August | 2013 | Thomas' Work Space

Protected: Many input languages, keyboards and IMEs requested are not accessible to most LRC users

2013/08/28 plagwitz Enter your password to view comments.

2013/08/28 plagwitz Leave a comment

2013/08/27 plagwitz Enter your password to view comments.

2013/08/27 plagwitz Leave a comment

Problem: When you use – that is to say: analyze – YouTube video clips in a classroom setting – whether in Film studies or second language acquisition classes –, you will find yourself jumping around a lot in these clips. This can be slow and enter a lot of undesirable little interruptions into your teaching (or learning) flow.
Root cause: Since pedagogical use is not the primary use case for YouTube videos, their download configuration defaults to streaming, which preloads the video only a few seconds ahead of the cursor or playhead.
Solution:

If you want to buffer or preload the entire YouTbue video clip before examining it in your class, you can install a browser add-on called YouTubeCenter.
Here is more on how to install YouTubeCenter.
No configuration necessary, ”Dash Playback” which buffers videos completely locally, is the default setting.

2013/08/27 plagwitz Leave a comment

YouTubeCenter comes for a variety of browsers, but note that Firefox seems the only practically supportable browser in our campus computing environment.
To download and install, go to : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/youtube-center/ and click on:
There is not shortage of settings (e.g. preselected is the Dash Playback, useful to speed up jumping around a video, by disabling streaming):

2013/08/26 plagwitz Enter your password to view comments.

2013/08/26 plagwitz Leave a comment

Now: Records one party only – bad if you have to find this out only after an exam… You can see this in the graph here – low audio is partner speaking, and not audible: and hear it yourself on campus here: "S:\coas\lcs\lrc\sanako\student\8-7-2013_2-35-18_PM ELTI level 2 final pair\Group A5 (falothma, maldubai)_sent.MP3"
Then (example of how it is supposed to sound): "S:\COAS\LCS\LRC\sanako\student\2013-02-27 14_13-pair-no-names\Group B4 (LXCOED434-PC36, LXCOED434-PC17)_sent.MP3":
workaround: Instead of being able to default to mp3 format, as we used to, the teacher now has to save the audio of pairing activites in a Sanako proprietary format (MIFF) and, including the students, play it back with the Sanako prpoprietary player. If the teacher does not remember to change the format from the default MP3 to MIFF for pairing exercise recordings, the teacher (and students) will lose the assessment materials of half the class (and likely not find this out until when the files get opened for grading).