Open Source or Ad Supported Software and Content

The economic storm we’re now in is soon to become a deluge, according to Louis Uchitelle of the New York Times. The source of the problem is state and local government spending. To date in this business cycle, such spending has served as a counter force to the downturn. But tax receipts have lagged and the state governments are building up hefty deficits as a consequence. Surely spending cuts are just around the corner. For the usual Keynesian reasons, this bodes poorly for the economy overall, with the smart money waiting on the sidelines to see if we’ve past the bottomed out phase or not. But it is particularly troublesome for us who work at public institutions of higher education because it looks like serious budget cuts will be coming, if they haven’t hit already.

Within IT at like instiutions, I suspect things are particularly troublesome in this regard. Back in the early part of the decade when my university when through a previous downturn, administrative units were hit more heavily than were academic units and IT tends to be viewed more as as administrative function, even as most of the users are doing so in an academic context. There is the further point, made first by Nicholas Carr, that IT as it has matured has lost the ability to differentiate us as institutions, and hence the non-utility part of IT, if such a part exists, appears as if it can be dispensed with. And there is the still further issue that certain cost increases appear to be unavoidable – heating and cooling are notable in this category; everyone is aware of how the pump price of gasoline has skyrocketed and HVAC costs are obviously highly correlated with gasoline prices. So that is likely to make campus administrators more cautious about any other expense that seemingly is avoidable.

Budget cuts in IT is indeed a dreary subject, so instead of focusing on that let’s consider emerging technology and services, where by use of the term “emerging” I want to take the perspective of our respective institutions rather than the view of developers of such technology. In this sense emerging means there’s not yet institutional lock-in to the service and the future direction still seems remarkably flexible. Social networking in an academic context may be in that category. Likewise, so may video hosting, even at campuses that have supported video streaming for some time. They likely haven’t supported anything akin to YouTube and almost certainly have no mechanism to support student created videos made for an academic purpose.

Now let me take an aside and talk about my “roots” with instructional technology, formed mostly during 1995-96 when I was a grantee of the SCALE project here on campus. I had used the application PacerForum in spring 2005 and then switched to FirstClass thereafter. We referred to these applications as “off-the-shelf” software. First Class, in particular, was a poor man’s alternative to Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange and had a clientele both in business and higher education. Such software survives and evolves based on the needs and vicissitudes of the marketplace. Sometimes such software dies out. PacerForum, though quite admired by its users on Campus, didn’t or couldn’t make the switch to TCP-IP. The grantors from SCALE at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, former executives from IBM, had a distinct preference for us to use off-the-shelf software. While they never fully explained “the why” in this stipulation, the consequence was clear enough. It encouraged an approach of adopting pedagogy to the software and seeing what was possible that way, creating an emphasis on the teaching approach rather than on the software development, and demanding a degree of creativity on the part of the instructor to get a successful implementation.

Having also served as sponsor of some ed tech software development projects, wherein the developer’s primary goal, to do well by the users, seemingly trumped concerns about the business sensibility of the development, an admirable but undisciplined approach that oftentimes proved unsustainable after the grant money runs out, I’ve come to appreciate the approach with off-the-shelf software and still favor that approach ceteris paribus.

But, of course, things have changed. Most of the applications we might be interested with nowadays are Web based, accessed by a browser, rather than require a dedicated client as was the case 10 – 15 years ago. And many are “freely available” with a seeming explosion of new offerings in the past year. Many of these fledgling offerings hope to make it commercially. There seem to be two possible alternatives for that. One is to generate revenue directly, mostly likely via ad support, and see whether the operation can sustain in that manner. The other is to not worry so much about revenues up front but instead to focus on the experience of the users and grow based on their word of mouth, with the hope of viral growth and then to be bought out by one of the big players in the future and capitalize in that manner. Of course there can be hybrids of these two forms, such as where there is no sell out to one of the big players but where the ads emerge as a revenue aspect after there has been some substantial growth in usage. If you take those two extremes and allow for all permutations and combinations, that’s my current day analog to off-the-shelf software.

Likewise things have changed with campus software development. Home grown has been supplanted by open source, whether for LMS, ePortfolio, or any number of other applications. And to the extent that these efforts are meant as alternatives or tonics to the commercial provision of these applications, so much the better. But in the previous paragraph I was seemingly making an argument for commercial provision. So what gives?

Let’s consider the split between applications that the campus provides for users and applications that the users select for themselves. When I was getting started in the mid ‘90s, this divided nicely by the distinction between client-server applications on the one hand, and desktop applications on the other. There still is a difference between campus supported and user selected, but the notion of desktop applications is going by the wayside. Unfortunately, in my opinion, our thinking about campus provision of service hasn’t really accommodated that change. And the result is that we in IT take the scope of what should be provided by the campus as more broad than it otherwise might be.

Let me illustrate with a concrete example. I don’t want to make this an advocacy for the product, but I hope discussing it will help to bring out the issues. Consider the social networking application Ning, which is unabashedly ad supported. The feature of Ning that I want to take note of is that, like many other social networking applications, it employs the email address of the user as the login. Suppose that I, wearing my instructor hat, wanted to use Ning for my class and interact with them in that manner. Then I’d spend some time setting up the Social Network to my specifications and after that I’d invite my students to participate. I’d use the class roster that I can get from the grade book in the LMS to issue those invitations. The students would have to opt in and accept my invitation to have access to this class social network.

This is the first issue. Is my invitation coercive? Suppose the students don’t want to be part of that social network. Can they opt out by not accepting the invitation? Note there is no opt out for students in the campus LMS. They are in there by virtue of having enrolled in the course. So the opt out can’t be because they object to the pedagogic approach the software encourages and that I as instructor have embraced. Rather it would have to be because they don’t trust the commercial provider to protect their privacy, even when they can’t get into the social network without a password. The fear is that the vendor will data mine the individual information in such a way that might be detrimental to the student in the future. There may also be fear about copyright appropriation.

It is on these issues that my campus has either blocked or slowed down contracts with a variety of commercial vendors, who don’t seem willing to ensure the security of this information in writing. But I’m not the institution in my current position and in the above discussion I’m acting as an individual instructor. In that role I look to a different set of information to try to attain these type of assurances. Does the software work well? Are there other users more or less in the same boat as I who seem to be using the software successfully? Do I feel safe using the application? If I were a friend of the students rather than their instructor, would I feel ok inviting them to use it? In practice these questions are likely to be asked implicitly. When the answers are in the affirmative, meaning when I feel comfortable with the application, then I might very well embrace the application for my class.

The next issue turns from me the instructor back to the institution. What should the institutional stance be on this sort of instructor behavior? Possible alternatives include: go for it – active encouragement by the institution, don’t ask don’t tell – tacit acceptance of the practice by the institution but instructor beware because the liability might be on you, or you can’t do this – prohibition by the institution because until the institution has gotten the vendor’s promise in writing the students are being put at risk and the institution has in loco parentis. Which of these three we actually do might depend on to whom at the institution you pose the question. For software that has an admission charge (an Island in Second Life costs real dollars) the institution may be able to exercise control over campus dollars being spent on such software. For software that is freely available to the end user, however, there is no mechanism for institutional control up front that I am aware of. So de facto I believe we have don’t ask don’t tell, with the only mechanism for the institution to get involved after the fact being for a student in the class to lodge a complaint. But, if I had my druthers, we’d see an activist promotion by the campus, which would send an explicit message to all instructors to the effect of, “Go ahead with the use of commercial software that is externally hosted for your courses as long as you intend to use that software for legitimate academic purposes. We want to encourage you to innovate in your classes. An important way to maintain quality in the classroom is via your innovation and one way to innovate is for you to embrace emerging technologies. We understand there is some liability risk in doing that and we the campus will bear that risk for you as long as your intent is to promote the learning of your students.”

