Is It Time for a Moratorium on Metadata?

Ramesh Jain has some interesting comments regarding an article published by Dick Bulterman in the Oct-Dec 04 issue of IEEE Multimedia. Bulterman's agenda:

1. Issue a joint proclamation that the DCMI, MPEG-7 and Semantic Web initiatives are all Official Successes and are Ready for Business.
2. Issue a second proclamation calling for a general moratorium on metadata.
3. Concentrate on locating objects within a range of mixed-media assets based on context-sensitive queries.
4. Ask public-spirited citizens worldwide to contribute their favorite photos, audio fragments, or personal videos to create a culturally diverse corpus of 1 million nontext media assets.
5. Embark on a multimedia content differentiation competition that will allow a comprehensive but limited set of objects to be identified: people, places, objects, and life events (births, weddings, deaths, and so on). The catch: Any contributed techniques must apply to multiple encoding formats (pictures, video, audio), and it must include a user interface for managing media classification.

M-Learning 4 Generation Txt?

Great article/conversation by Howard Rheingold with Bryan Alexander, codirector of the Center for Educational Technology at Middlebury College in Vermont.

"Perhaps we are beginning to see the emergence of learning swarms," Alexander ventures: "We already know the precursors, in the form of interested learners who appear at campus libraries and museums, driven by an experience that excited them, such as a film, a book, or a conversation. Now the socializing powers of mobility and wirelessness could expand this drive into collaboration. An interested learner could ping a network or site for learning engagement: digital objects, digitally tagged materials, learning objects, instructors, other learners and instigators. We’ve seen a part of this in the global, collaborative use of MIT’s OpenCourseWare. Are instructors ready to join in learning swarms on their specialties or to facilitate the ad hoc growth and flourishing of such learning swarms? … How should our institutions approach thinking about this possibility? Are we ready to sense which of our students arrive at our campuses with such experiences already under their belts? How do nomadic swarms work with our anthropologically sedentary campuses?"

CaptionKeeper Recycles TV Captions for Web Streaming

WGBH's National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) announces the availability of software which enables closed captions created for broadcast and video to migrate to the Web.

CaptionKeeper™ software automatically converts line-21 captions created for television or video into Web-streaming formats. The software, now available for purchase, uses existing closed-caption data to create caption text suitable for live or archived multimedia presentations via RealPlayer, Windows Media Player and QuickTime Player formats.

CaptionKeeper can be used to:

• Repurpose existing captions of live or pre-recorded television programs for Web streaming
• Repurpose captions of videos archived by universities, libraries and other public and private organizations for online use (distance learning, video kiosks, indexed archives)
• Meet Federal requirements (Section 508, 1194.24-C) by transferring captioned training or educational video content to Web-streaming formats
• Make multimedia content searchable by using captioning text as metadata