Assumed Environment:
There is a liveboard and associated computer.
Each student has a computer.
There may be one or more servers associated with the project.
All computers are connected so they can share a common clock signal for a
time stamp.
Immediate Goals:
1) Use liveboard for web-based presentation (slide show). [This has been
demonstrated.] Liveboard events (changes in display with time stamps)
can be uploaded to web. [This needs to be implemented]
2) Students can write electronic notes, and upload them to the web.
This could be pen-based or keyboard based.
3) Liveboard events and notes are sychronized with time stamps,
so they can be browsed in parallel.
4) Audio of class is recorded with time stamps, and can be accessed using time
stamps from student's notes or liveboard records.
Next Quarter Goals:
A) Allow presenter to create blank page on liveboard and write
new slide using pen. New slide is uploaded to web with time stamps.
B) Allow presenter to annotate existing slides using pen.
C) Provide students with mechanism to link within their notes.
D) Provide students with mechanism to link notes to contents of liveboard,
and vice versa.
E) Presenter can control some aspect of student's display.
F) Student can annotate and edit own notes in web browser.
Future Goals:
a) Content based access of audio.
b) Time stamp based access of video.
c) Content based access of video.
Here is a description of a zeroth order implementation, which will support
our immediate goals:
1) Liveboard process which uploads record of time stamped display events.
2) Sun workstation with 30 serial ports connected to the liveboard and
the student computers. Synchronization signals are sent to the liveboard.
3) Students use a computer to take notes only.
Students each have a Newton or other cheap pen-based computer.
Pen strokes are locally drawn by the Newton and also sent to the Sun,
where they are associated with time stamps.
4) An audio server is implemented to continuously record and digitize from a
a microphone on the presenter. The digitized signal is also time stamped.
5) Web pages are mostly GIF images of what was displayed on the liveboard
at any given time, and GIF images of the pen strokes. There is some HTML
to glue this all together. Clickable items are done using image maps.
Problems with this approach:
1) How do we annotate anything?
2) Students don't get to have private copy of liveboard display on Newton.
3) No support of on the fly creation of links.
4) No support of editing notes or slides.
5) No group display synchronization during class, or presenter control of
student displays.
Alternative representations to consider:
Preparing presentation and post class browsing representations:
HTML/GIF is 0th order approach.
PDF (create documents using PowerPoint, Frame?)
VRML
JAVA
Student computer representations:
copy user events to central server is 0th order approach.
Newton book (how time stamp, how upload contents?)
Newton based web browser.
See you on Wednesday,
Chris