SPINDLE in a nutshell

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Martin Wynne
globalisation keywords image

Globalisation policy keywords

Globalisation policy keywordsGlobalisation policy keywords
Globalisation policy keywords

SPINDLE brings together the media and podcasyting team at OUCS with experts in linguistics and speech technology from the Phonetics Laboratory  to work on the University’s growing collection of video and audio podcasts of lectures. The project will use speech-to-text technologies to automatically create transcripts of lecturesin order  to generate keywords which will help with the indexing, description and discovery of the lectures.

The team will also investigate further potential uses of the transcripts, such as screen-reading and full-text search, and will build demonstrators of synchronised subtitling, as well as writing blogs on the various technical options, standards, barriers, problems, and work-arounds, to assist other institutions which may be considering developing similar or related services.

University of Oxford podcasts are freely available at http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/

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Great Writers goes global in iTunes

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Peter Robinson

Today and for the rest of the week Apple is promoting through iTunesU our inspirational short ten minute talks by Oxford academics that form the basis of content collections for the Great Writers Inspire project. This kind of promotion usually leads to quite a few thousand downloads over the next few days. We’re big fans of this short lecture format, have a look at the first talk on Shakespeare by Professor Tiffany Stern to see why. Hopefully we’ll soon have some feedback from this global audience and we’ll be adding another set later in the year concentrating on Victorian writers.


These talks are on a diverse range of writers from early English to post-colonial; the Beowulf poet, William Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Stephen Duck, William Blake, George Eliot, Dickens, Katherine Mansfield, Olive Schreiner and J.M. Coetzee. These short talks will inspire you to discover more.

And of course they are all free for reuse under the terms of our Creative Commons licence.

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Podcasts Are Like a Box of Chocolates..You Never Know What You’re Gonna Get

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Peter Robinson

Sergio Grau, Programmer for Spindle writes …

As part of the SPINDLE project we are going to try to let users know what is inside a podcast. Our goal is to generate automatically additional information to complement the existing metadata (title, series, speakers, unit, short description and list of keywords).

As part of this additional information we are going to use Speech-to-Text software to generate automatically the transcription of an audio podcast. This automatic transcription is relevant to index and describe the existing audio data. It could also be useful as a starting point for human-generated transcriptions.

How do we generate automatically the transcription of an audio podcast?

Audio podcasts are going to be converted into text automatically using state-of-the-art Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR) software.

Which software packages are we going to use?

We are going to evaluate two different software packages, an Open-Source package, CMU Sphinx and a commercial video-editing software package, Adobe Premiere Pro.
Sphinx
How do we evaluate the performance of each software package?

We are aware the automatic transcription process is not going to be 100% accurate (not even humans can transcribe 100% accurately). In order to know how good our automatic transcription is we are going to do an experiment using a test corpus.

The test corpus is going to be composed of 20 audio podcasts from the University of Oxford podcast directory. We are selecting podcasts that have already been transcribed by humans. We will select podcasts from a variety of accents, topics and recording conditions to evaluate the robustness of the LVCSR software.

We will then compare the automatic-generated transcriptions obtained using both CMU Sphinx and Adobe Premiere Pro with the human-generated transcription to evaluate the overall performance of both packages.

Here is the waveform for the podcast on Globalisation that was mentioned inn the first SPINDLE post. Note that it is impossible to recognise anything other than perhaps gaps between words.

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Reflections on Engage

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Lisa Mansell

It is a week after our Engage workshop and I think we are still bowled over by how well it went.  The workshop was attended by 10 teachers and lecturers, two Oxford students and seven Oxford academics and friends of the project. Everyone came ready to contribute and participate and we had two very busy days exploring our theme of Great Writers Inspire.

Our two students, Cleo and Kate, kept the blog fed with up-to-the-minute reports of sessions which you can enjoy here. They amazed us with their energy, speed and commitment to the project. Cleo gave an excellent presentation on how she was inspired as a student, which led into a great discussion on how teachers inspire their students. They also found the time to record some vox pops with our participants which we hope will yield some excellent quotes.

The academic debate on ‘What is a great writer?’ inspired us all and I overheard one participant say it made them feel like a student again. This and other recordings from the workshop will be released for everyone to enjoy.

