Here’s a bite-size bit of video of me presenting our Vitrual Audience software at the Adobe Education Leaders’ Summer Institute at Adobe HQ in San Jose.
Here I demonstrate how the computer’s camera watches you “perform”. When the computer senses you’re finished, the audience claps. Sometimes more than others!
Thanks to Ian Usher for capturing this video!
On stage showing some interaction's we've made at Miami. Photo by Ian Usher.
From the Adobe Website: “The Adobe Education Leader (AEL) program highlights the successes and contributions of innovative educators involved in Higher Education (Post-secondary – Public and Private Universities, Community Colleges, Vocational Schools) and K-12 Education (Primary and Secondary) utilizing Adobe tools and applications.”
Though the AEL program has been around for a few years, this year Adobe added 40 members from select international higher education institutions.
The Adobe Education Leader’s Summer Institute is a week long event that allows the AELs the opportunity to share their work with one another, discuss emerging trends in technology, preview upcoming software and help guide the development and marketing of Adobe software for use in education.
It was a great week in San Jose. I got the chance to meet many great minds and saw some cool uses of new technology!
Read more about the Adobe Education Leaders Program and view some AEL Profiles.
My interactive presentation on Miami University’s Video Annotation and Review System scored the ‘Best of NMC’ award this year at the New Media Consortium in Monterey!
Check out the Prezi presentation! Go Team!
The Shadowing Experience came out of the need to have Miami students meet and observe theatre professionals during the course of their work.
The challenge was the fact that there were 1200 students per semester, and only about 30 professionals in the southwest Ohio region that were willing to be shadowed for a day. The result is a logistical problem that could frustrate the professionals and provide scheduling headaches for faculty and students.
When discussing this problem with a faculty member, I came up with the idea of a videotape shadowing experience. This could be achieved by placing ‘fly-on-the-wall’ cameras throughout the physical space that the professional works, at various critical times throughout the professionals work-flow. For instance, in a play, the directors role spans the entire life of the play. Casting, design meetings, rehearsals, etc. By recording and editing each of the key moments, you could compress the time it takes to show the director’s work process into a five minute video piece.
The result could be an online interaction that resembles reality TV, a cross between Cops, Big Brother and Survivor. And by incorporating the video with Flash, assessment questions could be turned on at random intervals to ensure student participation.
I’ve been asked by one of the faculty to develop a “mock-up” of how a shadowing would look and feel, so the department chair could review and decide if the activity would be appropriate. Since I am not in the theater, but my job process follows a similar work-flow, I decided to shadow myself as the example.
I was asked to pull together a quick training module designed to remind students that their conduct in a theatre performance should be different than how they would act at a movie, or a concert or a sporting event.
The original plan was to develop a training in the paperworks style like we produced for the eScholar training. The outcome will be slightly different.
The students are introduced to a bad behavior (which is designed to get more annoying as the scene progresses). At some point the user will be asked to eliminate the cause of the behavior or ignore it.
THE PROCESS:
Adam Baumgartner (Digital Media) wanted to try a new animation process by scanning the storyboard frames, touch them up using Photoshop, and animate them using Adobe Premiere. The resulting video file (an FLV) will be streamed into a Flash file that allows users to interact with the scene and eliminate or ignore the bad behavior. Ignoring the annoyance only plays the movie (and bad behavior) in an infinite loop.
See the first pass here.
A pre-recorded audience listens AND responds to your performance
The Virtual Audience allows the user to practice performing in front of a living, breathing audience, virtually.
After installing the free Adobe AIR runtime environment, you can install and use the Virtual Audience for free.
The initial faculty request was to create a DVD with loopable video that would allow a music student to practice in front of an audience that did the distracting things that audiences do, cough, sneeze, whisper, etc. In theory this would allow the student to be desensitized to audience distractions. We satisfied the faculty’s initial request by making a DVD. But, I asked to go a step further, and make a more interactive version by using Flash’s ability to sense user’s movement and sound using a web cameras lens (as the audience’s eyes) and mic (as their ears).