Now let’s take it another step. We’re in the world of don’t ask don’t tell where there is commercial provision of social network software that might be used for academic purposes. Absent the activist promotion described at the end of the previous paragraph, how does the availability of the commercial software impact the campus decision to host its own social networking software for academic purposes? Consider this question in light that many are arguing something like, “The students spend all their time on Facebook and if we want them to engage in their studies while online we have to provide something equally as compelling.” And with that let me return to how I led off this piece, talking about the economic downturn. How can the campus in good conscience embrace new applications of this sort when there isn’t sufficient budget to support what’s already a production service, when IT spending appears discretionary, and when other clear needs on campus are being given short shrift? Though consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, if you agree with the sentiment expressed in this question, might you reconsider your thinking about instructors choosing to employ externally hosted social networking software for their classes?

* * * * *

Let’s switch gears and now let’s think of the instructor as content creator. In days of yore there was the “textbook model” under which faculty who wrote textbooks would have copyright of that work unless and until they sold that to a publisher, and such work would normally not count for promotion, tenure, or salary review except perhaps if it attained sufficient visibility to have some light pointed at the faculty member’s department and host institution. But textbooks are a dying breed and online content that has resale value is subject to a severe appropriability problem. Where do the incentives come from nowadays to get faculty to write good and interesting online content? Should those incentives be provided by the institution, perhaps in the form of some bonus payment for delivery of such content? Should faculty be marketing themselves much in the same manner as musicians who tour, viewing the online content as in part promotion for the live presentation, which ends up being the revenue generator? What about the alternative of faculty content displayed on Web sites that are ad supported, where some of the ad revenue bounces back to the faculty member, that in lieu of a royalty payment?

Many may feel uncomfortable with that suggestion and I’d be among them. There is an ethical issue regarding instructors making money off their students. I know on my campus there have been cases where the instructor is one of the co-authors of the textbook and in a position to require the textbook for the course and where colleagues of the instructor have viewed the behavior as less than exemplary if not downright uncollegial – it’s ok to make money off of students at other campuses if instructors there willingly embrace the textbook, but for our own students charging them for the content is immoral since so much of the content is an outgrowth of the teaching experience that was had on the campus and hence the instructor should feel a debt to the campus for providing such a productive environment. (A similar argument, attributed to Herb Simon, is made here for why on ethical grounds society should have a 90 percent flat tax, though Simon recognizes the incentives from such tax would be disastrous.)

Nowadays, however, many of the large gateway courses (the ones that would generate enough eyeballs so that ads might actually prove revenue generating) are taught by adjuncts who are on year to year contracts, rather than by faculty on the tenure track. And these folks tend to get paid less salary-wise. In the class system among instructional personnel, the adjuncts are definitely treated as second class. Further, because their teaching is often the main part of the job, the online content they make while teaching might quite possibly be considered “work for hire” and therefore the copyright may be held by the home institution rather than by the instructor himself.

My experience is that such instructors tend to be extremely cautious about their position – they don’t want to do anything to jeopardize their circumstance. Thus in spite of their focus on teaching, that makes them very slow to innovate with technology, especially if any of the innovation appears to be labor saving and hence possibly leading to their own (unplanned) obsolescence. The point is that the incentives are quite different for such adjuncts than they are for tenure track faculty. Might it be ok for adjuncts to produce content on ad supported Web sites? Might that give these instructors incentives to product good content or, at least, incentives to produce content that would attract eyeballs?

If the instructor does produce good content and profits from it as a consequence, what should the institutional stance be? It’s all well and good for the institution to create an open repository for such content for those instructors who decide to contribute there. But when the repository gets few contributions, can the institution look down its nose at commercial alternatives that might rebate some bucks back to the instructor?

The traditional argument against commercial interests sponsoring research is that it leads to bias in the outcomes and ultimately the parochial interest trumps the broader need, producing a perverse outcome. But a substantial aspect of argument is that the sponsorship remains hidden and so others are not able to factor that in when evaluating the results of the research. Ads, by their very nature, are overt. A different sort of argument would have to be made to argue against this incentive for the creation of instructional materials, namely that the students are not mature enough to evaluate the bias and hence that in an environment with ad supported content one is likely to witness a mild form of brainwashing rather than true instruction. Perhaps.

Yet I think the argument either needs to be more subtle or it is simply wrong. Many of us have come to trust Google as a search engine. It produces results quickly and efficiently and most of the time we find what it is that we were looking for. But, depending on what keywords we used in our search, Google might spit out a bunch of sponsored links – ads targeted by the words used in the search. We understand that’s Google’s way to make money. They’ve pioneered the approach. Do we think their search results are skewed as a consequence of the ads? Wouldn’t a widespread belief that the results were skewed kill the goose that laid the golden eggs? Likewise, wouldn’t an instructor who has a reputation as a good teacher do much harm to said reputation by deliberately biasing materials in order to generate additional ad revenue? What magnitude of revenue would it take for us to scratch our heads in answering that question?

Let me close with the following observation. We need to talk about this more, a lot more. We’re not ready to provide answers to these questions but the eager beavers among the faculty are ready to embrace commercial ad supported applications, purely because many of these applications are more functional and user friendly than other alternatives. So these faculty will act and then we’ll react, quite possibly inappropriately, meaning not in the best interest of our institutions.

The budget pressures might spur this sort of dialog. Sometimes being in a tough spot causes one to be more pragmatic in approach.

ooVoo Chat with Jim Witte

Jim was nice enough to devote some time for this conversation, some of which covers his own use of desktop video conferencing.

Hosting ooVoo Chats

It would be nice if any technology that we promote for instructor use could also be readily used by students. In that regard, ooVoo only requires Webcam and headset so would seem to fit the bill. But if you want to post the recorded video, that requires fair amount of file space and a server. Students would use up their entire campus allocation with just a few movies, so they'd want some external host. Moreover, ooVoo produces the recording in .flv format. Although YouTube converts uploaded videos to .flv, it doesn't accept videos that are submitted in that format. However, blip.tv does! Further, blip.tv will render the video in the in original resolution rather than in a shrunken version. So for student use (or instructor use in Colleges that don't provide unlimited hosting), I'd recommend blip.tv

Do note that even blip doesn't accept .swf file format (Jing movies) so for that students would have to use some other Web space (sigh!) but those files tend to be smaller so their campus space should suffice.

All over again with Deja Vu

I finished up the last couple of episodes of 24 Season 6 over the long weekend. I need to do the stationary bike on a regular basis - to get some form of aerobic exercise that is not too stressful on the joints - and to keep from cutting out of it early I depend on some DVDs of a TV show sans commercials to keep me company while I'm doing the bike. So, lacking a better alternative, I started back in on 24 Season 1, episode 1. To that narrow mindedness make any snicker that you'd like. But note there is a reason I'm bringing it up.

Since I started watching this series during Winter break, there hasn't been a huge lull for me to forget the plots, a lot of detail in that episode I couldn't recall, true, but the main theme is hard to misplace. Yet it turns out, context is everything.

The big mission for Jack Bauer and crew is to prevent the assassination of David Palmer, who happens to be the first credible Black candidate for President of the United States. This episode first aired in November 2001. At that time, my state of Illinois had had an African American Senator, Carol Moseley Braun, but no longer had one. Bush was less than one year in office. Filming of 24 probably started well before the attacks on the World Trade Center; the timing of the shows initial airing was fortuitous for the producers to build a fan base. Nobody was thinking ahead to the Presidential race in 2008....Nobody!

