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I prefer transcripts over videos. It often takes less than 10 minutes to read the transcript of a 60 minute presentation. And it is a lot easier to go back and

I prefer transcripts over videos. It often takes less than 10 minutes to read the transcript of a 60 minute presentation. And it is a lot easier to go back and review sections which were confusing.

saosebastiao 12y ago
Agreed. If I see a link to a video without a transcript or description or even a TLDR, I just won't bother. Maybe to some people I am just another impatient millenial, but I can't help but feel like I have better things to do than to sit through bad jokes, equipment problems, stuttering, and umm-ahhhs. I'm usually pretty critical of a lot of Amazon's culture, but one thing I think is absolutely brilliant is its reliance on whitepapers and its shunning of presentations. With a presentation, the presenter retains 100% control over information flow, which can magnify the agitation that you feel when they just aren't spitting it out fast enough. With a whitepaper, a quick skim allows you to know exactly where you want to focus and you can control the information flow from there. Whitepapers take significantly more effort, which is why a lot of amazonians criticize them, but the reward is easily proportional to the effort.
- cordite 12y ago
  Here's an idea, a transcript where you can click on a word in the transcript, and it jumps to the point in the presentation so you also have the context of the slide shown during speaking.
  - chrisabrams 12y ago
    This would be such a great learning tool!
    - haberdasher 12y ago
      I'm the developer of this, which has: A transcript editor, Full-text search over the transcripts, The ability to use the transcript to seek. For example: http://presentio.us/view/d8b58e http://presentio.us/view/d8b58e (edited to fix formatting)
    - cordite 12y ago
      It reminded me of a certain notebook and pen (an expensive set) where each page of the notebook had a unique background pattern and the pen would record the lectures as you wrote. Later you could put the pen down on a word in your notes and start listening to the lecture just as you were writing those notes. Can't remember the name though.
      - hga 12y ago
        I think you're talking about this: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003RAE19Q/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003RAE19Q/ the Livescribe Echo Smartpen Or at least as of 2010 when I put it in an Amazon.com wishlist (and #%&^%& but Amazon's search function sucks, "pen" didn't find the "smartpen" by which it's named). Going to http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=bl_sr_pc?ie=UTF8&field-brandtextbin=Livescribe&node=541966 http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=bl_sr_pc?ie=UTF8&field-brandtext... I see much cheaper versions, including ones for iOS.
        cordite 12y ago
        This is indeed the unit a fellow student used. He dealt with ADHD, anxiety, and many other things in conjunction with medication side effects. For him, this was an invaluable study tool.
  - kiranb13 12y ago
    Someone at MIT's User Interface Design group is working on something like this, with a searchable transcript -- http://juhokim.com/lecturescape/ http://juhokim.com/lecturescape/
  - fakename 12y ago
    I've seen a few places that do this. edx was doing it for some courses at one point. Here's a demo from 3play: http://www.3playmedia.com/services-features/plugins/interactive-transcript/ http://www.3playmedia.com/services-features/plugins/interact...
  - jamesbrownuhh 12y ago
    You can do something like that with YouTube right now - any captioned video will have a rolling transcript window available to open, which you can scroll through and click on to jump around the video in a non-linear fashion.
skwirl 12y ago
Why not just read books then?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- Symmetry 12y ago
  Some information hasn't been written down in books.
  - hga 12y ago
    Indeed. I'm pretty sure there's no book treatment of Lady Gaga being greeted by Harvard students. (I swear I am not making this up: http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimination-public-online-content http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimi... and if those are the best examples they can come up with for a national campaign....) Disclaimer, I'm MIT Class of '83, donate to OCW, and am beyond annoyed.
    - Sanddancer 12y ago
      You're taking the example of the Lady Gaga video deceptively out of context. It was both preceded by four other examples covering Ebola, Brown V Board of Education -- a case of equal access to education even --, and discussions with Bill Gates and Noam Chomsky. The Lady Gaga video was submitted to show how laughable the automated captioning system is; it creates useless word salad out of videos. Your alma mater can do better than that.
      - hga 12y ago
        Not when those examples are immediately followed by this comment: “Worse still,” said attorney Timothy Fox, “a sampling of the videos available illustrates the problem with inaccurate captioning, making them confusing and sometimes completely unintelligible.” Where he's explicitly saying those above examples are not as bad as Lady Gaga et. al. being inaccurately captioned (apparently auto-captioned by Youtube). "The Lady Gaga video was submitted to show how laughable the automated captioning system is..." If so, it's entirely unapparent in the link (supply a quote if you disagree). Which as far as wel can tell starts out with false framing by claiming MOOCs are included in the problems, at least if the claims elsewhere in this discussion about all edX courses being professionally treated are true. Looks like, at least for MIT, that NAD is trying to confound that with Open CourseWare, which has an explicit mission limiting it's remit to making MIT course material useful to other teachers; anything else is gravy. This is mendacious, invidious PR thuggery; we'll see what the lawyers have to say after analyzing the lawsuit; ah, yeah, the Instapundit is going to be all over this. When faced with the above, my alma mater simply cannot win. And it certainly doesn't have the money to caption all this stuff; see elsewhere where I speculate one outcome will be a large fraction if not all the content will simply be pulled, the creation of future content will be severely curtailed due to this being moved from the arena of (not) good (enough) works to the legal one, and the remediation of the pulled works will be limited at best. One wonders just how many people in the entire world these SJWs will seriously piss off....
handojin 12y ago
A thousand times yes. With a suitably rocking implementation (as outlined by other posters up/down of me) this would be a net benefit to everyone not just the deaf. The number of people on this thread who think this is a zero sum game is just massively depressing.

