Multimedia annotation & community folksonomy building
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This project has successfully achieved its aim of developing a web-based multimedia annotation tool to meet the important and pervasive user need of making multimedia web resources (e.g. podcasts) easier to access, search, manage, and exploit for students, teachers and other users.
Executive Summary
This project has developed the application Synote which supports the collaborative creation, editing and viewing of synchronised notes, bookmarks, tags, links images and text captions. To help explain this new approach, the project has invented two new technical terms: ‘Synnotation’ to denote a synchronised annotation and ‘Synmark’ to denote a synchronised bookmark that can contain a title, note, tags and links. Synote can work with a wide range of multimedia sources hosted anywhere on the web and stores the annotations separately on the Synote server, which has the capability of hosting annotations of millions of hours of recordings. Users can repurpose the same recordings for many different teaching and learning scenarios.
The Synote client is a JavaScript application that has been developed for all major browsers using the Google Web Toolkit. A user permissions system allows users to specify who will be able to annotate their recordings and read their annotations.
The performance, efficiency and effectiveness of the software was evaluated by using Synote for a number of undergraduate courses and this showed that students like using Synote, found it useful and easy to use and would like more recordings and lectures to be available in this way.
With regard to dissemination, the software has been made widely available for trial to members of the JISC community and demonstrated in workshops and conferences, while research papers will continue to be published in conferences and journals.
There are two main ways to use Synote: to provide access to audio &/or video recordings of lectures that students have already attended or to provide audio &/or video learning material that students have not seen before. For students to want to attend lectures that are being recorded for replay using Synote, students would want a facility to be able to have any notes they have taken during lectures automatically synchronised with the lecture recordings in Synote. We hope to be able to develop this facility through future possible JISC funding. We are also now in the process of investigating what will be required to integrate Synote with various repositories at the University of Southampton. Further developments and improvements and trials will be sustained beyond the programme end date.
An example scenario for the use of Synote might be:
| "Mike records a narrated PowerPoint of his lecture and as the students are leaving his class he uploads this into Synote which automatically creates a clickable index from the slide titles and turns his speaker notes into a transcript of his presentation synchronised with the recording of his voice and the slides. He quickly adds some questions students should think about for next week as well as the URLs of some other resources (including a section of a recording he made the previous year) and synchronises these with the relevant parts of lecture. When Sally, a first year student sits down at her computer all this material is available on the web allowing her to search the slides and text transcript and notes for specific topics and then replay recordings from that point. She annotates the recording with notes made from the text book to aid revision for the exam and she also tags and highlights a section of the transcript she doesn't understand fully so that Mike can clarify it for her. She needs to go to lunch and so she inserts a synchronised bookmark into the recording so as to be able to continue later exactly from where she left off." |