Berkeley on iTunes U on Apple’s website

In time for Educause 06, Berkeley on iTunes U now featured on the Apple > Education > Products > iTunes U website.

Ideas to tackle online media captioning

For years I’ve thought about how best to deal with captioning for webcasts and now podcasts in a cost-effective and scalable way. I believe that the time is right to tackle this with a combination of Wikis and a slick transcribing interface modeled on dotSUB, a collaborative subtitling program.

Beyond the critical need to make webcasts and podcasts accessible to hearing-impaired there are additional benefits:

• Written transcript often easier to peruse and annotate
• Keyword/phrase search results synchronized to exact moments in the media
• Same language subtitling helps literacy and/or learning scientific terminology
• Learning disabled accessibility
• English as a second language learning
• Transcripts can be translated to extend the media to a worldwide audience

Challenge #1: Producing the transcript
Hiring a professional transcriber is about $90/hour. The CastingWords service leverages MTurk to bring the price down to about $.42/minute, or $25/hour. This has proven cost-effective and accurate enough for folks like Jon Udell to go for it. I’ve heard some reports about inaccuracies that lead to further clean-up.

I believe that volunteers are inspired to transcribe educational media. This is inspired by the work of OOPS (Opensource Opencourseware Prototyping System). Based in Taiwan, the volunteers translate Creative Commons licensed work primarily from MIT’s OpenCourseWare in order to bring the knowledge to Taiwan and to learn English.

How it works, from their site:

As a volunteer-based project, we ask you to adopt the file(s) you wish to transcribe… Once you have located the lecture(s) you wish to transcribe, simply click on the “Edit” link on the top right-hand side of the page… Once you have finished transcribing, come back to this site and copy and paste the text into a placeholder that will have been setup for you.

As you can see from the list of courses, however, it may take awhile for all of the courses to be adopted and finalized. OOPS also does not seem to use a Wiki interface for their work. At the end of the day, CastingWords is probably the most direct route but I’m still fascinated by the Wiki.

I’ve looked into Wikia but am amazed to not find one for transcribing (and I don’t want to kick it off!). Please let me know if one exists. Perhaps we should simply set up our own private wiki for this. Ideas welcome.

Challenge #2: Synchronizing the media
Transcript in hand, the next step is to produce timecodes for captioning. At Berkeley we love Automatic Sync Technologies for this. Their software automatically takes a transcript and the media (an MP3 of the video is preferred) and quickly produces timecoded transcripts in a variety of formats. This still costs  roughly $60 per hour of content, though less if hours are bought in bulk.

Again, I believe that with the right interface volunteers can chunk the transcripts, too.

Transcribing interface
Ideally, we would have a UI layered on top for people to transcribe while viewing or listening to the media. The UI would have quickkeys for controlling the playback (start, stop, pause). The input fields would be pre-chunked to facilitate the timecoding.

This UI was inspired by dotSUB that I first saw demoed during Andrew Baron’s keynote at the Podcast Expo. dotSUB is still in beta, and their focus is collaborative translation of existing timecoded transcripts

According to dotSub’s film submission page, they require 1) the video to be uploaded; 2) the timecoded transcript.

Regarding #1, frankly I’m not keen on sending my videos to yet another 3rd-party. Furthermore, there is a Filmmaker Agreement which presents an instant hurdle.

Many of our videos are already up on Google Video, as are those of many others including YouTube, Blip.tv, etc. All of these services provide HTML snippets to embed videos into a webpage. dotSUB’s business model may include making the subtitled videos available as hi-res and/or portable distribution (DVD, etc.). If dotSUB accepted 3rd-party embeds, they’d have a lot more people using their system. I wonder if there is a technical issue with syncing up timecodes with videos being served from an external source.

Regarding #2, I briefly chatted with them and there is a possibility for opening up the interface for pure transcribing.