I’ve had time to go through some of the feedback and evaluation forms and there are some clear themes emerging which we can add to our wish list:

  • A requirement for materials for some specific writers was suggested, for example the Brontës. We are working on this collection and will do our best to continue to add content in the remaining 6 months of the project.
  • Signalling possible connections through the site and notes to suggest how an item may be used would be helpful.
  • More critical analysis, introducing the idea of debate and multiple readings would be excellent for students.
  • Short clips and videos are most useful for showing in the classroom or lecture as illustrative materials for further discussion.
  • The text-based resources are most useful, given that the text is most often the basis of study.
  • More pictures and visual images would be inspiring for students.
  • Whilst it is early days for ebooks in the classroom, students are using mobile devices in lectures and adults bring Kindles into the classroom, and there are things that can be done with etexts which are impossible with a hard copy.

The general feedback on the Great Writers Inspire website was overwhelmingly positive and we are confident that people will use materials from the site in their teaching and learning. Some quotes from the workshop:

“this on line resource will offer the possibility of diversity and depth whenever we choose to take its opportunity to inspire us to engage with new texts and perspectives.” HE lecturer

“The potential of great writers is to allow ‘off piste’ exploration.”  A level teacher

“Some students feel that they do not belong in this literary world – they ask how does this fit in with all this literature? Access to GWI helps us address this question.” A level teacher

“I would probably want to include EVERYTHING on the Great Writers website which relates to the authors or books on the module I create.” HE lecturer

“Really attractive range of resources – great for giving students a taste of what university study might be like.” A level teacher

“One of the really amazing things this site could do for A Level students is offer alternative perspectives on great writers works which would help them develop a richer, more versatile understanding of the authors they study.” A level teacher

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The Fourth Wall and the First Person

Posted on April 18, 2012 by Patrick Lockley

April 19th will be our Engage Workshop for the Great Writer’s project – and as a little ice breaker, we’re all being encourage to bring our favourite book. Riffing on an OER theme – does choosing a favourite book bring up some issues with OER? As an example, I’m quite keen on some of the futurist poetry such as Zang Tumb Tumb, but I do worry that Zang Tumb Tumb’s author Filippo Tommaso Marinetti is also involved in Facism. After our first Great Writers Event, the writer who inspired me to read their work was Ezra Pound, who turned out to be a facist as well. I think you can appreciate the work without that as an issue, but when you come to say “this is my favourite book”, it might not be the best way of introducing yourself to someone.

So what is my favourite book, well it’s the no-sniggering-at-the-back “Christy Malry’s Own Double-Entry” by B.S Johnson.

Still here? Probably still sniggering (the double-entry is a reference to book keeping).

So how does this relate to OER? Well attribution is a keen element of OER – we are always keen for the author to be accredited and cited – as the licence often requires us to legally. However, how we might find or discover the OER may also be tied to the author – and we might be more likely to reuse OER if the author was someone we knew – or someone we believed was held in academic esteem. Like when choosing your favourite book – there is an issue that you are conferring, or embedding some of yourself in the reputation of A.N Other. There is an innate risk in this approach, and with risk will come fear, and possible recalcitrance and reluctance. OER means we need to have some relationship with the author.

So what does Christie Malry do which relates?

Let’s look at how B.S Johnson describes the lead character – taking 6 chapters to do so

What writer can compete with the reader’s imagination! Christie is therefore an average shape, height, weight, build, and colour. Make him what you will: probably in the image of yourself. You are allowed complete freedom in the matter of warts and moles; as long as he has at least one of either.

Johnson himself appears in the text several times, distinctly appearing as the author.

So the text is quite open (stop groaning), but it also breaks the fourth wall – questioning the roles of audience and creation. Is OER breaking an academic fourth wall, turning the lecture theatre via remixing into more of an Academic Commons / Academic Bazaar where the ecosystem, and not the individual author is important? A commons where attribution isn’t important perhaps risks less contributions – but Github commit graphs and the twitter conventions of /via and /ht perhaps suggest that a community that is communicating with each other adopt different attribution conventions, and because they are explicitly communicating with each other – you perhaps won’t need attributing, as you’ll know you’ve been reused.

Attribution as the lesser issue to knowing you’ve been used? And reuse as the confidence?