HOW IT WORKS:
When Flash senses movement from the camera, it tells the audience when the student has “taken the stage” and Flash prompts the audience to act accordingly: welcome clap. We shot fourteen segments of distractions. Audience members coughing, sleeping, answering cell calls, etc. During the performance, random clips of video load that represent audience behavior. Or, distractions. When Flash hears that the music has stopped for a few seconds, it tells the audience to clap in response to a performance ending. And, like a real audience, you don’t know how they will react. Sometimes the performer receives a polite clap, sometimes a more enthusiastic applause, sometimes a full standing ovation.
We are using Adobe AIR as the deployment method for a few of reasons:
We actually tested the VA in various settings (from HUGE screens, to life size projectors to video goggles). It had a chilling (but good) effect when I “took the stage”.
During the development, we realized that the VA could be used by other areas of the university that “perform” in front of an audience. Namely speech communication and theater. Both programs require students to think on their toes and concentrate on performing a piece that they may be very familiar with performing in a quiet setting, with no distractions.
Future versions will be available using Flash Media Server and will feature video shot in HD format. The HD format will provide finer quality video when the audiences is projected on to large format screens or viewed on larger monitors.
After installing the free Adobe runtime environment, you can install and use the Virtual Audience for free.
The Impromptu Widget allows Intro to Speech students the chance to practice giving an unprepared speech.
Students in Miami’s “Public Expression and Critical Inquiry” course needed a way to rehearse the steps necessary for giving an unprepared speech. As an exercise in class, the students are given a choice between a quote, or a current event. They have three minutes to prepare an argument that supports their point of view. Then, they have to present that point of view for five minutes.
To help the students perfect this technique, I was asked to build a program that would pick a random topic from a list of either quotes or current events. We decided to up the ante and actually record the video/audio of the practices to let the student watch their own progress over time. The videos are private (not even faculty see the practice videos) and the student can make as many as they need to perfect their technique.
Students enter their credentials, then are prompted between using a quote or a random current event pulled from one of several approved RSS feeds. Once they choose, they are given the random topic and have three minutes to plan the speech. At the end of three minutes, student’s web cams or microphones record their impromptu speech for a total of five minutes or until they stop the recording.
We chose to build application in Flex and use Flash Media Server to actually record the speeches. Since the Impromptu Widget could be used at other times in the course and in other departments at Miami (Foreign Languages, Theatre, Video/Television Production), Flex and FMS seemed to be the appropriate environment.
Created as an out-of-class companion to in-class discussion, On The Road with ‘Lolita’ takes students on a virtual field trip through some of the places visited in the famous Nabokov novel.
The activity is based in Google Earth to examine the lead character’s geographic journey. Accompanying each destination are photos and videos of the locations, as well as the site’s entry in the novel, analysis of the author’s reasoning, and opportunities for students to explore their own thoughts about why each location was chosen by the author and discussed in the book.
The Venn Diagram animations help students visualize abstract concepts related in a finite mathematics course.
See the animations here
This application, originally created by Dr. James Oris, lets students be the captain of a fishing boat and experience the choices that need to be made to prevent over-fishing.
Students submit an effort each ‘fishing season’ and watch the collective population data change as other teams submit their own efforts. Students can choose to refrain, or fish as much as they desire.
Students compete against each other to see who can catch the most in the 20 years. Ultimately, greed causes teams to lose as a result of diminished populations. Likewise, consortium teams are rewarded for their patience. Students can use the chat and wallet functions to purchase other fleets and gain their fishing power, or communicate a strategy to sustain the population’s growth for the next season.
The application was upgraded to allow real-time data and communication to be passed to the students using Flex and Flash Media Server.
See a demo and view some of the features of the Sustainable Yield activity.
Learning Activities
