Chris started off the meeting by asking us (meaning Yusuf, Sue and Nick) what
we would have to show if we were asked to present a demo of Classroom 2000 in
one month to some powerful people. Turns out this is not such a far-fetched
idea.
There has been a lot of progress in getting familiar with the Newton
environment but there still seem to be some significant hurdles to overcome
before we can allow the student to take notes that can be intelligently linked
with a Web presentation and other rich media sources (video and audio,
specifically). Some of those problems have to do with linking pen input to the
underlying textual information of the lecture (which is assumed to be
available on the Newton as well, possibly as a NewtonBook). Some of the
problem is obtaining timestamp information that could be used to index into
the rich media sources.
Chris expressed a lot of pessimism at our choice of the Newton platform
because from his perspective the Newton is hiding a lot of the information
that we want to be able to control. The issue of ditching the Newton for
another PC-based platform was raised again.
It's clear to me that we need some tangible demonstrations of our current
capability. So, next week, I am going to deliver a 10-minute presentation
using the Liveboard. Those in attendance will be given a Newton and will be
asked to take notes. Sue and Yusuf will work this week on automating the
process of uploading Newton notes (just taken with the Notepad, unless they
can figure out a way to do this with a NewtonBook) and hanging them off of a
Web page for review That is Phase 1 Classroom 2000. Nick is going to prepare
the first pass at the Liveboard lecture which will just be a talk on the
Classroom 2000 project itself. Nick, there are some blurbs off the project Web
page and I have some Powerpoint slides that I used for Edutech Lunch and Learn
that you can use for this purpose. Scott, I would like to record this talk as
well, so how can we facilitate that?
Phase 2: We need to provide some value added to the note-taking. There are three things we can do, as far as I can see:
1) allow for the Newton to display the lecture material while still supporting student notes (this might be accomplished as part of Phase 1, but I don't assume that)
2) provide time-stamps for student notes to facilitate indexing into the other rich audio streams; and
3) provide some facilities to allow for more sophisticated post-production review of notes, such as overlaying notes on top of presentation, making links, etc.
Seems to me you can do #2 without the other. #3 probably depends on being able to do #1 first. Chris was pushing for Yusuf and Sue to work on #2. Sue and Yusuf feel they are close to making some progress on #1 and #3 and would rather not divert their attention at the moment. I don't think it matters which one we do first, because we ultimately want both. So whichever of these tasks you can make progress in very soon should be the one to work on.
On the issue of different platforms. Nick is going to get the DTR from Chris and work on getting it to timestamp pen strokes. As I was thinking about this, it occurred to me that we have to be able to do this anyway in order to record my own annotations on the LiveBoard for display during review. We don't have anyone worrying about this right now. Amy, I'd like you to work with Nick on capturing and presenting annotations on the Liveboard over a Web browswer. I think we're going to need something like a transparent overlay window on top of the browswer that I can mark up. And I'm going to want to dismiss this overlay (or have my pen actions go through it) so that I can interact with the browser as well. See what you can do about that and let us know about your progress next week.
That's all for now.
Gregory