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Engage workshop

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Lisa Mansell

‘Engage’ is a free 2-day interactive workshop for invited participants run by Oxford University’s Great Writers Inspire project. Our ‘Engage’ workshop for teachers (HE, FE, 6th form) and learners will take place on Thursday 19th and Friday 20th April at Oxford University Computing Services in the centre of Oxford.

‘Engage’ will offer discussion of teaching approaches in literature in HE, 6th form and distance learning settings and explore how digital resources can be used to enhance the teaching and learning experience. Participants will have plenty of hands-on time to interact with the Great Writer Inspire resources and provide a steer on their development. The Oxford academics supporting the project will lead a debate on ‘What is a Great Writer?’, and we will also help to clear up some of the misunderstanding around copyright and reuse by increasing open content literacy.

We are expecting participants from British and International educational institutions:

Head of English, Repton School;

Head of Sixth Form, Teeside High School;

English Lecturer, Bristol UWE The Open University;

English Gifted and Talented Coordinator, Leyton Sixth Form College;

Lecturer in English Literture, University College Yeovil;

Lecturer and Distance Learning Coordinator, Shakespeare Institute Univiversity of Birmingham;

Freelance Creator of Resources plus OCR Board exam marker;

Curriculum Team Manager, Peterborough College;

Lecturer, Brunel University;

Lecturer Programme Leader, Blackpool and The Fylde College;

Teacher and Researcher of Teaching Shakespeare, University of Sydney;

Lecturer in Stylistics, Oxford Brookes University;

Lecturer in English, Karlstad University Sweden;

Two Graduate Students, University of Oxford.

Participants have been asked to come prepared to share their experiences, engage with other participants and help us make the workshop as productive as possible. Participants will be given the opportunity to create a collection of resources which can be used in the future. There will be presentation time to share these collections and the issues they address with the group, plus an expectation to create at least one blog post reflecting on the event.

There will be tweeting and blogging during the event and we’ll be recording sessions and vox pops with participants. We’ll share more as soon as we can.

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OER Copy tracking using Google Analytics

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Patrick Lockley

Just a quick blog

We’re interested for Great Writers in getting as much reuse information as possible – but certain things are hard to track. We did some experimenting and we think we have a working block of code which will track when people are copying text from your website.

Here it is


function copyHandler(){

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','copyandpaste','copy',window.location.href]);

}

function add_copy_listener(){

if(document.addEventListener){

document.addEventListener ("copy", copyHandler);

}else{

document.body.attachEvent ("oncopy", copyHandler);

}

}

if(window.addEventListener)
window.addEventListener('load', add_copy_listener, false);
else if(window.attachEvent)
window.attachEvent('onload', add_copy_listener);
}

We might add to it at a later date to detect where text is copied from, but this at the moment adds to Google analytics an “event” each time some one either “click copy”‘s or use a keyboard shortcut.

Thought this was worth sharing.

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Great Writers Animation and all 10 minute taster talks released

Posted on March 31, 2012 by Peter Robinson

Just a reminder that 12 audio and video recordings which were captured at our “Be Inspired” December & February events are now all live at http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/series/great-writers-inspire. These provide a great introduction for students studying themes and writers that are related to the Great Writers Inspire project

Short video introducing the Great Writers OER project

The project is covering a huge range of writers from Shakespeare to D.H.Lawrence, together with over a thousand ebooks from the Oxford Text Archive, Project Gutenberg and we’re currently testing aggregating a selection from the Bodelian Library Google books project. Our wonderful young editor Josh Carr has just produced a taster animation to promote the Great Writers project:
Video: http://media.podcasts.ox.ac.uk/oucs/openspires/great_writers_ident_final.mp4

These inspirational short talks by Oxford academics form the basis of content collections from the Great Writers Inspire website, but we didn’t want you to wait until that was ready so they are freely available via Oxford’s podcasting portal and iTunesU.

The lectures cover early English to post-colonial; the Beowulf poet, Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Stephen Duck, William Blake, Johnson, George Eliot, Dickens, Katherine Mansfield, Olive Schreiner and J.M. Coetzee, these short talks will inspire you to discover more.

All our material is free for use and resue in schools and Universities under the terms of our Creative Commons licence. A full list of related literature podcasts are available here.

