Penn State Learning Design Community Hub

I came across an article this morning that I thought might be of interest to some of you (http://maclearning.org/article.php?article_id=83). We've been hearing for a couple of years now that HTML 5 is going to replace the need for Flash and SWF files at our Web sites when we want to embed animations. A new product called "Hype" seems like it will actually make it possible for non-programmer types to accomplish this.

The author notes that the Apple.com Web site makes extensive use of HTML 5. Using Hype, he was able to reproduce one of Apple's Web page animations in just 10 minutes.

A project that I and other members of the Media Commons staff (formerly DMC) are a set of case studies of how several Penn State courses are assigning video projects. The courses include ECON 2, English, kinesiology and marketing.

We tried to describe the projects, the workflow for the student and the grading rubrics. I think we're getting a good idea of what's working and ideas for different video projects.

To see the cases, go to
http://mediacommons.psu.edu/faculty

(Or go to the Media Commons home page and click the mortarboard logo).

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.

In case you have heard, the Lynda.com service for Penn State is now open at
http://its.psu.edu/training/lynda/

FYI - The Adobe Presenter tutorials are now hosted on http://digitalcommons.psu.edu.

To locate them, go to http://digitalcommons.psu.edu/tutorials/, select Adobe Presenter from the "Software" drop-down menu and press the "Submit" button. There are currently 10 tutorials available.

FYI 2 - Only the tutorials for the Presenter have moved (i.e. for the PowerPoint plugin). The documentation for Adobe Connect in general is still housed at http://meeting.psu.edu.

YouTube does support caption files (specifically the SubViewer/.sub and SubRip/.srt). You can find information about searching for captioned videos and reading captions at

http://www.youtube.com/t/captions_about

More information about the specific caption format is at

http://help.youtube.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=100077

P.S. Pat just confirmed that Parity can create the correct caption format for YouTube.

Last week in my blog I wrote a about a Photoshop CS4 color blindness filter which lets you simulate how a color blind user might see an image.

 If you were not able to attend this month's Multimedia Group meeting, here is the URL to the recorded Adobe Connect stream:  https://breeze.psu.edu/p65537353/

Today we looked at some take-aways we got from the Adobe Max 2008 conference in San Francisco this week.

 Here is the link to today's PSU Multimedia Group meeting, featuring Zac Zidik,  that was recorded via Adobe Connect (thanks to Yvonne Clark):

OIF Topic: "Using Open Educational Materials in Your Courses"
*Date: October 20, 2008
Time: 1:00 pm-2:30 pm
Location: Foster Auditorium, Pattee Library, University Park
Special Requirements: Laptop to connect to PSU network (VPN required for wireless access)
*
Agenda:*
1. Introduction to the session and set-up of wireless and/or wired connections
2. Copyright Perspectives site and resources
3. Educational Learning Objects and Government Resources
4. Image Resources
5. Audio and Video