Technical experiments

• Albania (Language: Italian /w english translation)
  A simple example of how to sync videos and images rollover using Javascript only.
  The page contains a simple video, a set of images (the slides) and a textarea with the english translation of the content.
  The HTML source show how to program the behaviour of the Windows Media Player.
  The page is best viewed with Internet Explorer @ 1024x768.
  The HTML and video files has been saved on a CDROM and sent to a congress in Albania such as a *remote* paper presentation.

  ---

  Technical: An array of items containing the name of the slide to present and the player internal time at which rollover the image is polled by a loop that checks the current player time.
  
• Syncronous lesson playback with interactive chat (Language: Italian)
  This is the first example of the new (v.2, not yet released) playback interface, now in testing.
  First we produced the lesson in syncronous mode (teacher speaking in front of camera and ppt presentation, students watching and interactively chatting with the teacher), then, once we live acquired the sync markers between video and slide changes, the entire content (video, slides and chat messages) is saved on the server for playback.
  This is the first experiment with actual lessons in our Faculty (Technologies for learning course): the student class was splitted in three groups: anonymous chat interaction, chat interaction with real name and surname, traditional lesson.
  We found that the anonymous chat group interact much more than other groups.

  ---

  Technical: The teacher work with two PC: on the first is running a WSH/VBS script that open the powerpoint presentation and a web page with the chat form, the second one was the streamer, run by another WSH/VBS script.
  Why two scripts to run PowerPoint and the Media Encoder? The first one convert slides in HTML pages and contains a loop that intercept slide changes during the presentation in order to send that event to the web server. The web server fill a database with events coming from the presentation pc. The streamer script run the media encoder as COM slave and a loop check from the server if there are events to include in the script channel of the video stream so that is the video file that contains markers for slide changes.
  The chat engine running on students and presentation teacher computers record chat events in the database, so that also messages are included in the stream.
  The result is a single .wmv file containing synchronized video, audio and scripted events: the playback page receive events in a javascript funtion and calls functions to change slides, update the chat window and so on.
  The page is best viewed with Internet Explorer @ 1024x768.