Enjoy our taster animation for the Great Writers project and as always thanks to Josh and all our academic contributors and our student ambassadors for making the material free and open.

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SPINDLE project starts – Combining Podcasts with Speech Technology

Posted on March 31, 2012 by Peter Robinson

Can we use Automatic Speech to Text Technology to generate better cataloguing of our open content ?

A new project at OUCS starts in March, funded by JISC as part of their ‘Rapid Innovation in Open Educational Resources‘ programme. SPINDLE will bring together the Open Spires media team at OUCS with experts in linguistics and speech technology from the Phonetics Laboratory and the Faculty of Linguistics, Phonetics and Phonology to work on the University’s growing collection of video and audio podcasts of lectures. The project will experiment with speech-to-text technologies to automatically create transcripts of lectures, and develop new tools to generate better keywords to help with the indexing and description of the lectures.

Here as a teaser – is this the type of thing that will possible ? Can you guess when this was recorded ?

Keywords from Ngaire Woods on Globalisation


Factors that affect automatic speech to text success

The success of automatic speech-to-text processing depends on various factors, including the quality of the recording; the accent, dialect, and speech style of the speaker; and the topics of the discourse. Unfortunately the Oxford University podcasts exhibit a lot of variability in all of these aspects! The project team will report on these factors, and investigate and discuss approaches that can be shared with similar academic organisations with large collections of content suitable for digitization and indexing. The project is funded by JISC in order to develop these techniques and technologies for the benefit of the wider academic community, and an important part of the project will be to report, in the form of publicly available blogs, on the various technical options, barriers, problems, and work-arounds.

Why does text versions and better keywording of audio and video lectures matter ?

Keyword word cloud from Oliver Taplin's Tragedy podcast

The team will also investigate further potential uses of the transcripts, such as providing full text transcripts for accessibility, and full-text search of the lectures, and will build demonstrators of synchronised media playback utilizing time-coded transcripts in the emerging HTML5 standard. As well as enhancing the usability and discoverability of the OERs, the transcripts, time-aligned with the digital audio and video, will also represent a useful research resource for those interested in studying language, for example in linguistics and English-language teaching, and as much-needed training data for further developments of speech recognition and alignment.

The project will allow much more accessible material to produced by media teams working with Open Educational material. One last teaser from the Great Writers project :

Automatic keywords from Emma Smith's The Spanish Tragedy

Further information:

Open Spires – Open Education projects - http://openspires.oucs.ox.ac.uk/
Open Spires Podcasts released for resue with creative commons licence – http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/open/
SPINDLE project blog posts – http://blogs.oucs.ox.ac.uk/openspires/spindle
JISC Technical Strand – Rapid Innovation in Open Educational Resources

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A taste of Raspberry Pi for Open Education Week at Oxford University

Posted on March 31, 2012 by Peter Robinson

To celebrate international Open Education Week we promoted a number of our Open Spires projects that are releasing free resources from Oxford including the Great Writers literature project, our World War 1 resources and the Oxford University podcasts. All our material is labelled and released using a Creative Commons licence for reuse in education worldwide. In addition to round the week off and to look into the future I invited a special guest to Oxford, Professor Alan Mycroft from Cambridge Computing department to talk to 80 IT experts here about an open educational project that is generating a huge amount of buzz in the schools IT community – the very memorably named “Raspberry Pi”.

Myself and fellow enthusiast Matthew Buckett introduced the project and then Alan demoed the computer. Remember that this is one of the handful of prototypes in existence, with an early version of the Debian OS, – the first 10,000 developer versions are set to arrive later in April or May 2012 for the lucky few who managed to buy early at the 6am launch.

Here is the film of the lecture at OUCS – “An Introduction to the Raspberry Pi”:
http://media.podcasts.ox.ac.uk/oucs/openspires/raspberrypi_intro_09032012.mp4

An Introducton to the Raspberry Pi at Oxford University

An Introducton to the Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a credit card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard, which can be used for many of the things that your average desktop does – spreadsheets, word-processing, games and it also plays high-definition video. The device is designed and sold by the Raspberry Pi charitable foundation who have set themselves an educational goal of seeing the device motivate kids and schools back into programming and electronics by being priced at such a low price that it is irresistible. The price has been kept down to less than 30 pounds for the development models that have been sold to early developers. The initial batch of 10,000 Raspberry Pi’s are hopefully arriving any day now, with the launch being heavily oversubscribed, with around 700,000 registrations of interest worldwide.