Yet there it is, the key plot device an assassination attempt on a Black candidate for the Presidency, with the fear that if it is successful then it would throw the entire country into a panic. As the pundits at the New York Times make hay with Hilary Clinton's ill considered remarks about Bobby Kennedy's assassination, here and here and here too, perhaps it's helpful to consider what the screenwriters for this show came up with, recognizing full well that these screenwriters knew how to push the buttons of the audience (the show aired on the Fox Network) and noting further that it's the job of a first episode to pull the audience in. The coup de grace, if you trust the correctness of the trivia on the IMDB site about the series, is the irony in noting that Clarence Thomas is a big fan.

wider blog

By futzing with the xml after doing some investigation of what's required, I was able to make the main part of the blog wider, keeping the sidebar as is. The video with norma in the previous post is no rendered at 600x400 and fits nicely as it is embedded. There were some minor casualties. The title bar looks a little weird and the right gray boundary around the main area seems to have been lost. If I can figure out how to recover those, I will, but in the meantime, now I can post larger videos with impunity.

ooVoo Chat with Norma

ooVoo now video records directly to FLV format. (Pretty big file size - about 5 MB per minute - because they record at high quality.) It took me a little while to figure out the html to get that to play directly in the blog, but having done that I believe this is pretty satisfying as a result. Interviews are much more interesting than individual talking heads and that this can be done without a studio for recording as long as each person has a webcam and headset makes it an attractive option to promote.

Students Should Produce Talking Head Video

I made the movie below with online students in mind, but perhaps it makes sense for on ground students as well. Here's a bit about the logistics in case anyone wants to try it.

The movie is just about 1 minute. It was recorded at 640x480 with a frame rate I'd guess at around 30 frames per second. The resulting file was about 11.5 MB in .wmv format. When that was done I uploaded it to YouTube. I do have a good connection in the office and certainly at school network traffic is lower now that we're in summer session. Your mileage may vary. But the putting in the meta data, the upload, and processing took 7 minutes. Then it spit out the html to embed the video in the blog. It took another 3 minutes for the video to actually be available. From my point of view that's not too bad. Of course, I've done quite a few of these so more or less know what to do. A student doing it for the first time would have a harder time. But my guess is that they'd figure it out quickly --- the skill has alternative uses beyond the class so should be valued.

The only real issue I can see with this is if English is not the first language or the student has some disability that makes speaking difficult. Otherwise, I'd do this if I were teaching now.

no file attchments

If you do embrace email posts to a blog for a class, you can't use file attachments.  But, again, linking works.  So a link to a file that is on a Web site would be ok.

Email Posts to a Blog for Class Use

I'm writing this from one of my test email accounts - one of the free ones given by a vendor. Then I'm sending this to an address meant only for the blog. Blogger tells you to keep that address secret, because anyone with it can post to the blog. I've tested doing this from a variety of different test addresses. It seems to work well. It preserves formatting and linking. And once it reaches the blog it seem to not include any identity information of the sender. Perhaps Google tracks that, but if this is coming from a non-Google account, then how do they identify the address with any other info?

Because there is no identifying info, if there is to be some recognition of who posted this, there would have to be some type of signature at the end of the post. (Blogger will say it comes from Lanny Arvan, the blog owner, regardless of who the sender actually is.) If first name suffices to identify the person, that would be great. Otherwise, first name last initial, or some alias that is for the class would have to be used. Does this satisfy the campus security folks?

And would students go for this approach? I should point out that students could set up their own blog as an archive of their messages by sending the email to two addresses, if they'd like. Alternatively they can archive within their Sent items by simply setting up a filter for the address. Seems pretty good to me.

Clever Student

eLearning and Telecommuting

Last Friday my staff and I drove up to Chicago to do a presentation for the Accountancy Department’s Masters in Tax program – a one-year Friday-Saturday program for professionals in the field. We were introducing them to Adobe Connect, in this case to be used for the group work the students do outside of their face-to-face sessions at the Illini Center. The presentation went reasonably well and I expect to see good uptake of Connect by this cohort of students.

Coincidentally, the day before the trip I had glanced through this piece on Learning Studios where there are tables and chairs arranged in pods, instead of the usual semi-circular rows that one sees in many Business School classrooms. The Masters in Tax program has something similar. Each team sat at it’s own pod. But unlike in the Educause piece, the seating was like a horeshoe, with one end of the table open, the end that faces the front of the room where the projection screens were. This arrangement makes sense to me and I was impressed by the set up. On occasion the students work ensemble with the instructor, in which case eyes face front and the seating enables that. But there is also a lot of group work and then the students face each other and converse among themselves without having to readjust their seating.

I will be curious to learn how effective the group work via Adobe Connect is. As was made clear to me during a lunch conversation before our presentation, the students in this program are extremely busy people. Apart from the instruction itself, the weekend program creates a benefit for the students in forcing them to commit that time to their learning. Something done online during the week has to compete with the other demands placed on these people. When we compare face-to-face with online, it ‘s not just the experience itself but also this time allocation effect that must be considered. But, of course, there is an argument that cuts the other way. Some of the students in the program are coming from as far away as Peoria, about a two hour drive one way when there isn’t much traffic. Meeting online is so much more convenient in light of such a commute.

With this experience fresh in mind I started to scratch my head after reading Paul Krugman’s latest, which argues that in Europe where they have smaller cars and drive less than in the U.S., they may have a better solution in place for the new world we live in, where gasoline prices are likely to continue to go higher and where for environmental rather than economy reasons it would be good to lower our reliance on fossil fuels. Indeed, on the Frye Leadership Institute Alumni listserv there was an interesting discussion last week about reducing the carbon footprint attributable to IT activities on campus. There were a lot of interesting and clever ideas mentioned, such as Climate Savers Computing and the Virtual Computing Lab. But nobody talked about IT as a possible carbon saver via telecommuting. This thought didn’t occur to me till I had read the Krugman piece.

The way commuting works, those costs are typically incurred by the employee rather than the employer, especially in the absence of a COLA. Likewise, on the issue of carbon footprint, the employer typically doesn’t get credit if, for example, the employee drives a more fuel efficient vehicle. But in what I write in the rest of the post, I’m going to assume the savings can be internalized and that we’re interested in producing them, as long as they are real and not some fiction, so I won’t concern myself with how such an internalization would manifest.

Let me proceed by considering Blended Learning in the classroom and promoting a partial telecommuting approach in the workplace. In so doing I’d like to make several points:

1. There is much similarity between the two and we should go out of our way to emphasize that. Thus learning technologists who’ve got some experience in support of Blended Learning should be enlisted to help those on Campus who in the work context want to entertain a telecommuting approach.

2. Universities should take a leadership role in promoting telecommuting. It is something that we in Higher Ed can export to the society at large if we learn how to do it well. The green argument for telecommuting has been made elsewhere, but the uptake has not been great to date except in certain niche areas. There is a need to demonstrate it works more broadly.

3. In towns like Champaign, housing tends to more expensive in town, so many staff making more modest salaries live in the surrounding communities. The recent increases in energy costs hit these staff disproportionately. In a time where budgets are tight, telecommuting is a way to reward such staff where it counts – in the pocketbook.

4. There is learning that needs to happen both for the staff themselves and their supervisors as to whether telecommuting can be efficacious and what practices and technologies might make it more effective. This might be as simple as asking if, for example, there are several co-workers telecommuting in part with some days at the office and other days at home, whether it matters how much they overlap in the office and if one should strive to have them all there at some times or if the goal should be to keep the number at the office as uniform as possible.

5. Because of the previous point there likely should be a phased in approach to telecommuting with some pilots that are carefully evaluated. In other words, start with one day per week at home for a few employees. Work up to more days per week and more employees. Do the pilot with employees who are already doing some work from home, perhaps in the evenings.

6. Where there have been face to face programs for commuting students that have moved to a Blended learning or Fully Online approach, there likely is some relevant experience that would apply for telecommuting (and vice versa). Of particular interest is finding the right mix between synchronous and asynchronous communication, with the former likely better for keeping people on task and committed to the work (as with the Masters in Tax students) and the latter better for flexibility and archiving the work. Also of much interest is how much work should be done ensemble with all staff aware of what is going on versus having very small groups or individual efforts. Here there is a different trade off – making all aware of the activity versus coordinating when the work is being done.

7. There are also questions about the importance of certain technologies and matching them to the participants. For example, Adobe Connect allows users to have talking head video interaction via Webcams. Does the Webcam promote the work, or is an audio presence sufficient? One might be able to get much of the desired functionality with a combination of applications, for example Skye and Google Docs. Does a a single application matter or not?

