Pancultur

BabelAsia and AUSLAN
As part of our multicultural project we will be translating a sample selection of our mp3 audio podcasts into Chinese and Japanese. This will demonstrate the process of promoting Cultural Awareness information into the Asian region. Li Ting has made real progress into preparing a customized website that we will use as the 'vehicle' to deliver our IAD Cultural Awareness program, ACAP. As such the site has to be capable of multilingual text and audio display, mp3, mp4, Flash and photos. We've decided on using a website rather than a PowerPoint presentation to deliver the F2F component of our Cultural Awareness program. This will give us greater flexibility to include a broader range of multimedia, and also to apply more effects to in-site media.
Not only but also....
Onto this broad canvas walks our very own AUSLAN professional Carmel Batson. I'm helping Carmel with the IT/multimedia construction of her keynote address in Spain, July 07 at the Bi-annual CODA meet[Children of Deaf Adults]. Carmel complained, and rightly so, that we are utter cads for not including sign language translations in our Learnscope project.
So after a quick phone call from Betty Pearce [our director] to the Imparja Television studios Carmel, Li Ting, Gina and I are in front of a blue screen capturing 'signed' [if thats the right word] descriptions of sacred caterpillars gouging out hills and valleys across the Central Australian dreamscape. The studio technicians were calling this technique 'chromo' something or other. We just know at this stage we'll have to shoot the video this way to peel it off at a later stage and stick it against some suitable panoramic back-drop.
Our new Business apprentice Gina, pictured in the blue top, narrated the piece. We got it right on the 3rd pass and contrary to rumors Carmel did not dislocate her wrists trying to keep up with Gina!
On Monday 28th May 07 we are set to nominate the 15 or so particular sites around Alice Springs that we'll be using to construct our MP3 and MP4 podcasts. I put up another post shortly after. All I can say at this stage is that the project seems to be almost driving itself now, like a caterpillar on a mission!

Pancultu

Drilling Down.
The project is running along nicely now. Learners are busy researching their chosen topics and the ITC training is producing positive results. The Moodle/Elluminate sessions have been well received and having 'show and tell' sessions with Georgina in Adelaide has added a rich overlay onto the learning experience. Learners are more comfortable and confident manipulating media objects into PowerPoint [it's amazing how this has gone so quickly from cool to passe.]
The emerging educational issue now relates to the team condensing blocks of information into 'bite sized' chunks. Google is great but it gives one so much!. Getting learners to condense their information overloads into coherent chunks is an interesting and demanding exercise for me. As the data is Indigenously oriented I haven't the cred to make the call. But I must admit it's great to see students collaborating and debating what is important to the overall flow of the message.
Regarding Information Overload: we're starting to amass a small but growing pool of raw multimedia objects. [mp3, avi, mp4, gif, swf etc] What I could really use right now is a purpose built data base housing multimedia objects. I've a feeling that down the line as we move from our PowerPoint 'source-pool' into pod and vod-cast construction, we might have to use something like SQL to call these objects up. As, ultimately , we also want to have these multimedia objects 'on-call' as scorm compliant online learning 'chunks' the need for a database is growing. Anyone out there know of any applications that does this?