Less than 30 pounds for a fully functioning computer is amazing in itself – but how is it an Open Educational project ? Well, for me this UK based project is trying to fit the vision of open education as much as possible by running an open operating system (LINUX), promoting free educational software designed by professionals for school use (Scratch and Python) and creating a charitable trust to oversee the project and to ensure their core educational aims. They’re also working in an open manner discussing the design of the product so that enthusiasts can create add-ons and they openly discuss the management of their activities through a public forum. The team behind the project includes professors like Alan Mycroft and Eben Upton from Cambridge University, top electronics experts from industry and famous games programmers ( David Braben co-writer of Elite), all united by a belief that a simple cheap computer could generate again the buzz of programming that swept the UK in the era of the 1980s home computers. Could the Raspberry Pi again excite kids to program and tinker in the way the legendary ZX Spectrum and the BBC Micro project did? The professors at Cambridge behind the project certainly hope so because they’ve noticed a worrying drop in the programming skills of students entering their University courses. They feel this is because computers are becoming more expensive, more closed-box and more difficult for a child to program or interface with the electronics.

Why is the computer getting everyone so excited ? How can it be so cheap?

Well it’s designed from the start to be cheap. It’s an amazing combination of size, state of the art System on a Chip (SoC) technology, free OS software that boots from an SD card and a philosophy of leveraging external parts that you already own. The Raspberry Pi comes in two models, Model A without ethernet ($25) and Model B with ethernet ($35). The developer version is without a case and saves money by using SD cards for storage, presuming you already have a spare USB keyboard and mouse, a phone charger power supply and a TV or monitor.

The Raspberry Pi measures 85.60mm x 53.98mm x 17mm, with a little overlap for the SD card and connectors which project over the edges. It weighs just 45g. It’s tiny !

Raspberry Pi developer board

What operating system (OS) does it use? How do you learn programming on the device?
Debian or Fedora are the current recommended Linux distributions. More are in development. It’s straightforward to replace the root partition on the SD card with another ARM Linux distro if you want to use something else. The OS is stored on the SD card, and all disk files too. By default, Python and Scratch are the educational languages the foundation will be promoting. Any language – C, Php,Pascal etc – which will compile for ARMv6 can be used with the Raspberry Pi, though; so you’re not limited to using Python.

What’s the hardware and System on a Chip ( SoC ) ?
The SoC is a Broadcom BCM2835 chip, postage stamp sized, which is often found in set-top boxes. This contains an ARM1176JZFS, with floating point, running at 700Mhz, and a Videocore 4 GPU. The memory is 256 RAM, included in the SoC (not expandable).

The GPU is perhaps the Raspberry Pi’s greatest feature – capable of BluRay quality playback, using H.264 at 40MBits/s. It has a fast 3D graphics core accessed using the supplied OpenGL ES2.0 and OpenVG libraries. Basically if the software can take advantage of GPU for graphics then the graphics will be accelerated and look amazing. Graphics capabilities are roughly equivalent to Xbox 1 level of performance. Overall real world performance is slower than a desktop, something like a 300MHz Pentium 2, only with much, much swankier graphics **if** the software can take advantage of the GPU.

How can the Raspberry Pi be used in schools?

Once formally launched the foundation hopes that community bodies like Computing at School will put together teaching material such as lesson plans and resources and push this into schools. In due course, the foundation hopes to provide a system of prizes to give young people something to work towards.

There’s lots of discussion of educational uses and resources in the Raspberry Pi Education forum – http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums.


Thanks again to Professor Alan Mycroft for bringing the beta version of the product – ‘Raspberry Pi No1 !’ and the amazing Eben Upton and Liz Upton from the Raspberry Pi charitable foundation in Cambridge for helping us organise the talk and providing such an amazing educational vision!

Again, here is the film of the lecture held at OUCS in March 2012 – “An Introduction to the Raspberry Pi”. Enjoy!
http://media.podcasts.ox.ac.uk/oucs/openspires/raspberrypi_intro_09032012.mp4

http://www.raspberrypi.org/
http://www.computingatschool.org.uk/

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