8. There is a need to allow experiments of this sort enough time so participants can move down the learning curve, but also a need to recognize when “it’s not working” and allow them to call it quits when they’ve reached that point.

9. And it may be that some employees are ripe for this and others not. But I think mostly the question is whether the employees have already “bonded” and have a good working relationship with one another. I believe we know from experiences with eLearning that face to face is very helpful for making such bonds, but it may be less necessary to keep up the same frequency of face to face once the bonds have formed.

I’d like to think there’d be learning the other way too – from telecommuting to eLearning. At present those on Campus who are deeply knowledgeable about eLearning constitute a tiny fraction of the populace. And if the way one learns about eLearning is to have a program or set of programs that are Blended or fully online, then it is likely for the vast majority to persist in their ignorance because because a high threshold must be crossed to justify developing such a program. But telecommuting could become broadly popular – the energy cost and green issues are likely to be with us for quite some time. So it should be possible for the institution to become aware of what eLearning is about through that channel. We can’t get there, however, unless we try it.

Transcribing Voice and Inserting Captions with Screen Capture Movies

This post is a sequel to a recent post called futzing with captioning. Here I want to talk about the “more natural” process of recording the voice first, without a script, and then transcribing that. I have the expression more natural in quotes because that’s the way it is for me. I assume it would be that way most everyone else who has intimate and often quite implicit knowledge of a subject matter, so can talk about it with ease (though whether that talk is intelligible to others might be an issue). If you actually sound more natural by reading a script that you produced ahead of time, by all means do that. It likely will be faster overall and give a cleaner presentation. But as I said in the earlier post, I sound mechanical that way – there is a lack of spontaneity. Recording the audio without a script is much better and I believe will give a better experience for the student. But then making that video accessible is more of a chore.

Here are a few such movies at my blog The Economics Metaphor, those under the label “Cost.” The three movies run less than 9 minutes in total, but with the ancillary spreadsheet, Word doc, and self-test in the last of the movies, I believe this content would be sufficient to replace the hour lecture on Cost that many instructors cover in Principles or even in Intermediate Microeconomics. Others can judge that for themselves. Here I want to talk about the making of these things and what I’ve learned from doing them.

First, each movie recorded a region of the screen that was 640 x 480 in dimension. The bottom 640 x 90 area was deliberately set to have a plain background so the captions could overlay that area and not block out anything of interest. Do note that this is all done so the captions can be turned off if the user wants to do that. One can produce captions that are placed “underneath” the captured video as long as one is willing for those to display all the time. But then the entire captured region is shrunk so to squeeze in the captions, and the shrinking of the video means it will be narrower as well as less wide. So with the captions it will render with some black space on each side of the video. My approach avoids that black space on the sides. Ultimately, the produced movies are rendered somewhat smaller, at a custom size of 596 x 437, so they can fit into the Blog without appearing to overflow the column. They are still large enough to render as if at original size.

For the Cost Table video, I did the screen capture first and then recorded the voice while watching the movie the second time through. That’s my trick for making sure things move along and I don’t go off on too many tangents. But it is more laborious that way and so for the other two I recorded the voice while I did the capture. Even with that I had to rehearse the captures a few times to make sure I knew what I was going to do at each step. Then I set out to produce the transcript.

A lesson learned is to produce the transcript first without worry about the timings, and then use the built in Camtasia tool to put the timings in afterwards – more about that in a bit. After screwing around with various alternatives, I opted for each line to have 45 characters (which includes blank space between words). I don’t really know what is optimal in the tradeoff of having the text change too often, on the one hand, and having too much in any one view on the other. I tried for a reasonable compromise. And with that, I vowed to have two lines of text per caption. Three is possible but I thought that too much.

Once I worked down the routine, this is how I produced the transcript. I’d play a little bit of the video and then hit pause. Then I’d type a line, or two if I was lucky. Then I’d have to figure out if there needed to be a line break or not. If not, I’d play a little bit more of the video to pick up a few more words and proceed again. Some of my sentences are longer than two lines of text and sometimes they are very short. So in going from one caption to the next there had to be a way to signal that. I started each new caption with a capital letter as if it were the start of a sentence, whether that was the case or not.

The creating of the script is laborious and the person doing it would find life much easier if they had some idea for the subject matter, to see if they should make a literal translation or make some small changes in the text to enhance readability. Look at the captions for the Algebra video (the middle one). This will give you some idea of the issues with captioning text when there is technical content. I’m guessing that between writing the script and putting the timings in, it was about a half hour, this for a movie that is under 3 minutes in duration, a good incentive for keeping the videos brief and to the point.

The other thing I’d like to comment on here is just how colloquial the voice is. I thought my writing was informal, but au contraire, at least compared to the speaking. I think that’s necessary when talking about a subject from a technical point of view, for otherwise it will seem impenetrable. Also, my pacing is distinct from the pacing when reading text. I don’t pause much if at all at the end of the sentence. It’s almost as if a period is an excuse to accelerate the speaking. I believe the rapid speech conveys some sense that I’m interested in what I’m talking about, which is likely important to convey for otherwise the students will find this stuff very dry. But it also means that student might not get it in a first pass. One of the benefits from the video is that it can be replayed as often as the student would like.

To sum up, if the only concern was providing good content for the students, this would definitely be the way to go with screen capture movies, producing a capture where there is no audio for the script and then producing a transcript. But this is quite laborious, no doubt about it. So generating a large volume of content of this sort requires the fore knowledge that the videos will have substantial use value to a good number of students. If that condition is satisfied, then it’s likely also worthwhile to hire students (who’ve already taken the course) to create the transcripts and put in the timings.

Asps and Aspirations

Tuesday night I worked late in the office. I didn’t leave for home till after 7. And since for reasons I don’t understand public radio doesn’t come in too well near my home, especially in the evening, I didn’t listen to the radio on the drive and had no clue about the primary results when I got home. So after pouring a glass of wine I plopped on CNN. Lo and behold, there was Donna Brazile really giving it to Paul Bergala. I tuned in too late to know what started it all, but I quickly got the sense that she felt as if she’d been taking it from him for quite a while (they’re part of the show every weekday evening in the slot before Larry King, at least now when the race between Clinton and Obama is news) and with it getting down to the wire, she had had enough. This seemed to me the obvious consequence when one has commentators who have their hearts in particular candidates. Brazile, who is also a superdelegate, had been fairly non-committal as to which candidate she backed on earlier show. But given that African Americans have been turning out in droves in support of Obama, I have to guess that trumps gender in this particular instance. Bergala has been for Clinton from the get go.

In any event, their scuffling was giving me a headache so I switched channels to MSNBC. After a brief update of the then current results, they left the commentary of Chris Matthews and Tim Russert in favor of an interview with Harold Ford Jr., who with due respect argued that, in thinking a step or two ahead, Obama does have problems getting the votes of working class, ethnic, white male voters and to sure up on that front he should seriously consider getting Clinton to be his VP candidate. That was the smartest thing I heard that evening. Much of the rest was just speculation on how the next steps of the campaign will play out, with very little added information content, unless the speculation itself is news. Indeed, we seem to have gotten way beyond the threshold of the observers affecting the events that they watch. The pundits now seem to be telling the candidates how to run their campaigns. I prefer analysis to demagoguery. The best of that I heard from Mark Shields the following evening on the News Hour, who argued that Clinton might bargain with Obama for his campaign to absorb some of her campaign debt. Ask yourself, if that is what’s really going on, what bargaining chips might she have to make that outcome part of the deal?

I watch this stuff in part as an escape from work. But that doesn’t seem to be working now. The lack of analysis aside, there’s another issue. We become what we abhor. I’m seeing a good part of my job as being a pundit, though in this case the problem isn’t that I might influence the outcome in the process – I’m supposed to do that – the problem is reporting on the outcome once it has occurred.

