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Media and Formats on the Net

Point your browser to www.fox.com and you can see the future of media on the Net. Fox News is one of several mass media giants to stream live video over the Internet. This is far more exciting than simply sending some video clips over the network. Fox is broadcasting a live television news channel 24 hours a day over the Internet!

Television and other forms of media are nothing new to the educational classroom. The trusty cassette recorder or photos clipped from a magazine have, for years, enhanced the language classroom. Converting this media to a digital format gives educators an even more flexible and adaptable teaching resource. Traditionally, media consisted of print photos for images, audio cassette tapes for audio, video cassette tapes and television for video. Although sound, images and video do not have to be isolated as different media types, combining these sources together is not always an easy process.

Why digital? Digitizing media produces raw materials, which can easily be integrated, edited and distributed. Here are some examples:

Integrating: Take a photo of yourself. Record your voice, digitize both and you can have a talking picture.

Editing: Replace your voice with a animated character’s voice; add a video clip.

Distributing: Send your talking picture to a friend as an email attachment.

Various file formats, compression standards and hardware configurations tend to complicate these simple examples.

This month’s Tech Column is aimed at simplifying the steps involved in digitizing media. File formats, recording and editing software, as well as ideas for media in the classroom are a few of the topics covered. Information for both Macintosh and PC users will be included to the extent of my knowledge. Unix is not covered here. Since media is delivered to different types of computers over the Internet, it is not a bad idea to gain some insight on various platforms.

Digital Media Information

Images enhance any language learning setting. A snapshot, a photo clipped from a magazine or a frame captured from television can easily be digitized and used in the classroom. Digital camera prices have now become affordable for the common user. Purchase an inexpensive one for student use both in and out of the classroom. Digital cameras save considerable money and time since there are no developing fees and no time spent scanning. Although most digital cameras store images in non-compatible standards, the maker most likely provides software to convert files into the standard Internet .jpeg and .gif (pronounced jay-peg and jif) formats. My Olympus 420-L takes crisp clear photos that can easily be uploaded to a web server. Many of the digital cameras come with software that includes a photoshop plugin allowing you to connect your camera to your computer and upload the pictures from the camera directly into Photoshop. This allows one to resize or perform more advanced edits and save them as .jpeg files. Don’t forget that digital cameras generally don’t store many pictures in memory and they will soon need to be transferred an external storage device. You may want to consider a CD recorder as a media storage device due to the longevity of the recordable media.

Scanners are another alternative to digitizing images and are somewhat cheaper but are slow and not easy to transport. If you are creating some simple images for the classroom, you can get away with a digital camera as a cheap way to input images. You can even snap a photo of a book or magazine image as a low quality alternative to scanning. [My brother-in-law just bought a scanner for $99 in the US. -ed.]

Before sending images out on the web, they need to be compressed as standard .jpeg or .gif images so that the viewer is able to download them in a reasonable time period. Your entire web page, including the .gif and .jpeg files, should be kept under 50K. JPEG generally results in the best compression for most photographs although the compression method used discards parts of the image. In other words, to save space it just throws away parts of an image. GIF files do not lose any data during the compression process and allows for transparent backgrounds but are limited to 256 colors or less.

Sound

Sound can be easily digitized with any recent computer. Windows users must make sure they have a sound card installed. It is standard on Macintoshes. Connect an external microphone and your hardware is complete. PC users with Win95 or NT have recording software included whereas Mac users may have to do a little searching for some sound recording software if they want to record a clip more than the control panel’s 10 second limit. Below are a few freeware sound recorders for the Macintosh. Free sound recording software is also available for Windows with more advanced editing features but the sound recorder included with Windows OS is sufficient for most classroom applications.

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For sound files to be easily distributed over a network such as the Internet, they also , need to be compressed. I recommend compressing sound files as Real Audio (.ra, .ram) files especially if using a Macintosh since the compression software is available for both Macintosh and Windows machines. Real Audio files are small enough to be downloaded even at speeds of 12 kbps. Compressing audio files is made easy with Real Audio’s free encoder which can be found at www.realaudio.com. After saving your .wav, .au, .aif, or .snd file, launch the Real Audio encoder and select the file you want to encode. If running older Macs using the Real Audio 3.0 player or an earlier version, you have to select the type of encoding depending on the version player you anticipate will be used to listen to the file. Below is a screen shot of the encoder software.

