Author Archives: George Williams

Use Amara to Crowdsource Captions on Your Entire YouTube Channel

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Amara is the relatively new name given to the service formerly known as Universal Subtitles. As I’ve written before, I’ve found this to be the most user-friendly online interface for adding captions to a web-hosted video (I even made a screencast, though some of the details are out of date).

One thing that kept me from declaring Amara the perfect online tool for captioning web-hosted videos is the somewhat involved (but admittedly still pretty easy) process of downloading the captions from the Amara server and then uploading them to, say, your YouTube account where your videos are hosted. Something as mechanical and repetitive as this ought to be automated in some way.

Well, guess what. Amara recently made a welcome announcement:

We are very proud to launch a major new Amara.org feature– free crowd subtitling for every personal YouTube user! Want to make your videos accessible to people around the world who speak a different language? Want deaf and hard of hearing users to be able to watch? Just connect your YouTube account to Amara and invite your viewers to help. Whenever subtitles get created, they will be synced directly to your YouTube channel. It takes about 10 seconds to connect your YouTube account.

In short, just create an account on Amara, link your YouTube account to your Amara account, and all of the videos in your YouTube channel will be automatically added to Amara for users to subtitle. Once subtitles for a video are finished, they will automatically be synced to your YouTube video.

I haven’t tried this out, yet, but once I do I’ll be sure to write up the experience.

How about you? What are your favorite methods for adding captions to videos? Please share in the comments.

When It’s Time to Abandon the Digital…

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I have a confession to make: I hate responding to student essays through a computer screen.

Yes, I know I’ve advocated using text-expansion software to respond to student writing, Billie has taught us how to respond to student writing audio style, Jason has explained how tracking changes on the iPad might be useful when grading, Doug Ward has described grading with voice on the iPad, and I know that Erin (among others, probably) uses iAnnotate with her students’ essays (an iPad app that both Jason and Mark have covered).

Here’s the thing, though: I am much more comfortable (both ergonomically and psychologically) with a printed essay on the table in front of me and a pen in my hand. It’s much faster (for me), and it is much less taxing (for me). I realize that it might sound ridiculous to describe reading and responding to student essays as “taxing,” but here we are. When it comes to grading essays, I just haven’t gotten to the point where using some kind of digital interface feels as comfortable, as seamless, and as transparent to me as using a pen and paper.

In other words, sometimes it’s necessary to recognize that a potential digital solution is just not going to work out for you. At that point, it’s time to abandon the digital.

How about you? Have you had a similar experience? Have you gone back to analog ways of doing things after a fling with the digital? Please share in this week’s open thread!

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by Ryan Hyde]

November is Academic Writing Month

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Last year, November was AcBoWriMo (short for Academic Book Writing Month), a month in which, as Charlotte Frost proposed, “We are going to wear comfy clothes, drink a lot of coffee, probably nap in our offices at strange hours and see how close we can get to writing 50 thousand words in one month.” (Incidentally, it turns out that AcBoWriMo has earned its very own Wikipedia entry!)

Well, Frost has announced that November of 2012 will be AcWriMo (short for Academic Writing Month), which will be similar to AcBoWriMo but with a few changes: “This year’s event will focus on ALL aspects of academic writing, and will encourage participants to set their own (wild) goals.”

Essentially, these are the rules for next month:

  1. Set yourself some crazy goals.
  2. Publicly declare your participation and goals.
  3. Draft a strategy.
  4. Discuss what you’re doing.
  5. Don’t slack off.
  6. Publicly declare your results.

For all of the details, go read Frost’s full blog post at PhD2Published.

How about you? Are you going to take part in AcWriMo? How’s it going so far? Do you have other strategies for increasing your writing productivity? Let us hear from you in the comments.

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by followtheseinstructions]

Microsoft Introduces Office 365 for Higher Ed

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Here at ProfHacker, we’ve written several posts over the years about cloud computing and collaboration. Most of our focus has been on GoogleDocs and collaborative authorship (see my “GoogleDocs and Collaboration in the Classroom,” for example).

Not to be outdone by the cloud services offered by Google and others, Microsoft has been working on offerings like Office Live (which I wrote about in 2010) and Office 365 (which the New York Times covered in 2011). These services are designed to let users access and edit cloud-based documents, spreadsheets, and presentations from any device with a connection to the Internet and to collaborate on these files simultaneously with other users. And as Microsoft attempts to stay competitive with its mobile devices, introduces a new operating system (or two), and starts selling a new tablet device, cloud-based tools are going to be more and more important.

Last week, Microsoft announced Office 365 University, a cloud-based service to be made available to students, faculty, and staff at colleges and universities. The company says that the service is scheduled to become “[a]vailable in the first quarter of 2013,” and will be free for higher ed users who have purchased Office University 2010 or Office University for Mac 2011. (However, later in that same announcement a price of $1.67 per month is specified, which is still pretty good, but not as good as free).

Since I work on a campus where the default computing tools are Microsoft-compatible, I’ll be interested in seeing how this service rolls out. While my students have made good use of GoogleDocs, there’s still some (though not much) awkwardness in moving from Microsoft Office on the desktop for most of their writing and editing needs and then converting to the GoogleDocs format for sharing and collaborating. If Office 365 can make this kind of work as seamless as possible, then I will certainly be interested in giving it a try in the courses I teach.

How about you? Have you taken advantage of Microsoft’s cloud-based services? Will you be giving Office 365 a try? Or are you committed to other, competing services? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by Microsoft Sweden]

Open Access Week 2012

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This morning we published Adeline’s interview with with Brian Hole of Ubiquity Press (@ubiquitypress), “a small new London-based digital publisher of peer reviewed, open-access academic journals.”

The timing of this interview is perfect–(see also Konrad’s post from last week)–since this is Open Access Week, “an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.”

To quote Jason from his 2010 post on Open Access Week, “Open Access scholarship allows researchers and universities to fulfill their public mission–and also to do more and better research.”

Check out the Open Access Week site for a schedule of events taking place worldwide, a variety of blog posts, a selection of videos, and some ideas for how to get involved (at the bottom of this page). If you’re on Twitter, look for the #OAW2012 hashtag.

Is your campus hosting any Open Access Week events? Is this an important issue for you, your colleagues, or your students? Let us know in comments!

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by Gideon Burton]