We’re doing a project on Blended Learning with a novel twist. I’ll write about it when it’s a little further along. In the meantime, we have to plan the evaluation of it now and, because it involves human subjects, we’re required to complete IRB forms so they can review our proposed “research.” For some reason, the word research in and of itself set me off. I’ve already got in my head the upside if this first project “works” and we start scaling the approach to other courses. I can see the consequence – for instructors and students, to be sure – but also for me and my office, in terms of how involved we are with the mission of the College and how much we’ll be appreciated for bringing in an innovative approach to instruction. Mine is not the view of a dispassionate geneticist studying her Drosophila. My staff and I are not neutral about what we hope to learn from this implementation. A pundit and his team doing research. Hmmm.

Perhaps for recreation I should stop watching election politics on TV and go back to the Yankees. It’s a lot safer career-wise. I never say “Holy Cow!” and The Scooter is not one of my role models.

Futzing with Captioning in Camtasia

I've been screwing around with Camtasia using their captioning tool to learn how it works. This is my latest movie. It has several serious flaws that I'll describe in a bit. But first let me say some nice things about the Camtasia captioning tool.

There are two ways for captions to appear. They can be under the video as stand alone text. Or they can overlay the video. In the later case, there is an option for closed captioning, so the viewer can turn that on and off. That is slick. (But this option is only available if the video is produced as Flash.) Also, if you have a script for the captions to go along with the movie and you have reasonably short sentences so you know where the breaks should be from the point of view given by the text, then Camtasia has a nice real time tool for putting in the timings of those breaks. I give them high marks for that too.

But the overlay does this by putting in a colored background onto your image and that cuts off about 1/4 of the image from the bottom. That colored background has some transparency, but for all intents it means that part of your image capture will be blocked. That's fine if there is white space or something else neutral. It's not very good, however, if there is information content in that part of the image.

I found myself feeling very awkward reading a script of my own creation aloud. If you watch and listen to the video above, I'm sure that comes through. I'm much more natural without a script. But production-wise, it clearly is less effort overall to write the script first and read it back then to talk through the slides and generate the script as a transcription of the talk through. In fact, I don't really even like PowerPoint if I'm going to be speaking, because I want to go with what moves me at the time and not stick with the preassigned message. (On the other hand, if I simply wrote the text and didn't speak it, then the PowerPoint would be ok to me as a way to deliver the images that are part of the writing activity.) So there seems to be no good way to have it all, including a reasonable time in which to generate an end product.

The other problem with the video is the background music. I don't know if this is completely Kosher, but to avoid copyright infringement issues but to use music that is familiar and whose lyrics one might (not so) subliminally tie to the message in my presentation, I've opted for midi versions of well known tunes. In this case it is a segment from the Wizard of Oz song, "If I Only Had a Brain." And this same segment is repeated over and over. (My music editing skills are also fairly feeble. Through fade in and fade out I was able to get the volume of this segment set at a reasonable level. But I couldn't do that uniformly to the entire song.) But, the midi sound can be grating on one's nerves. It would be much nicer to have the actual instrumental bit from the movie. One could eliminate the background music entirely, for sure. But my sense if that this were well done, then the more one can engage the senses of the viewer, the more effective the video would be, though I must say that there's no analog to the captioning for the background music.

My conclusion from all of this is that for a person without disabilities, we could produce a reasonably interesting show by using text, music, and images as the primary inputs, with spoken words only rarely, accommodate much of the production issues I mentioned above and be satisfied with the result on some grounds. But if we want an experience that is accessible to all, a goal we should aspire towards, then aesthetically it will be limited in a variety of ways. I'm sure someone more skilled than I could improve on what I've produced here. But those limitations are likely there for all of us.

Video is likely to become an increasingly important part of our repertoire. So I'd be curious to know how the rest of you are thinking about captioning and accessibility now. For me, it's something I'm still trying to wrap my arms around.

Renewing Ourselves

Late afternoon yesterday I took a stroll around the development where I live. The park across the street from my house showed dandelions everywhere. We tolerate the weeds where the children play, but not on our own lawns that must be more pristine and well kept up. The air was crisp with the temperature in the high 60s, low humidity and clear views, the sunset still an hour away and a sense of transient perfection punctuating the calendar before return to the hot and muggy summer. The 10-day forecast predicts we’ll have this temperate climate for a while. This is Finals Week here, then Graduation, followed by Summer School. Perhaps the seasons are permuting and we’ll be spared the air conditioning bills till June or later. Spring is our season to start again, even as the conversation coming out of our national politics wants to dampen down our hope.

As I walked along the path near Interstate 57, I saw a rabbit. A while later I saw a couple more, outside the backyards while walking up Duncan Road. There are no squirrels here, perhaps because the trees are still so young and the development still has a feel of space reclaimed from agriculture; I suppose that’s the reason the squirrels haven’t yet made it west from the older neighborhoods in town. The dogs are mostly on a leash or running around inside back yards with fences. With nary a predator in sight, the rabbits are the animal equivalent of the dandelions, spending their time on what they do best.

There are corn fields immediately to the south. The farmers have been getting ready to plant. I saw some tractors in town last week, slowing down traffic. In that setting they seem to be the encroachers because they alter the usual flow. Yesterday I don’t see any farmers but I do see many people puttering in their yards. They have the urge to grow something outside and shape its appearance as it grows. I am jealous of that feeling because I don’t share it.

Though I used to traipse around Buttermilk Falls Park when I was an undergrad and sit on the rocks and stare at Lake Michigan as a grad student, my idyllic spot has always been inside, a coffee house or living room, with reading or conversation or simply staring into space both means and end.

Now it’s technology that pronounces the artificial nature of my existence. Earlier in the afternoon I read out in the back yard with the Kindle, the Sunday Times download and non-reflective screen making it the perfect companion. During my walk I imitate my 15 year old son, wandering around with the ubiquitous iPod, my internal rhythms competing with old Allman Brothers music for my attention.

I have the unmistakable feeling that things are out of wack, the uncontrolled growth of Asteraceae and Leporidae a metaphor for societal ills. Yet there is also much beauty in the varied colors of the leaves and a sense of possibility in seeing how far we’ve come out of the harsh winter. What path should we take to greater harmony?

Students Should Make Web Movies In Doing Homework

Here's a video from me to make the argument for Web Movies made by students as part of the normal transaction for students doing their work. It would be much easier to make the case if students had Tablet PCs, because then they could do it in one step. But in my argument I assumed that the students didn't have Tablets and were just using a regular computer to make the movies.

Re: Student Projects As Capture Movies

In the previous post, the embedded movie looks rather small, especially if you have a high screen resolution. (Size is acceptable if your monitor is set to 1024 x 768 or lower.) That may be less satisfying. Here is a linked version that is larger, 640 x 480. It is more pleasing to view because of the size, but at that size it is too large to embed into a blog post.

One other comment about the creation of this sort of thing. Camtasia is both a capture solution and a movie editor. You need both to make this. But Camtasia costs and if this is really for students, then perhaps there needs to be a free alternative. On a PC, Windows Media Encoder is fine for the capture. The output will be .wmv rather than .swf, but that is a minor concern. You might then not want to capture in slideshow mode, but rather in the regular edition mode. If you do this, you must advance the slides manually, for example with the arrow keys. For the editing, one might use Windows Media Maker, though there doesn't seem to be a Vista version. Likewise, there is commensurate software for a Mac (iMovie for the editing, not sure about the capture). The free software makes this a little harder, because there are more applications to use. But should still be do-able.

Student Projects As Capture Movies

Here is a little movie about how to make movies like this. The idea is to make slides in PowerPoint that have sentence captions in the main screen and capture that. Then after the capture put in a background music track. (An alternative would be to do voice over. But I'm not crazy about reading the captions, and if you have voice that differs from the text, that could be confusing. ) For anyone who wants to do this themselves, here's the PowerPoint file itself, so you can reverse engineer it and make your own. And for those curious about the music, it's Chopin, Mazurka Op. 7 No. 3 in F minor.

