At Bioscreencast, we believe in using alternative media forms to communicate science, since we think that the web offers opportunities to communicate and collaborate that were not available in the past. So it should come as no surprise that a search engine for classroom video recordings excites us. At this point the search engine, called Lecture Browser, only works for MIT courseware, but the plan is to make it available to other universities.
The coolest bit; you can go to exact points in a lecture relevant to your query term. I wonder if, at some point, voice-based search, or taking a snapshot of audio and using that as the query term will ever become reality? The developers intend to add collaboration features in the future. IMO that is a necessary feature. People should be allowed to have discussions and Q&A around a particular lecture or series.
I’ve actually not been able to use the search engine, but hopefully it’s a temporary issue that prevents the page from loading
I agree that Transcripts are very important, especially for search engines. That said, it's good to see others trying to do this for audio (and hopefully video). Pluggd for example has some nice technology to do this for the podcasts that it aggregates.
I've been looking for an adequate free way to search for audio within my podcasts but the reality is that the technology is simply not there. Yes, some simple words can be caught by services like PodScope but certainly not technical chemical terms.
What I ended up doing is just payed for the transcription using CastingWords, which worked out to a few hundred dollars a term. For example, my introductory organic chemistry classes (vodcast, podcast and Flash screencast) are available here: http://chem241.blogspot.com/ and the transcript is here: http://chem241transcripts.blogspot.com/
Since CastingWords has actual chemists on board, the transcript is pretty good, though not perfect.
If you're looking for "alternative media forms," www.AltSearchEngines.com covers more than 1,000 alternative search engines (est. total 1,700) on a daily basis, including Lecture Browser, of course. We invite you to stop by for a scroll through "the most wonderful search engines you've never seen!"
Searching for lectures on the web
At Bioscreencast, we believe in using alternative media forms to communicate science, since we think that the web offers opportunities to communicate and collaborate that were not available in the past. So it should come as no surprise that a search engine for classroom video recordings excites us. At this point the search engine, called Lecture Browser, only works for MIT courseware, but the plan is to make it available to other universities.
The coolest bit; you can go to exact points in a lecture relevant to your query term. I wonder if, at some point, voice-based search, or taking a snapshot of audio and using that as the query term will ever become reality? The developers intend to add collaboration features in the future. IMO that is a necessary feature. People should be allowed to have discussions and Q&A around a particular lecture or series.
I’ve actually not been able to use the search engine, but hopefully it’s a temporary issue that prevents the page from loading
Thanks to Hrafn Thorisson for the link
Technorati Tags: MIT, CSAIL, Video, Lectures, Search