Here’s a little video intro to the major enhancements which are mainly focused on the user interface:

Spark has a number of tools on it that allow you to host and publish privately, to Tufts only, or indeed to the entire world if you so choose. The Spark site and its associated tools are freely available to anyone with an active Tufts Username and Password and, for the most part, are self-service. If you need assistance with using any of the tools please check in at our consultation desk in the Digital Design Studio.

Spark Podcasts

The Spark Podcast tool allows anyone to manage their own podcast channel for others to subscribe to. Using the tool the podcast manager can upload their media files (video, audio, or any other file type). The tool takes care of automatically regenerating the podcast feed. Users who have subscribed to the podcast via their iTunes, Winamp, or other podcast reader will have the new media automatically made available to them for viewing.

Examples

• Bio 13 uses Spark Podcasts to disseminate recorded lectures.
• The Department of Education uses Spark Podcasts to publish a series of highlighted events, personalities, and programs related to its activities.
• Romance Languages uses Spark Podcasts to host language recordings.

Spark MediaMarkup

The Spark MediaMarkup tool allows Tufts users to upload media files of various types (e.g. all popular formats such as mp4, wav, mov, mp3, etc) and share them privately, Tufts-wide, or world-wide for viewing and annotation. Viewers with edit rights to the media can provide comment and feedback at specific time stamps within the media file. In this way MediaMarkup is a powerful tool for review and assessment of student work.

Examples

• Electrical and Computer Engineering use Spark MediaMarkup to host recordings of student presentations. Instructors and peers can then provide feedback to the student regarding their performance.
• Friedman uses Spark MediaMarkup to publish panel discussions. They use the annotation feature to provide a linked table of contents to specific parts of the discussion.
• The Music Department uses MediaMarkup to publish recordings of drum and dance performances. The instructor then uses to annotation feature to highlight the various components of the performance along with constructive feedback for the performers.

Spark WordPress

Spark WordPress is a state-of-the-art web publishing platform that is used for a wide variety of curricular and co-curricular purposes (e.g. program web sites, faculty portfolios, student groups, etc.). A variety of different media files can be embedded into the content of a WordPress site. We have installed the Anarchy Media Player plugin which:

will play any simple href link to mp3, flv, Quicktime mov, mp4, m4v, m4a, m4b, 3gp as well as Windows wmv, avi and asf files, in the appropriate player on your web page.

The WordPress versions also add buttons to the Rich Text Editor for embedding Flash swf and Director dcr movies as well as YouTube, Google Video, iFilm, DailyMotion, Revver, Metacafe, MySpace, Apple iTunes iMix, and GoEar players.

Examples

• The Jumble site publishing videos from a variety of sources to highlight Tufts activities.

Spark Wikis

The Spark Wikis tool allows Tufts users to create collaboratively edited web sites. This is very useful for group projects, writing papers, managing a departments internal knowledgebase etc.

Users can upload and embed a variety of media files into their wiki pages. Wiki page permissions can then be set to allow access only to certain individuals, the entire university, or to the world.

Spark WebConferencing

The Spark WebConferencing tool is our internally hosted instance of Adobe Connect. This tool allows Tufts users to set up and conduct web-based conferences. The is useful for distance education initiatives, group projects where the participants are geographically dispersed, and for conducting webinars.

The following file types can be uploaded and shared via Adobe Connect: *.ppt, *.pptx, *.flv, *.swf, *.pdf, *.gif, *.jpg, *.png, *.mp3, *.html, or *.zip

If you want to consult or brainstorm about how to use ESTS tools such as Trunk (http://trunk.tufts.edu), Spark (http://spark.uit.tufts.edu), and VUE (http://vue.tufts.edu), or would like to discuss technology for teaching, learning, and scholarly collaboration in general, please stop by.

If you have any questions about the ESTS Drop-in Consulting Hours please contact David Grogan at david.grogan@tufts.edu or call 7-2859.

Because entries came to us in a multitude of digital formats, the trickiest part of the site production was making sure that we could convert them all into web standard formats so that all judges and other site visitors could readily view them. Photoshop was good for the image formats and Sorenson Squeeze provided the video support. To publish the videos I used JW Player.

Congratulations to the winners!

HandBrake screen shot and logo.

HandBrake is a cool little tool that does a great job of converting the DVD video into a number of standard formats. And best of all it’s open source (therefore free) and comes in a variety of OS flavors.

RodRego screen shot.

RodRego is a “register machine simulator illustrating the computational capabilites of the INC/DEB language model” that was developed for Prof. Dennett by the folks here at Educational and Scholarly Technical services.

I recommend reading the article “Secrets of Computer Power Revealed 2008″ that is linked to from his new site. You’ll get an understanding for how the simplest of machines and languages can perform complex functions.

What I did:

1. Created a new WordPress site: http://sites.tufts.edu/rodrego .
2. Requested the domain name “http://rodrego.tufts.edu” from Tufts Web Communications.
3. Once I got the go ahead from Web Comm I forwarded that to our sys. admin who then requested the DNS updates from Tufts Network group.
4. Once that was set up our sys. admin took care of the redirect on our WordPress server.

Access the site here: http://RodRego.tufts.edu.

I offered to take the video and run some transcodings on it to turn it into something more web friendly. Instead of sending me the original video file the student had uploaded the video to YouTube. Luckily I’d installed a lovely little tool called DownloadHelper.

This is a free Firefox extension that recognizes video media on the web page you are currently on and allows you to download it, in a number of different formats, to your computer. I chose to save is as an MP4. This saved a file of 10MB in size. I uploaded to VoiceThread to make sure it worked. Nice one!

After my last post where I was whining about getting traction for an idea for an alternative visualization of oral history data I decided I’d just stop whining and use it as an opportunity to look into HTML5 multimedia capabilities. It’s also an opportunity to build upon my woefully bad Javascript skills.

A good first step, I thought, would be to replicate the audio/text synchronized player from the current Oral History web site. This site uses Flash for the player. Let’s see if we can take Flash out of the picture by using HTML5.

The first port of call is the audio tag: http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_audio.asp

Here (if you have Firefox or Chrome) you’ll see it in action (that’s my daughter, Sophia’s song BTW, so proud):

Next I used ColdFusion (gotta love CF!) to fetch the transcript of the interview from the database. So easy with CF. The transcript is divided into segments with a starting time stamp, and the text of that section of the interview. Once CF has fetched all the segments I parse the query results into a global Javascript array.

I added an event listener to the audio tag: v.addEventListener(‘timeupdate’, checkTime);

The browser takes care of firing that event about every 1/4 of a second. The checkTime function then will then autoscroll the audio player to the appropriate time stamp using scrollIntoView (thanks Steve!).

The user can move the play head of the audio player by clicking on a time stamp within the transcript. That functionality is brought to you by the audio tags currentTime method. e.g. audioElement.currentTime = timeStamp;

So, so far so good. I only have it working in Chrome right now. Here it is..

Another result of Version 1 was a huge amount of data processing that is now readily available for other interfaces and tools to build upon. Each oral history is now transcribed into text, the text synchronized with the original audio file, entities of interest (e.g. people, places, and concepts) have been tagged and metadata attached to them.

Here is one idea I’m trying to find traction for. Click on the image below to see it in full view. Any refinements, ideas for moving it forward, comments on usefulness are more than welcome.

By the way, I sketched the idea using a fantastic tool called Cacoo. Definitely check that out.