Limericks Again

The Democratic race for President,
Has two candidates left who’ve set precedent.
One’s a woman, the other a black man.
For more than a year they ran and ran.
And they’re still running, which makes the super delegates hesitant.

- - -

My dad would write the letters ‘CA.’
The word they stood for, he could not say.
His life was prolonged by insert of a stent,
To drain the poisons within him, which would not relent.
It’s been almost nine years since he passed away.

- - -

When rhyming one must give up all pretense of taste.
Sounds alike rules, putting good ideas to waste.
The trick in doing this type of word play,
Is ensuring the reader reacts, “On, nay!”
Which is why limericks like these are written in haste.

- - -

Web 2.0, whether blog or YouTube video,
It’s empowerment galore so we can all say so.
Voicing opinions and commenting on others,
Whether of strangers’ thoughts or of in-laws who are brothers.
It’s about exchanging ideas rather than making dough.

- - -

Dr. Suess taught us with a cat in a hat.
And green eggs and ham and all the rest of that.
For kids learning language with a picture and a rhyme,
It works very well most of the time.
But for adults perhaps it turns a bit flat.

- - -

The need to rhyme shows I’m deranged.
But each of us have aspects that are strange.
Surely its better in it to take delight,
Than use it to give others out of their wits fright.
Which is why my theme song is “groan on the range.”

Cranky Doodle Dandy

Thoughts turn in spring toward the traditional pastime. Unfortunately, the dreaded Red Sox are heating up. And I’ve taught myself not to get too caught up in the pennant race till September, when the end is in sight. So I indulge my passion in other ways. I confess to have become a Utah Jazz fan and watch at least part of their games in the playoffs. (Deron Williams who in college played at Illinois is their star guard.) Then I think nostalgically of old baseball movies. And I watch the new sport, the presidential election campaign.

One of those movies is the Jackie Robinson story, with the man himself in the title role. (You can watch it online.) As films go, even restricted to the genre of sports films, it is not a great picture. There is a stiffness in the acting, a predictability in the delivery. But the story is incredibly important. Breaking the color line was the crowning achievement of baseball, more important than all the home runs, stolen bases, and no-hit games put together. It is worth viewing to mark this great achievement. The key character apart from Jackie Robinson himself is Branch Rickey. The full speech to which I linked is worth a read. It gives a very interesting interpretation why U.S. history regarding Blacks after emancipation was so much harsher than the similar experience in Latin America, where there is and was much greater acceptance of Blacks – slavery was a condition of circumstance and predated the African slave trade; there was law called manumission (it is spelled differently in the speech) where slaves could buy back their freedom and most did, and free people who had been slaves were prone to take care of their own kind when they became free. The speech makes it clear the Rickey was looking to break the color line for some time before he found Robinson. He had a vision of what was necessary to do that.

"Then I had to get the right man off the field. I couldn't come with a man to break down a tradition that had in it centered and concentrated all the prejudices of a great many people north and south unless he was good. He must justify himself upon the positive principle of merit. He must be a great player. I must not risk an excuse of trying to do something in the sociological field, or in the race field, just because of sort of a "holier than thou." I must be sure that the man was good on the field, but more dangerous to me, at that time, and even now, is the wrong man off the field. It didn't matter to me so much in choosing a man off the field that he was temperamental, -- righteously subject to resentments. I wanted a man of exceptional intelligence, a man who was able to grasp and control the responsibilities of himself to his race and could carry that load. That was the greatest danger point of all. Really greater than the number five in the whole six.

In the movie this issue about off the field behavior played out in a scene where Rickey tests Robinson for his reactions in a variety of circumstances, each meant to provoke Robinson with taunting, racial epitaphs, and worse. I don’t have the precise dialog, but my recollection is that eventually Robinson asks something like this. “Mr Rickey, don’t you think I’m strong enough to fight back?” And Rickey responds, “Jackie, I want you to be strong enough not to fight back.” In Rickey’s view fighting back would be the path toward lack of acceptance by the rest of the nation. The only way was for Robinson to turn the other cheek. The movie is worthwhile for watching that scene and for how events transpired thereafter. Ultimately, Rickey allowed Robinson to take the gloves off and he had a variety of fights out of public view, proving his mettle in the more traditional way.

The other movie I want to comment on is a wonderful piece of fluff in black and white, perfect viewing for a rainy afternoon, It Happens Every Spring. A chemistry professor, played by Ray Milland, makes an accidental discovery when a baseball from a sandlot game crashes through the window of his lab, knocking over beakers with who knows what in them to produce a one of a kind formula for a substance that is repelled by wood. When applied to a baseball the substance makes for the perfect ‘spitball’ and the professor becomes transformed into the best pitcher in the major leagues.

The professor/pitcher is in the absent minded category, lovable but zany. He ends up rooming with his catcher, who tries to keep him on the straight and narrow. There’s great comedy between them. This movie is purely for the entertainment value while watching, no real take away afterwards, but it is interesting to note how professors are depicted in the film, a stereotype that I believe persists to this. Unfortunately for me, I fit much of the stereotype – absent minded, sure; not able to deal with normal real-world stuff without the help of others, definitely; but also, charming and loveable if these other needs are attended to but capable of being aloof and too focused on ideas rather than on people otherwise. Other people might read the behavior as disdain, though I’d call it concentration.

This is not a perfect segue into the presidential campaign as sports viewing but I want to switch to it anyway. And the first thing I want to note – the partisanship among the analysts seems greater than I can ever recall before. When you watch a ball game on TV and you are tuning in on to the home team’s broadcast with the home team’s announcers, it is really no surprise that they favor the home team. That’s the expectation. But if you watch a game on a national network, say on ESPN, you expect the announcers to just want good play and not prefer one team over the other. In this case, it’s neutrality that is the expectation. During a break between innings they might do an interview with the manager of one team (typically not too informative – the other team might be watching) and if so they’ll be sure to get the manager or some coach of the other team later in the broadcast. They are governed by rules of fairness in how the broadcast is conducted and the broadcasters take that seriously; if they themselves are fans for a particular team they restrain that as best as they can. The system works pretty well, not perfectly to be sure, but it is more than satisfactory.

Consider this Wikipedia entry on the now defunct TV show Crossfire and in particular Jon Stewart’s appearance in 2004. The criticism, one I suppose that many people at CNN agreed with since they cancelled the show soon thereafter, is that people on that show would not argue in a way where they might change their opinion if their counterpart made a good and effective point, so that the end result would be a synthesis of the starting views of the participants. Rather they’d more or less give a sales spiel about their position and keep spieling whenever they had the opportunity. (Sometimes both from the right and from the left presenters would talk at the same time, which made them both look rude, but by opportunity here I mean when the other wasn’t speaking.) When those on TV don’t move toward a synthesis of ideas, neither does the audience. Members of the audience either embrace one side of the argument, and then feel confirmed by hearing someone else give voice to their own views, or they are repulsed by it all and walk away with the sense that argument is a painful thing to do, something to be avoided whenever possible. We talk about the Net Generation regarding their technology experience, but we don’t talk about their lack of experience in witnessing interesting debate and in learning how argument advances thinking.

CNN’s own election coverage has in effect moved some of the Crossfire into the same programming with Wolf Blitzer, John King, and the other Caspar Milquetoast staff of regulars. They’ve done this, I suppose, to compete for viewers with Fox News. Unfortunately, the approach has spilled over elsewhere including to ‘more respected’ outlets, like the New York Times Op-Ed page and the Charlie Rose show. All are competing for eyeballs and being loud can drown out making subtle points. So a kind of Gresham’s Law has been at work here, which is doubly unfortunate because when there are lingering remnants of good argument being made, the viewers likely find it hard to separate the chaff from the wheat.

