scalability issues. After some discussion, however, we thought that a good direction would be to eventually store the video assets in individual users' PASS space. This could solve the scalability issue as well as make it easier for anyone to manage their files.

I have a faculty member who has dozens of Flash video clips produced from Camtasia studio. These video clips have been used in his classes for several semesters and had never had audio problems. However, recently the same video clips start giving out sporadic "tweaked noise" - something like playing a fast-forwarded audio cassette - along the normal narration. Meanwhile, any keyboard strikes recorded before now echo so much that they sound like fireworks.

This is an online version of Lloyd Rieber's chapter on reviewing research on educational animations and simulations from the Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning.

Although it shows that physics animations can be effective, there are some interesting caveats to consider:

1. Simulations need to be combined with structured explanation (even a short text was better). That is students, especially at beginning stages, may not be able to use discover learning alone.

A faculty member I am working with would like to create course content incorporating slides (with images) with an audio narration that could be viewed from within ANGEL. Something like what Adobe Presenter produces would be perfect, but that software is PC only, and he works on a Mac and doesn't want to run Windows on his machine. Does anyone have any suggestions for other types of software/freeware that could create something similar on OS X?