Exporting timecoded transcripts
Finally, I would love to be able to export the timecoded transcripts. I could then submit them alongside my Google Videos for close captioning, an important feature that they recently announced. iTunes U can now search upon keywords, but I don’t believe the results bring you to those moments in the media. Of course we’d like to add these to our local webcast.berkeley site where we do have caption search implemented.

Summary
Adopt-a-podcast feature + Wiki for collaborative transcribing and finalization + dotSub-like interface for a useful transcribing interface that also produces timecodes. It would be an interesting experiment, with the first step to set up a Wiki.

Berkeley on Google Video stats: Week 1

Here are the latest stats from UC Berkeley on Google Video, one week after our launch. This is for about 230 videos.

Tuesday 9/26/06 – Tuesday 10/3/06

94,546 streams | 10,971 downloads

Top 10 streams

1. 13,539: Physics 10 – Lecture 01 (5 stars, 117 ratings)
2. 12,398: Sergey Brin (4 stars,126 ratings)
3. 10,640: General Anatomy – Lecture 01 (4.5 stars, 64 ratings)
4. 4,329: WebSpam – Dr. Marc Najork (4.5 stars, 19 ratings)
5. 2,690: Cal Football – Countdown 03 (4 stars, 23 ratings)
6. 1,727: Cal Football – Countdown 04 (4.5 stars, 5 ratings)
7. 1,690: Jason Schultz – IP and Search (4.5 stars, 14 ratings)
8. 1,587: Chemistry 3B – Lecture 03 (5 stars, 10 ratings)
9. 1,305: Physics 10 – Lecture 02 (5 stars, 48 ratings)
10. 1,218: Yahoo! Search – Pederson & Rose (4.5 stars, 16 ratings)

Top 10 downloads

1. 1,280: Sergey Brin
2. 812: Physics 10 – Lecture 01
3. 417: Physics 10 – Lecture 03 (4.5 stars, 26 ratings)
4. 398: General Anatomy – Lecture 01
5. 378: WebSpam – Dr. Marc Najork
6. 308: David Lynch (4.5 stars, 29 ratings)
7. 239: Physics 10 – Lecture 02
8. 213: Physics 10 – Lecture 04 (5 stars, 20 ratings)
9. 197: Chemistry 3B – Lecture 03
10. 177: Physics 10 – Lecture 05 (5 stars, 25 ratings)

All time – 10/3/06

197,800 streams | 27,175 downloads

Daily Cal editorial on webcast and Google Video

Daily Californian editorial today couldn’t be a more powerful statement in support of the campus’s decision to put courses and events online.

Choice quote:

If nothing else, the decision to make these materials available comes at a time when some students bemoan the cost of college as buying them nothing more than numbers of units and signed pieces of paper; the administration’s choice should remind us of our fortunate place at the university and all the advantages we have. If Google Video, which offers only a trickle of the social and intellectual torrent on campus, can be embraced by the public, perhaps we can finally force ourselves to make it to class and skip the webcast.

Nobel Prize in Physics: George F. Smoot – webcast

By 2pm PST you can view a webcast of the  press conference for George F. Smooth, receiving the Nobel Prize for Physics.

Cosmologist George F. Smoot, who led a team that obtained the first images of the infant universe, confirming the predictions of the Big Bang theory of its origins, has been awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Smoot, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and an astrophysicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), shares the prize with John C. Mather of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. This is UC Berkeley’s twentieth Nobel Prize since 1939, and its eighth physics Nobel.

K-State’s extreme course podcasting

Somehow missed this one…  Kansas State University is podcasting 6,000 lectures.  The self-proclaimed “World’s Largest Course Podcasting Initiative”.   That’s some PR.  They might want to take a look at Purdue’s BoilerCasts.  University of Western Australia is letting out even bigger belches.

Hat’s off to K-State.  Some things that would make it better:

• Enhanced podcasts – a proprietary format playing only on iPod/iTunes.  Still quite nice for indexing and slides.  Assuming they’re doing iTunes U for the full experience.  Hopefully an MP3 version, too.
• Behind a firewall – 6,000 lectures “for students” I read to mean no public access.  Have to wonder if/when the archives will be set free.
• Proprietary automated system – Tegrity Campus.  I look forward to an open source solution for automated capture.  Maybe Box Populi will come to the rescue.