This particular show, from last Tuesday, was better than most in getting the pundits to make real argument. But even here, there might be what you call ego getting in the way. Early in the show, perhaps around the 17 minute or 18 minute mark, Dick Polan defends a Clinton ad that others had argued was mean spirited. Later in the show when the question came up how the candidates were talking to the Press off the record, Polan reported that Clinton was much better in that context, warm and open. Obama didn’t do it much and was stiff and guarded when on the record. I know the first time through when I watched it on TV, I got the strong impression that Polan was for Clinton. On watching the replay on Google video, the impression was still there but more muted. What did come across, since so much of the subject was connection with working class white (male) voters, an obvious topic of discussion after the Pennsylvania Primary, is Polan’s willingness to document where Clinton seemed to make that connection and Obama didn’t.

I thought the best bit of the show came in Mark Halperin’s analysis around 22:30, where he begins by talking about the fatigue of both candidates and then turns to the fact that they are no longer getting better in the campaigning, partly because of that fatigue. (Both candidates did improve early on.) Rather they are now taking a low to the ground tactical approach that gives most of the rest of us who’ve voted in our own state’s primary the impression that the primary season is too long. The question then becomes whether the rules should be changed to shorten the season. (Baseball, that most traditional of games, has the Designated Hitter, a multi-tier round of playoffs, and a reinterpretation of the strike zone. Even our must revered institutions can go through rules changes.) Or is this such an exceptional circumstance with two strong candidates that we should not project this experience into how things should be done in 2012 and content ourselves to watching the theater of the endgame as the nominee is selected?

All of the pundits seemed to agree that Obama is remote and aloof, or at least is perceived to be that way. The question arose whether Obama is the next Adlai Stevenson or the next JFK. Here Stevenson is cast more or less in the role of the Ray Milland character in It Happens Every Spring, as the egghead who can’t connect with ordinary people. (I don’t know whether this is a fair characterization of Stevenson, who did get the nomination both in 1952 and again in 1956. It’s true that he lost both times. But Ike was a popular opponent.) None of the pundits even remotely suggested casting Obama as the next Jackie Robinson. They seemed much more comfortable attributing the Obama behavior to his intrinsic character than to view it as a planned approach, to remain guarded and circumspect in order to gain acceptance, shielding his own character from view.

Maybe they are right. I don’t know. They’ve got more direct information. The rest of us only have what we view and read. But there were many reports from well before the Pennsylvania Primary that Obama muted his critique of Clinton, and that doing so was a deliberate strategy on his part. I’ve got the impression that he’s still pulling his punches even after the two campaigns stepped up their attacks on each other right before the Tuesday vote. And I’ve been puzzling over this because of the perception that Obama is the more tired candidate and Clinton the stronger. First, I question whether it’s true. Second, if it is true, I question why. Obama holding things back explains both – remember the Branch Rickey line from the movie.

So it could be his personality but I’m not giving up on the thought that Obama is playing out the same sort of strategy that Rickey laid out sixty years ago. In clinging to that idea, I’m challenging the wisdom of the pundits. Taking on the pundits is my form of diversion. It’s more fun than yelling at the umpire for a bad call.

Default Font

Sometimes technology *features* are simply there, just showing off or so it seems. On the Kindle, I’ve noticed that Wall Street Journal articles give a word count – this article has 1244 words, that sort of thing. It follows the byline. “Does this help the reader?” I wonder. The New York Times doesn’t do this sort of thing, so it’s something Journal folks have cooked up, not something endemic to the Kindle. Just how long is an article with 1244 words? Does the reader count the words in deciding whether to continue the piece. “I’ve got 572 words to go and this seems blather, so I’ll stop now.” I don’t need word count to make that choice, or do I?

On the Kindle the user can vary the font size, but the font itself is fixed, Times Roman I suppose, though without a menu to choose from I can’t be sure. In MS Word, there is an awesome menu of fonts. I only know what a handful of them look like. How many are variations on a theme? I wouldn’t be able to tell one from another. But I’m pretty sure the Kindle font is Times Roman. Kindle so aspires to read like a book. Many books are printed in Times Roman. The Harry Potter Books are the exception that proves the rule. With books aimed at adults, the text is supposed to be pure symbol, not an artifact in itself that the reader should react to. But nowadays, why not a book with a sans serif font? Why does tradition rule here?

A couple of weeks ago I had an assignment to write a 500-word essay on a topic. I go back and forth between my office computer (MS Word 2007) and my home computer (MS Word 2003). I am cognizant of the file type (.doc or .docx) but believe that in itself has no effect on the viewing. I am also aware that the default font has changed, from 12 point Times New Roman in Word 2003 to 11 point Calibri in Word 2007. What explains this change? I first moved to Outlook 2007 on my office computer and for quite a while used in conjunction with the other tools in MS Office 2003. The default font colors in Outlook 2007 are pastel, as if progress in the software requires a softer look in the text on the screen. Calibri is a sans serif font. I suppose the softer look requires a sans serif font.

It occurred to me in writing the assigned essay that with the change in the default font type, that would change how long a 500-word essay would appear on the screen. What would such an essay look like page length-wise? I believed that one page of Times Roman 12 point was somewhere between 300 and 350 words. What would the switch to the to Calibri 11 point do to word count per page? I wrote this post partly to practice the 500-word essay. (It is not quite 600 words.) I was quite surprised to find out it fit entirely on one page. And I was a bit disturbed by this observation. Could the font change account for such a big difference in words per page? So I converted what I had written to Times New Roman 12 point, expecting the text to then run over to the next page. Lo and behold, it didn’t. It still fit into one page, with a couple of lines to spare.

Now I was scratching my head. How had I come to the belief that a page of text in MS Word had about 300 – 350 words? My current experience showed a page plainly could accommodate in excess of 500 words, perhaps even 600 words. In writing this post I’ve not yet hit the first page limit and this sentence culminates with the 649th word. (One of my sidebar discoveries is that Word 2007 has a status bar at the bottom of the page where Word Count is one of the options and is turned on by default. If you are looking for a technological cause of writer’s block in a student doing a term paper, this could be it.)

This was a real discrepancy. I don’t typically come up with a belief in fact that has no basis in experience. Sometime in the past my pages had 300 – 350 words. Was that when I was a Mac user? Perhaps. I recalled some difference in pagination when crossing platforms. But this seemed too extreme to be explained by this. Something else was the likely cause. I double spaced the text. That produced the requisite 300 – 350 words. Now I single space. Did I double space in the past? Probably I did but I don’t have a good memory of it.

Reconstructing the likely error, sometime when I did double space I did a tiny bit of looking to find word count per page, got the 300 – 350 words as the ballpark, and remembered that. Later I switched to single spacing, but had no immediate reason to track words per page. When I needed to consider that, I used my old beliefs, though circumstances had changed. I hadn’t recalibrated, though the circumstances demanded that I do.

This type of error is particularly troublesome to an economist, who has been trained that rational actors should not experience money illusion. But now, with a somewhat greater appreciation of cognitive challenges, for me personally and for our species as a whole, I began to wonder not so much why I had made this mistake, but rather whether we’re all prone to make mistakes of this sort on a repeated basis, namely we don’t recalibrate our world view that was determined in a previous regime while knowing full well that the regime has changed. Hence we are prone to make errors, because our world view is not up to date appropriate for the current circumstance.

Let me illustrate with a more profound mistake. I took the SAT in 1971, once in the spring and again in the fall. I’ve written about this extensively in the context of the current testing craze so I won’t belabor it here. I simply want to recall two things from that experience. At the time I believe that test measured something important. And I performed significantly better on the Math part than on the Verbal part. The Bakke case, which got enormous publicity at the time, happened in the late 1970’s. So by the early 1980s I must have been exposed to the argument that there was a cultural bias in the SAT that had an effect on minority student performance. But I believe I completely discounted that argument regarding my own performance. And even to this day, I believe that the math proficiency correlates with performance in certain college disciplines (e.g. Chemistry or Economics) and that reading comprehension can be measured to some degree by the type of questions that the SAT asks (although I would concede that prior knowledge of the subject matter is implicitly measured, not just understanding of the passage under question).

