Week 8: YouTube, TeacherTube, and the Future of Shared Online Video

Online video has been increasingly used and integrated into the classroom due to its high potentiality to facilitate learning. For example, it can reflect the real life situations much more than the things describe in the textbooks. In addition, online video is not only used for an academmic purpose, it can be used for socialization. Like this morning, my close friend just sent me her video clip sharing her lifestyle in the UK.

One of my concern about utilising these technology as one of the mandatory tools in education is the students with special needs. Since the content is rendered through the audio and visual presentation rather than the text-based display, those students with visual and hearing disordered would certainly be affected and could not fully participate in learning.

On the other day, there was a Webinar held by Equal Access to Software and Information (EASI) UNDER THE TOPIC OF THE MoPix, Motion Picture Access. This system is an initiative of the Media Access Group at WGBH. This production unit is mainly comprised of two provisions: The Caption and Descriptive Video Services. for the former, it is called “The Rear Window Captioning System”. It is an innovative technology that makes it possible for exhibitors to provide closed captions for those who need or desire them without displaying them to the entire theater’s audience. The patron needing captions will see them in a reflector which is mounted in front of them. For the visual service, DVS Theatrical makes it possible for exhibitors to provide descriptive narration for their blind and visually impaired patrons through special headsets. Narrated descriptions provide information about key visual elements such as actions, settings, facial expressions, costumes, and scene changes. The descriptions are inserted into pauses in the soundtrack and do not interfere with the dialogue. For more information about these systems and services please see:

http://ncam.wgbh.org/mopix/
And for the presentation archive (available for a few weeks):
http://www.easi.cc/archive/mopix/recording/index.htm

Currently, the services are mainly provided for the movie theatres and entertainment. However, some movies are recorded into VHS or DVD and commercially available. Even though these systems are still costly, but it is a good initiative and would be beneficial for further research under the non-profit organizations and implemented by those who are dealing with the national education.

Week 7: Open Educational Resources.

The materials and resources of today’s topic are one of other very interesting classes that are opening eyes for me. There are lots and lots of educational resources available online either from the local and international collaborations. Is this the thing that we call “the knowledge-based society and the true learning environment?

Open Course Ware (OCW) “initiated by MIT is one admirably distinct example of the projects under the premise of learning opportunities on the basis of equality.
“We are going to make our educational material available to students, faculty, and other learners, anywhere in the world, at any time, for free.” (Atkins et al., 2007). The site was officially launched in September 2003 with 500 courses online. In 2004, the site received almost 120 million hits from visitors in more than 210 countries, territories, and city-states around the globe. Part of the project’s achievement is because English is the international language. However, the course materials have been translated into many languages, such as Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese (Lee et al., 2007).

Regarding Chinese translation, the Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System (OOPS), is the all-volunteer organization headquartered in Taiwan. The main mission of the OOPS is to translate open source materials from MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) site into Chinese. Since the work has been run voluntarily from the Chinese-speaking people from various regions around the world, this community is specially fascinating for me.

One of the most distinguishing characteristics of the OOPS is their project management. I wonder what ties these volunteer members together for such a long period and still, with the high quality of work. It is true that they may have a strong mutual commitment with the same goals like other community of practice such as open source software projects, nonetheless, a teamwork of thousands of people from all around the world is incredibly “mission impossible” for me!

By January 1, 2007 the translation of nearly half of the 1,100 courses had been completed by a network of over 2,200 volunteer translators from more than 22 countries (Chu, 2008). I believe the project will continue to grow up successfully and I hope the OOPS would be a model for other language communities to follow according to the concept of “global learning”.

References:

Atkins, Dan, Brown, John Seely, & Hammond, Allen (2007, February). A review of the open educational resources (OER) movement: Achievements, challenges, new opportunities. William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. (84 pages). Retrieved July 5, 2007, from http://www.oerderves.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/a-review-of-the-open-educational-resources-oer-movement_final.pdf

Chu, Lucifer. Personal communication, July 18, 2007.

