Summary
The Multimedia Annotator is an easy-to-use tool designed
by and for language teachers to provide students with a variety of
kinds of help as they view a video clip.
The Multimedia Annotator consists of a player,
which is used by learners to get just-in-time help in understanding
a video clip, and an authoring tool, which language
instructors use to create custom players for use by their students.
The player shows the video clip, has navigational controls with
the video parsed into sections, and help features that students can
click on as they view the clip. The power of this player lies in
the types of help that students can access: students listen to an
alternate audio clip; read culture or grammar and vocabulary tips;
slow-down the video; and turn on subtitles. All of this help pertains
to just that part of the clip that the student is having problems
understanding.
The multilingual authoring tool allows instructors to easily create
custom players. Instructors can parse video clips into sections,
associate different kinds of help with those sections, and set-up
requirements for access to help.
First developed under the name Listening Assistant, the Multimedia
Annotator was created by the T4 Foreign Languages Project
in collaboration with College of Letters and Sciences faculty at
UW-Madison. Programming was provided by Clotho Advanced
Media, Inc.
Technical
The Multimedia Annotator Player is a Flash MX movie that
allows the playback of video content encoded with the Sorensen Spark
codec. Associated data is provided by an XML control file. It can
function independently (as a pop-up) or as part of an HTML structure
viewed with a web-browser. The Multimedia Annotator author is also
a Flash MX movie. It is loaded by a Macromedia Director Projector,
allowing for the creation and editing of the player’s XML control
files.
