Wireless Projectors: Seen & Heard

Someone mentioned Wireless Projectors which go well with tablet PCs if the instructor is moving around the classroom:

Its the AirProjector, an accessory which allows ordinary projectors to be wirelessly enabled, which I thought was worth the mention:

http://www.alliance-intl.com/airprojector/

Podcasting Automation

Podcasting Script

Release: 02.22.2006

The rss.cfm script went live. This is a script that picks up mixed media from an afs directory and generates a podcast.

Features:
Media Types Supported: mp3, aac, m4v, mp4, m4a, m4b
Takes two URL parameters to locate the media: course ID (e.g. HBHED654) and semester (e.g.W06)
- these two parameters are the directories created under 'podcast', however these have to be valid courses listed under course database with a valid instructor

Bugs:
- No error handling for cases where course description or instructor query fails - need to add defaults.
- The title for PDFs is coming out to be "Lecture Audio for..." - this needs fixing.

Editing Box Under $2000!

NY Times as featured this story for this box with ambitious features.

MiKo, a portable media work center from Open Labs, is a computer designed to make music and a whole lot more.

if (Video Editor + Sound Studio >= $2000) {

Shoutout(Great!!!);

}

Seen & Heard: Windows Vista....

"Windows Vista will natively support wireless projectors over some standardized protocol."

in a dev list...

World's most popular podcast, the Ricky Gervais Show, will be one of the world's first to charge...

Money and PodCasting Unite - A World First

Michigan thinks eLearning Should be Compulsory...

Mich. floats online learning requirement
State could be first to insist on virtual instruction as a condition for graduation
From eSchool News staff and wire service reports

New ConferenceXP Capabilities

University of Nebraska, Lincoln has developed new capabilities for ConferenceXP, the open source project sponsored by Microsoft. Open source and Microsoft in the same sentence? Yessir. I have seen eye brows go up at meetings at this statement from people who are far from supercilious.

(UNL)

Anyhoo, ConferenceXP is a free, opensource, conferencing product that works best in Multicast, but runs allright for clients on a Unicast network too, as we tested and established last month. ConferenceXP consists of the Client, Archive, Reflector and Venue services which are essential building blocks.

Researches are developing 'capabilities' within the open source framework. UNL has created two: Buddy Group and Question Answering. They are calling for interested parties to test these out. I can only feel that Conference XP is moving closer to Centra, which has capabilities like remote participants can 'raise hands' express approval/disapproval through icons & emoticons, have application sharing, whiteboard, pop quizzes etc.

Watch out for CXP! Become a .Net distributed application developer if you really want to make it big.

Read it all up at http://www.conferencexp.net

NSF cyberinfrastructure office

June 1st will see Dan Atkins, founding dean of the School of Information will lead the NSF Cyberinfrastructure Office at the
University of Michigan.

http://www.umich.edu/~urecord/0506/Feb13_06/07.shtml

Rodney McPhail of the Dept. of Biological Science, Purdue University has reviewed a product in his blog: Pod Podagogy.


The product is iPresent for Mac only. This manages creation of slideshows and managing them on the iPod for slideshow presentations. PPT, Keynote and PDFs are supported.

THIS IS NOT ENHANCED PODCASTS as my first impression was. But anyways, good to learn about a new professor, a new product and a new blog at the same time.

There are other cool software at http://www.zapptek.com/index.html for making your iPod into a PDA, document tex-to-speech etc.

A Web of Flyswatters

Yesterday I tried out a configuration of 4 flyswatters (Crown Soundgrabber 2s) in SPH2 Auditorium to see how well instructor and audience audio can be obtained without depending on individual serving mics (lapels, Shure 58s, or wireless avatars which are handed around and passed around).

The idea is to avoid audio-postproduction, which is such a productvity killer and time waster. So here are few samples which includes flyswatter-only audio, mixed live by yours truly. The mic positions in the SPH2 Auditorium is indicated:



Interaction with a student on the east side of the auditorium:

Interaction with a student on the center column of the auditorium:

Interaction with a student on the center & east column of the auditorium:

SOA & Reap: A Brave New WebWorld

SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is the now and future of web application development. SOA is about exposing webservices for consumption and interaction and the hot skills are building integrations.

A SOA expert, who works specifically with WebMethods, a business integration tool (correct me here, I am new to using this jargon) says that the biggest institutions will be busy building and exposing webservices and the smaller ones will be working to integrate with them. A very simplistic view of a really vast field, for starters.

Google's Map API and Amazon's Book Lookup API are probably examples. How will it pan out in higher education? Central administrative services consumed by distributed units is one application and is probably being done in a highly custom mode by coding specialists working to integrate legacy and current systems.

What might be services for the richmedia library? Content, yes. Metadata, more so. Something that is not available for low cost, being made available to the masses. We'll see how this churns and turns.

What are the hot SOA products?
WebMethods
WebSphere etc.

Although this information may not be news to people already working in ERP/CRM, this was news to me, learning about the expanse and intensity of implementations this consultant friend of mine has been through in the last 4 years: from government to education, to publishers to retail, from network solution providers to healthcare... he's seen and done it all in the field of WebMethods.

The World of Smartboards, Sympodiums is about to change

The technology is multi-touch screens, developed at NYU (as per post on the Cult of Mac blog). And the interesting part is that Apple has patented these interactions, which means... a TabletMac?

[Video was removed as it was posted on YouTube without proper copyright permissions - search "multi touch" on YouTube to see possible legal versions. The video thumbnail should appear like this:

]

DIY Podcasting Workshop

Last Tuesday (Jan 31)

The first and proably last of this semester's podcasting workshops went quite well. Attendance was from the Dean's Office, Internet2 and the school in general.

Everyone was able to get through the registration for the three services necessary to start phone-podcasting.

MBL said she might have students phone blog from New Orleans. Others wanted to see how it might pan out in their organizations.

Lets see...