Lee, M., Lin, M.-F., & Bonk, C. J. (2007, November). OOPS, turning MIT OpenCourseWare into Chinese: An analysis of a community of practice of global translators. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 8(3). Retrieved March 23, 2008, from http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/463/980

Week6: Free and open source software.

We have often heard about “open source” in the cyber world, but how many people know its actual meaning. The common misunderstanding and confusion about open source software is mostly from its minimal cost of acquisition, and most of the time, it is even available for the free distribution. Open source software, in fact, incurs many of the same categories of cost as that of developing in-house or implementing commercial products, this may still include the costs of technical support/development staff, licensing and maintenance although these will usually be lower than their commercial counterparts. I have never been directly involved in any open source software development project, however, I used to provide some recommendations and the logistic support. It was the project of software localization and my participation was the linguistic related per se. Even though it is just a small contribution, at least, I feel good that I am able to share something.

For me, the charm and benefits of open source software projects are not only the outcome of the group (software application) and other associated elements such as relative lower cost, it is also the way that people with the same interest gather together and help each other without necessary obligations or any financial condition. This can be called “community of practice”. It can be true that people in the community also invest for the social capital (kapor, 2005); nevertheless, one of the core concepts of open source is to help other people as a basis of the society (Stallman, 1983). The community of open source software development is somehow similar to the blog community or the online forum in terms of social norms and practice. Persons with the same interests will find their own space to share and exchange their thoughts in various versions, such as text, photos, and codes, just to name three. In addition, it is noticeable that the popular topics/bloggers/appliccations would gain more interest from the public, and hence receive more comments/contributions. Meanwhile, there is also lots of deserted blogs/forum or discontinued projects. This is one of the major drawbacks of the open source software.

Another concern about the open source I want to address here is the copyright issues. Once the source is publicly available or accessed, it is easy to be pirated. As stated earlier, even though the open source software is freely distributed, there is a formal license derived from the mutual agreements of community.

Many pros and cons of the open source software still exist, depending on each perspective you will take. Although there is no clear-cut conclusion about the good and bad of the open source software, I believe that this is a superb mechanism to balance between the capitalism and socialism.

References.

Kapor, M. (2005). How is open source special? EDUCAUSE Review, 40(2), 72-73. Retrieved July 4, 2007, from http://www.educause.edu/er/erm05/erm05210.asp
Stallman, R. (1983). Initial announcement. Retrieved March 2, 2006, from http://www.gnu.org/gnu/initial-announcement.html

Week 5: Neo Millennial and web 2.0 Learners.

In the era of neo Millennium, the world has moved from analog to digital. Consequently, many new technological devices have been developed and become integrated seemingly in our daily lives. The lifestyle have been dominantly influenced by these
Innovations in which we believe that they can facilitate our way of living. We are now surrounded by E and I, such as E-
Government, E-commerce, E-learning, I-pod, I-phone, I-calendar, and so on. We, therefore, have to follow these technologies and tune ourselves to them.

The border line between the period before the years 2000 and the years after clearly separate two generations: the old and the young, particularly in terms of digital literacy skills (which is needed in the present days). The views towards technologies of these people (the generational digital divide) are definitely different. The new media may be seen as exotic, extraordinary things where the young (so-called “the net gen” may view these innovations as ordinary and even banal (Herring,
2008). Due to this perspective, some adults feel separated or have no confident in using these media, and sometimes even compare themselves with the net gen. Let’s take my dad as example. A few years ago, I taught him to use the VOIP application. He took a note and when we tried to chat everything was fine. Until the monitor turn on the screen saver mode, he was so nervous and worried that he might have made something wrong.

In fact, even though these kids are comfortably using such digital device, it does not guarantee that they have that level of digital proficiency (Oblinger, 2008). Therefore, adults should stop exoticizing this net gen and view digital devices the same as other tools in their period. Because the new media today will eventually become the normal things in the near future!