This site is rarely updated. benbrophy.com is more up-to-date. - Ben
Slideshow pro discusses new Stellar tool
We're planning a very limited pilot of a tool that uses images in Stellar this Fall. Based on early feedback from the faculty, it sounds like there is a need for tool to assemble and present slideshows. This is interesting - it's related to the demise of the slide projector (Kodak has stopped production of their projectors and their slide film). I'll be blogging about slideshows a lot in the next few months. Jean and I met with David Jones, a professor of the History of Science. David taught STS.003, the Rise of Modern Science, in the Spring. He builds image-rich lectures, using Apple Keynote to arrange and annotate the images he has found on the web. Like everyone we've heard from he's a heavy user of Google Images. He also finds images through various government agencies, the Smithsonian, the National Library of Medicine and through contacts with other faculty.
The biggest drawback to his current method is vagueness around intellectual property. He mentioned concerns and confusion around copyright issues several times. He has no way of knowing if it is OK for him to distribute the images has has found on the web without permission. Most of the images are pre-1920s or are taken from government agencies, so are theoretically in the public domain, but it's never absolutely clear. As a result of this confusion, he has a beautiful collection lecture notes that were not accepted into OCW because of IP concerns.
The other major issue he faces is image quality. Google images are often of inferior quality, and it is difficult to sort out the bad ones. Images from other sources are often too high in quality, and he needs to down-sample on his own using Apple Preview - a process he doesn't quite understand.
He has 1,710 images related to STS.003 in a folder on his desktop. He titled them himself and uses Apple Spotlight to find them. He does this because he often reuses the images, and doesn't want to have to find them online again.
He also uses video clips, and would love to be able to search for historic moving images.
In his slides he often juxtaposes multiple related images - though he says this is a feature he could live without. He does this because it's easy in keynote and it cuts down on the total number of slides. Also in some cases several images on one page can be used to tell a story linking them together.
In additional to the descriptive text students see on each slide, he keeps notes for himself to use in the during his lecture. Having descriptive text appear with the slides when students review the lecture notes is important to him.
During the midterm exam he showed 5 images he'd used during the lectures and asked student to identify 3 out 5 of the images. He said this made it clear who was paying attention during lectures.
In the Fall he's teaching the History of Medicine, and plans to make the presentations for this class image-rich as well. He said be willing to review our progress and do some testing of the tool we create later this summer.
Based on this conversation, it seems clear Stellar Slideshow should:
- Make copyright information clear (this may be the greatest success factors for our effort)
- Export IP info to OCW
- Resize images appropriately for the screen.
- Allow instructors to add text notes to the image
- Provide a single search field (like Google)
- Make it possible to search through all of the images a professor has used in the past