The first two issues can be fixed with the flip of a switch.  It’s interesting to note that the large number is a result of digging into archives.  I’m curious how many courses sign on for this going forward.

Ewan McIntosh questions coursecasting entirely by asking How can an institution podcast – without reinforcing old teaching?  He’s looking for a more interactive two-way conversation with students.  This is the next-step of building community around the media that we’re always talking about.

Podcast Expo shout-outs

There are still some companies from PME I’d like to cover. But first some shout-outs:

• Andy Bowers – Slate Podcasts
• Stacy Bond and the team from Audioluxe
• David Bischke – LearnOutLoud.com
• Brent Izutsu – Stanford on iTunes U
• Michael Schmidt, PhD – Medical University of South Carolina. Wish I could have recorded your thoughts on using podcasts for faculty training.
• David Aldrich – U. of Washington podcasts. Let’s talk more about how we each use Barix InStreamers for podcasting.
• Corey Denis – Ioda
• Parul Singh – NYTimes.com Podcasts
• Marcus, Brett, and Chris – Box Populi. Can’t recommend you guys enough. Nice having dinner. I hope they let you into Misty’s some day.
• Jonathan Cobb & Ben Heskett – Kiptronic. Now piloting video (beta). All my chips on you guys.
• Jeff McQuillan – ESLPod. Let’s talk more about captioning and same-language subtitling.
• The Bourquins – PME. What a fun, informative and smooth event. Thanks for having me. Can’t wait for next year.
• Don Olliff – UCSD Media Services. Nice to see old friends. Good luck with your burgeoning podcast program.
• Karin Høgh – Denmark podcast blog.  Thanks for leading our education session.
• Colette Vogele – Vogele Law. Your session on podcasting law was probably one of the most important of the weekend. Looking forward to your podcast.
• Scott Simpson – Thanks for the introductions. And the Radisson courtyard was like Second Life and at least I was geeky enough to admit it.
• Craig Syverson – GruntMedia. Re-watching your podcasts and re-listening to your interview it’s no wonder you’re da man.

Andrew Baron at the Podcast Expo

Quiet moment at home after a whirlwind starting with the Podcast Expo and ending with a friend’s bachelor party last night. The boy’s asleep. It’s very very quiet.

The Podcast Expo was a blast. Met many great folks, saw old friends, and even did some interviews that I’ll try to get online soon as — what else — a podcast. These include the Box Populi guys, Craig Syverson of GruntMedia, and an informal discussion with Brent Izutsu from Stanford on iTunes U about our respective experiences with iTunes U.

One highlight was meeting the Rocketboom folks. At the awards ceremony at the end of Day 2 someone wanted to introduce me to the person responsible for the NY Times podcasts. On the way he bumped into some folks he knew, introduced me, then had me stay with them while he fetched the NY Times person.

The woman looked familiar… it was Joanne Colan from Rocketboom. Hello! It took longer to realize who the fellow was… Andrew Baron, of course. They were nice as could be. Andrew impressed me with how genuine and wide-eyed interested he was. And with his twang just love the way he says “Rocketboom”.

He and I were soon joined by the NY Times person and one discussion was potential directions for NYTimes.com podcasts and vidcasts. What a fun challenge! New media and old media. Inspired by Rocketboom I imagined man-on-the-street videos supplementing written stories. How about giving cameras or recorders to stringers? What if these stringers were in local markets that the NY Times has supplements for such as the Bay Area?

Andrew Baron’s keynote the following morning prompted the following notes…

In ‘04 he jumped into politics to help stop Bush. He worked on the Edwards campaign to put video online rather than distributing DVDs. He had an ah-hah moment when users didn’t complain about accessing the video. Broadband had reached the tipping point. Already blogging, he wondered how a fun site such as BoingBoing could be done as video.