It was not till I started to get involved with learning technology and listening to faculty from all across campus that I began to hear criticism about standardized testing in general and the SAT in particular. Perhaps this is just human nature, but I started off by resisting those criticisms because of the above mentioned correlation, which I had witnessed in my own experience both as an undergrad and in grad school. Over time, however, I’ve come to believe the test is insufficient in some important ways. The situations it covers are all closed ended. We want thinking on open ended problems. Skill at the one does not necessarily translate to skill at the other. And the SAT is a speed test. By its nature it can’t measure persistence. Yet stick-to-it-ness is probably a more important characteristic than aptitude. Hard problems require chewing on them for quite a while. Sparks of genius are great, but they are fueled by hours and hours of being stuck.

This altered perception about the test notwithstanding, I still clung to the belief I was a math guy; verbal skills were out of my purview. In retrospect, and especially because there actually was considerable other evidence to the contrary, this represents a remarkable lack of recalibration. Now I can see how I made the error. I had a strong taste for intellectual argument, certainly in college and I believe even back in high school. But I had limited places to express this interest. What I found was outside the classroom, with friends in a social setting. I didn’t see that as verbal skill because it was outside of school. Writing, which I do now largely because such friends are not close at hand, is my current way of making intellectual argument. But because much of that happens via blogging, and there is a community of .edu bloggers of which I’m a part, now it seems part of school, so I must be a verbal guy.

* * * * *

Profound errors of this sort make me wonder whether others are making them. I think the answer has to be that they are. Let me illustrate, but this time in reverse.

Look at this list of symptoms for jet lag. Note that irritability is a significant consequence. Then scroll up to the previous item and read about the causes for jet lag. To this I would add that whether in a plane or a car the passenger is subject to vibrations and if traveling for a long period of time those can be disorienting. (They give me a sense of internal hum well after the trip is over. Consequently, I have a well deserved reputation for being a poor traveler.) I’d add to this that on airplanes the engine roar itself can create a feeling of assault and deprivation. Most of us have been through this and continue to experience it now and again. But we get over it; it’s part of the routine.

Now consider the consequence of taking one trip after another, without enough time for recovery in between. What happens to our attitude? Our behavior? Suppose we’re in a high visibility, high stress job. How will others interpret what they see in us? Will they make adjustments for the travel and the schedule we’ve been keeping? Suppose these people have seen us when they visited us in our usual environs and where we performed at a very high level. They’ll likely have experienced us acting at lower level while on this grand tour of trips. Will they think of that as a fall from grace or simply an inevitable consequence of the unforgiving schedule we’ve been operating under?

Now consider the current presidential campaign where the Democratic candidates have gone negative. Many in the press have noted that the candidates are tired. But they note that and go on; then these reporters compare the candidates to their own best moments and to each other. Here’s a simple hypothesis that I’d call recalibration. If candidates have to continue to campaign well beyond when they expected it was necessary, they’ll be more negative at the end since that matches how they actually feel, due to jet lag and related fatigue. It might take years to confirm this, because the actual test would be how the candidates are with their inner circle. It could be that all this negative stuff is an act. But I don’t think so.

If we voters as well as the pundits are capable of recalibration, might we not more readily forgive the candidates for making promises during this part of the campaign that they renege on once assuming office, understanding that under fatigue the pandering that results doesn’t constitute a commitment? Or are we so locked into the memory of “read my lips” that we’re incapable of making such allowances. David Brooks seems to think Obama has fallen from grace, and that he has boxed himself into an ungovernable corner with his performance in last Wednesday’s debate. In my view, Brooks has got it wrong. He hasn’t recalibrated.

And if that is true, what if the pundits do this sort of thing regularly? They read the Ouija Board, but don’t make allowance for the known change in the rules. Do we do the same thing in Higher Ed?

Nobody's Fault

We've had a little excitement in the Midwest today. First, here is a movie with the news story. Then, here is another movie with music to accompany the news. Last, there was an aftershock a little bit after 10 AM, but I've got no multimedia on that yet. I hope we're done. The dog slept through the first one, but she normally doesn't take this sort of thing very well.

The pitfalls and how to's of making a screen capture mockumentary

After my previous post from Sunday night and some email with Robert Baird about what I went through to make the mockumentary, I asked myself whether the production part could be done easier. It turns out the answer to this is unambiguous - yes. For the previous movie, I did at home with older versions of software. In the office just now, I used PowerPoint 2007 and the most recent version of Camtasia.

It turns out that PowerPoint has a particular slide layout called images with captions. That sizes the images appropriately and you can put the captions in right there - very easy. In what I produced below, I used the titles only, not the captions themselves, but the effect is to produce captions. The new Camtasia has a timer in the recorder. This makes it very easy to manage the transitions. In this case, I had 10 slides. The audio of the Strauss piece was about 1 minute and 20 seconds, so I came up with 8 seconds per slide. (Your ability to do arithmetic gets challenged when you do the recordings.)

So, production-wise, this is very easy. Camtasia makes output for a blog format - 400 x 300 .swf file with a built in player. Then that just gets popped into the blog.

But unlike the previous video, where there was some creativity in the construction, this was pretty straightforward and dull. There is very little synthesis or pulling things together. It is just a recollection of the film 2001. So if students are to make these sort of things as part of their work, the emphasis needs to be on the creativity in the story, not on the production. The point of this post is, the technology is easy enough that they can do precisely that.

First Stab at Mockumentary

I know - don't quit my day job. But it was fun in the making! There should be subtitles. If they don't appear, click the CC button. If that still doesn't work, access the video here, then click CC. It looks ok double sized.

Photo Albums

I’m in the Fort Lauderdale airport (free wireless) awaiting for my American Airlines flight which turns out to be on time and not canceled. I’m ecstatic about that because when the trip is over I want to get home asap.

I was down here to see my mom, do her income taxes, and check on how things are going. Like many middle aged children, I’ve got one parent in the grave and the other not faring very well. My mom is well down the dementia path. She spends a good amount of time sleeping. Yesterday, in the middle of one of her naps, she started to scream violently, absolutely terrified. I can only guess it was a painful memory from her childhood. She grew up in Nazi Germany; a Jew who got out in time. Her parents did not. I have no way of knowing whether those are the thoughts that torment her. But on a previous visit I witnessed more or less the same thing where she spoke in German during the bad dream. My mom was multi-lingual. Now she doesn’t even have one language.

That afternoon, I spent some time going through family photo albums. In the mid nineties, I had gotten my dad a low end Mac with a color printer and one of the things he did was use it for pictures (he was a photography buff of sorts, not skilled, but with interest in making the captures) and then enlarge them and print. There’s quite a bit of my kids when they were very young and my siblings and their families. This was using the computer to satisfy a habit formed well earlier in life. We had a large collection of photo albums with black and white photos, mostly from the 50’s and 60’s but some from the 40’s as well. My dad also had taken a ton of slides that I believe are lost forever and we had 8 mm film that we converted to VHS, but I’m no longer sure where that is.

I was fascinated looking through the pictures. My mother was a remarkable woman fifty years ago. My sister was the star in many of these pictures. She’s the first born. And I could see myself and my brother wearing Best & Co. clothing that I remember made us itch because it was wool. There were also photos of many family friends and relatives, some from abroad. I recognized a few and could recall stories of what was happening when those pictures were taken. But there were other photos where I didn’t know who that was. Perhaps my siblings will know. Otherwise the memories are likely lost forever. Does it matter if I pass these memories along to my children?

My mother wrote an autobiography which my father edited extensively to eliminate some of the redundancy. I had copies made yesterday and will see if my children are interested in reading it. I read an earlier version some time ago. My impression was that it was historical fiction, at least the early years, because the truth was too painful. It occurred to me, however, that it may actually be how my mother came to know things, spinning a view of the world that others could not recount, a learning disability before anyone knew the term.

I suppose this happens in many families. The lineage and history gets forgotten. Perhaps it’s better to forget, but if so, why are those pictures so fascinating to see?