Picture

Real Audio’s latest encoder supports the following formats:

Note: Waveform (.wav). Encoder can transform compressed or uncompressed formats, although it is recommended you use uncompressed files.

After encoding the sound files, upload the real audio (.ram, .ra, or .rm) file to a web server along with a link in your web page to the sound file the same way you would link a URL or an image. You can cut and paste this example: <href= "my_sound_file.ram"> Click here to hear my voice! </a>. To listen to the sound file, the user needs to have the Real Audio or Real Video player installed. Real Audio 3.0 will run on Macintosh system 7.x while the newer Real Player 5.0 will only run on system 7.5 or later.

Video

There are two methods of capturing video and digitizing it. A inexpensive option is to purchase a video capture board and use your old VHS or 8mm video camera to input video to the video capture board. Once the video is captured, it can be viewed, saved, edited or sent via your computer as a digital file.

A more expensive option is to purchase a digital video camera which can save video in a digital format right on the camera and later be easily transferred to a computer. One drawback is that most digital cameras have their own compression and file format making them incompatible with the industry standard AVI Video for Windows or Quicktime for the Mac. Sony’s digital video cameras, for example, save video in a file format named DV. DV can be converted to AVI or Quicktime automatically during the camera to computer transfer using a special cable. If you are interested in converting DV to AVI or Quicktime you can find additional information at http://www.dvcentral.org/stepby.html.

Once video is saved as an industry standard file format, it is much too large to consider transmitting over the Internet. It will have to be converted to a format suitable for uploading to a web page or attaching to an email. Again, I would recommend Real Audio’s Real Encoder since both a Mac and PC version of the free software is available. After the video is encoded, the end viewer needs to install the RealPlayer to view the video clip. A three minute video of a face with sound is about 500K. The file can be put on a web page or emailed as an attachment. Real Encoder will accept the following file types for compression:

For PC and Macintosh

QuickTime for Windows (.mov)

Video for Windows (.avi)

Another choice for sending video via the Internet is Microsoft NetShow. Netshow uses a file format called ASF. Microsoft has a basic free encoder to compress AVI to ASF, which is then played using NetShow. Microsoft’s encoder is only available for Windows platforms and only encodes AVI files, so Macintosh users may be more interested in Progressive Network’s RealEncoder.

Interested in video-conferencing? Two free video-conferencing software packages are available for download. Cornell University offers CU-SeeME and Microsoft offers Netmeeting. (There is an enhanced version of CU-SeeMe which is not free.) To download the free version for Mac or PC, try this ftp site: ftp from ftp://gated.cornell.edu/pub/CU-SeeMe/. Microsoft’s Netmeeting is only available for Windows OS while CU-SeeMe is available for both Macintosh and Windows platforms.

Classroom activities

As multimedia becomes widely accepted, teachers need to be attentive to the pedagogical underpinnings of this relatively new instructional media. Digital media and telecommunications should be given the same careful review and consideration as any other instructional medium used in the classroom. That said, I have listed below a few examples of digital multimedia use in the language classroom.

Photographs

Still images are a great way to exchange culture with students from other countries. Have students to take photos in their community to display on a web page.

http://bosei.cc.u-tokai.ac.jp/~daniels/ccc98activ.html

Interviews

If you have already organized a keypal exchange, you can have students record interview questions rather then typing them and then upload them to a web page or attach to an email for the other class to download and listen to. You can even use it as a listening exercise between two of your classes at the same school. running on a local network, the sound files can be downloaded very quickly. You may even want to upload many interview questions by theme to a web page and then have another class select which ones they want to respond to.

Listening Activities

It is quite simple to create a variety of pronunciation or listening exercises by adding audio to a web page. Minimal pairs and idioms work well for listening activities. A few examples that I had used for an online English class can be found at http://krgewdt3.tmit.ac.jp/callsg/PaulHome/listening.htm

Class Photo with audio introductions

Also useful for keypal exchange classes is a class photo to upload to a web page so the other class can see with whom they are exchanging messages. Rather than listing names, a clickable image map is created so that a sound file is launched if the photo is clicked on. Again, you can see an example of this at http://krgewdt3.tmit.ac.jp/callsg/PaulHome/projects.htm

Video

Video can be effective if used sparingly. Because of the longer download times, video clips would have to be relatively short. I am currently working with students to complete a web page illustrating body language of both Americans and Japanese using short video clips compressed and uploaded to a web page. In a future issue I hope to provide more information on the digital video process and results of the body language activity.