He uses a wiki for his ongoing FAQs, reviews/articles, and also for feedback from his audience. By providing tools like this his audience feels like they “own” the show.

He’s currently experimenting with DotSUB which allows people to subtitle his videos. The intent is that people will translate into multiple languages. This has fantastic potential for close captioning our UC Berkeley videos. I wonder if we can get the timecoded transcript back?

He got into Rocketboom’s statistics, and advertising potential. I believe they command upwards to $80k per week for ads that they also help produce. Wow. He imagined a time when Disney will have an audience of 10,000 for a show, and advertisers will drool over being able to target this hardcore audience.

Hope to post some more about the Podcast Expo later.

Podcast Expo: Day 2

Quick post before checking out of the hotel…

Some quick hits from yesterday’s Expo:

Leo Laporte’s keynote yesterday he discussed podcast statistics in the context of competitiveness between podcasters when a premium should be placed on community. Announcing statistics, since they’re so fuzzy anyway, is “posturing”. I dig that, and hope numbers I’ve thrown out aren’t taken that way. Fact is that I want our administrators to appreciate not only the ROI, but that there’s a ravenous audience out there. That higher-ed content is big.

Good turnout for our Podcasting in Education session, and the panelists were able to build upon each other. With the Medical University of South Carolina and Stanford there, a lot on iTunes U.

I went unscripted and tried to hit thought-provoking topics on podcasting the classroom. I spoke about “open content” and how it aligns with the mission of the university, particularly a public university like Berkeley. How it fits in to the tradition of free speech and open source.

I pointed to higher-ed content’s quality, and how long-form, unmediated content is in fact desirable. How it’s perhaps akin to the early days of PBS.

I talked about how podcasting broke down many doors. As a downloadable medium we got away from streaming, but with it many risks including IP and copyright issues. I had to touch on the attendance debate as it’s foremost on many people’s minds.

In terms of stats I only said that our top podcasts are those that are more narrative such as History and Philosophy. Video, on the other hand, are Computer Science and Engineering.

I ended with the hope that Berkeley has inspired other schools to open up, knowing that people want to but still have to break through political and philisophical issues. Hoping that Berkeley’s precedent makes it easier for others.

What I didn’t get to was the role of higher-ed in the public debate, and how podcasting is helping with that.

Heck, gotta run. More later on meeting Rocketboom, the Kiptronic/LibSyn/Ioda party, and Day 3.

Podcast Expo and initial Google Video stats

Howdy from the Portable Media (Podcast) Expo in Ontario, CA. At the speaker check-in fest tonight met my co-panelists for the Podcasting in Education session (sadly, without Duke’s Richard Lucic who had to bow out last minute). Also saw my pals from Kiptronic, John Furrier congratulated on Berkeley’s current iTunes Store Podcasts homepage promo, and I quickly met Robert Scoble. Met IP Attorney Colette Vogele flying down from Oakland (co-author of the Podcasting Legal Guide: Rules for the Revolution). Also happy to meet the guys working with Chris Dawson on Box Populi.

I brought an M-Audio Microtrack 24/96 with 2G card, so hope to do some interviews over the next few days. What better time to start a podcast!

Berkeley on Google Video has received some great attention since launch two days ago. We were frontpage of today’s San Jose Mercury News (mirror link).  And of course lots more blogs.

Google Video statistics since yesterday (1-day haul):

• 23,911 page views (Flash streams) and 2,403 downloads
• Physics 10 – Lecture 01: 3,957 (streams) and 258 downloads
• Sergey Brin lecture: 3,420 (streams) and 264 downloads
• Anatomy – Lecture 01: 2,236 (streams) and 91 downloads
• WebSpam: Dr. Marc Najork: 1,529 (streams) and 132 downloads
• Chemistry 3B – Lecture 03: 437 (streams) and 37 downloads
• Cal Bears highlight#3: 414 (streams) and 5 downloads

As we’ve been posting files for months now, the totals to date are:

132,253 streams | 19,087 downloads

More to come from the Podcast Expo…