Video-Lectures over Internet - E-Infrastructures and Technologies for Lifelong Learning - page 265

vices have been used with the idea of recording
live lectures for asynchronous use.
Early work (from 1996 to 2001) on the capture
of several experiences in the classroom, including
whiteboard traces, was performed in the frame-
work of the Classroom2000/eClass project (see
eClass 2001). Moreover, Hilt et al. (2001) report
recording and replaying interactive media stream
(video and whiteboard) -their demonstration was
done with tele-cooperation in mind. Also, Joukov
and Chiueh (2003) developed a digital desk to
support and capture classroom activity. Lastly, the
E-chalk project (Friedland & Rojas, 2006) extracts
handwriting from a traditional blackboard via im-
age analysis. Various whiteboard vendors provide
solution for recording audio+smartboard track.
An evaluation of such tools from a pedagogical
point of view would be useful.

The recent evolution of the technology, pio-
neered by the Apple i-Phone, allows for larger
screens and already delivers you-tube videos.
We expect to see some developments in the near
future. The already mentioned iTunes U initiative
is a first attempt in this direction, even though it
remains to be understood how valuable such op-
tion may be from a usability and/or pedagogical
point of view.

Annotation and Other
Forms of Interaction

Ideas about the annotation of generic web docu-
ments have been around for a while - see e.g.
the Annotea project (Kahan et al., 2001). Also
annotation of streaming video has been a subject
of interest that spawned a research branch, and
that was also applied to video-lectures (see e.g.
Bargeron et al., 1999, Correia & Cabral, 2005).
Anchoring discussions to specific resources rather
than collecting them in bulletin boards or forums
sounds like a reasonable thing to do, since it
would provide a context for the discussion. There
have been proposals in this sense (Abowd et al.,
1998; Haga, 2002; Lauer et al., 2005). Another
idea, a precursor of the Web 2.0 fashion, was to
have students taking lecture notes, attaching them
to the video or to a slidecast and sharing them
(e.g. Truong, 1999; Kam et al., 2005). Although
all these approaches seem to be interesting and
useful, and technology seems to be ripe, none of
these seems to have really encountered a wide
acceptance. Probably these approaches could be
now revisited in the light of the social networking
approach brought to us from the Web 2.0.
Another issue partly correlated is the fact that
video on web is not a mere replacement of TV:
being bidirectional, the Internet channel promises
to make all this quite different from the traditional
uni-directional TV approach. Already today some
systems allow using bi-directional flows, with
synchronous seminars (webinars or video web-
casts) giving the remote listener the possibility to

Mobile Devices

The delivery of files via RSS feeds has gained a
considerable attention over the last three years.
Many papers have dealt with production, distribu-
tion and assessment of educational podcasts. We
do not review them here as they support only the
audio channel. Other variations known as vod-
cast (video podcast) or screencast (audio + slide
podcast) get closer to the video-lecture paradigm,
and we find them more interesting. At least two
examples in literature show the feasibility of the
screencast approach: Hürst, Weite and Jung (2007)
investigated it using an Apple i-Pod to deliver lec-
tures, and Ronchetti and Stevovic (2008) showed
the feasibility of the screencast approach even on
a mobile phone. Earlier Liu & Choudary (2004)
used palmtop devices for testing content-aware
scalable transmission of instructional videos over
wireless networks. Their focus was on optimizing
the delivery of videos by distinguishing between
content and non-content video frames. Friedland
and Rojas (2006) used mobile phones and i-pods
to show the videos of their E-chalk videos.