EXPLORATORY RESEARCH ON THE USE OF ACTIVITY CAPTURE TECHNOLOGY IN THE ARCHIVING
AND DISSEMINATION OF DISCIPLINE SPECIFIC LECTURES AND ADVANCED TRAINING
MATERIALS
Introduction
We request herein a sum of xxx to fund a specific set of exploratory studies
based on a novel capture application (Sync-O-Matic 3000) developed by a member
of our team. With this product, content-rich lectures and training material is
captured and presented on the Internet at an unsurpassed level of quality, at
almost no incremental cost, to an audience limited in scope only by the
confines of the World Wide Web (WWW). In addition, the archives can be
transferred to compact disk to further increase their availability to audiences
without WWW access.
Early pilot studies of the use of Sync-O-Matic 3000 have included a university
course (What’s this about?)
and the archiving and dissemination of lectures in the prestigious CERN Student
Summer Lecture Series. We also have captured presentations by an
authoritative instructor in Object oriented software. This was done in
connection with our interest in evaluating the application for possible use in
large-scale software training activities such as will be required in the
upcoming Object oriented and C++ training programs for the LHC high energy
physics experiments.
We believe, on the basis of these early studies, that Sync-O-Matic 3000 is of
sufficient robustness and quality, even when used in less than ideal capture
environments, that it should be aggressively developed and put into full-scale
operation at a variety of sites immediately. The funding we are seeking herein
is to make these immediate steps possible and to permit a limited development
of a set of ideas for package improvement. Clearly, a more substantial
request will need to be made to address some of our longer term research and
development interests in this area.
Immediate Goals
Over the next 8 months, we propose to accomplish the following:
Application Details
The application underpinning the project is based on the RealSystem suite of
audio/video recording components, PowerPoint for slide presentation, and on the
Sync-O-Matic 3000 software developed by Dr. Charles Severance of the
University of Michigan Media Union. This software is designed to synchronize
the playback of slides with the recorded audio/video and to provide
slide-by-slide indexing of the presentation. The two-windowed archive document
[Fig. X] requires no special playback applications other than a web browser
with embedded RealPlayer software, version 5.0 or greater. The latter is often
pre-bundled with the leading browser packages.
Resource Requirements
To accomplish the goals presented above, we need the following resources:
Institutional Commitment
In our view, few places in the world are better-suited to pursue these proposed
studies than the University of Michigan. A breadth of faculty, student and
staff talent and interest exists in our new School of Information, the
University of Michigan Media Union, the Information Technology Division, and
the UM ATLAS Collaboratory Project, as well as in numerous other campus units.
While being one of the top US universities in research volume, our many
initiatives in undergraduate education have also been formally recognized by
the NSF through its RAIRE Award. The University of Michigan recognizes the
importance of closely coupling research and education, and the importance of
pursuing every reasonable opportunity to exploit networking to facilitate
communications between faculty and students in distributed research
environments.
The Internet2 initiative is based in Ann Arbor and has strong ties to the
University. It was principally through the efforts of the UM ATLAS
Collaboratory Project and its alliance to Internet2 that CERN has now joined
STAR TAP and is about to become a member of UCAID. This will soon result in an
order of magnitude increase in the CERN-US network bandwidth.
Many faculty and staff at the University of Michigan who were involved in the
development of NSF-NET are broadly interested in the continued use of the World
Wide Web for facilitating collaborative research, and will advise us as our
project evolves.
Homer Neal was one of the principals involved in the creation of the overall
NSF REU Program, and is co-principal investigator in the current CERN REU
program which, for the first time, has provided a mechanism for US students to
participate in the prestigious CERN Summer Student Program. The initial
stimulation for pursuing the evaluation of Sync-O-Matic 3000 in this summer's
CERN lectures was due to the desire to find ways to share the benefits of such
special events with a larger US student audience.
Project Management
The Project research and development will be directed by Charles Severance.
The proposed software professional and one of the graduate students will report
directly to him.
The component of the project related to the educational evaluation of the
archives, and the establishment of new strategic sites, will be managed by
Homer Neal.
We will continue a close liaison with CERN, which has already committed one of
its Technical Students to work with us on this project. The student's immediate
supervisor at CERN will be Dr. Mick Storr, who is director of xxxxxx. Also,
Steve Goldfarb, who coordinated the original evaluation project at CERN, and
who is a member of the UM-ATLAS Collaboratory Project and the UM ATLAS effort,
will provide limited consulation and assistance with the proposed work. It is
expected, however, that his time will be severely limited by his primary ATLAS
responsibility as coordinator of the muon database system.
Barbara O'Keefe (or Chuck? or Joseph?) and Homer Neal will serve as project
co-principal investigators.
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Immediate Goals
Application Details
Resource Requirements
Institutional Commitment
Project Management