I prefer transcripts over videos. It often takes less than 10 minutes to read the transcript of a 60 minute presentation. And it is a lot easier to go back and review sections which were confusing.

saosebastiao 12y ago

Agreed. If I see a link to a video without a transcript or description or even a TLDR, I just won't bother. Maybe to some people I am just another impatient millenial, but I can't help but feel like I have better things to do than to sit through bad jokes, equipment problems, stuttering, and umm-ahhhs. I'm usually pretty critical of a lot of Amazon's culture, but one thing I think is absolutely brilliant is its reliance on whitepapers and its shunning of presentations. With a presentation, the presenter retains 100% control over information flow, which can magnify the agitation that you feel when they just aren't spitting it out fast enough. With a whitepaper, a quick skim allows you to know exactly where you want to focus and you can control the information flow from there. Whitepapers take significantly more effort, which is why a lot of amazonians criticize them, but the reward is easily proportional to the effort.

cordite 12y ago
Here's an idea, a transcript where you can click on a word in the transcript, and it jumps to the point in the presentation so you also have the context of the slide shown during speaking.
- chrisabrams 12y ago
  This would be such a great learning tool!
  - haberdasher 12y ago
    I'm the developer of this, which has: A transcript editor, Full-text search over the transcripts, The ability to use the transcript to seek. For example: http://presentio.us/view/d8b58e http://presentio.us/view/d8b58e (edited to fix formatting)
  - cordite 12y ago
    It reminded me of a certain notebook and pen (an expensive set) where each page of the notebook had a unique background pattern and the pen would record the lectures as you wrote. Later you could put the pen down on a word in your notes and start listening to the lecture just as you were writing those notes. Can't remember the name though.
    - hga 12y ago
      I think you're talking about this: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003RAE19Q/ http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003RAE19Q/ the Livescribe Echo Smartpen Or at least as of 2010 when I put it in an Amazon.com wishlist (and #%&^%& but Amazon's search function sucks, "pen" didn't find the "smartpen" by which it's named). Going to http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=bl_sr_pc?ie=UTF8&field-brandtextbin=Livescribe&node=541966 http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=bl_sr_pc?ie=UTF8&field-brandtext... I see much cheaper versions, including ones for iOS.
      - cordite 12y ago
        This is indeed the unit a fellow student used. He dealt with ADHD, anxiety, and many other things in conjunction with medication side effects. For him, this was an invaluable study tool.
- kiranb13 12y ago
  Someone at MIT's User Interface Design group is working on something like this, with a searchable transcript -- http://juhokim.com/lecturescape/ http://juhokim.com/lecturescape/
- fakename 12y ago
  I've seen a few places that do this. edx was doing it for some courses at one point. Here's a demo from 3play: http://www.3playmedia.com/services-features/plugins/interactive-transcript/ http://www.3playmedia.com/services-features/plugins/interact...
- jamesbrownuhh 12y ago
  You can do something like that with YouTube right now - any captioned video will have a rolling transcript window available to open, which you can scroll through and click on to jump around the video in a non-linear fashion.

skwirl 12y ago

Why not just read books then?

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Symmetry 12y ago
Some information hasn't been written down in books.
- hga 12y ago
  Indeed. I'm pretty sure there's no book treatment of Lady Gaga being greeted by Harvard students. (I swear I am not making this up: http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimination-public-online-content http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimi... and if those are the best examples they can come up with for a national campaign....) Disclaimer, I'm MIT Class of '83, donate to OCW, and am beyond annoyed.
  - Sanddancer 12y ago
    You're taking the example of the Lady Gaga video deceptively out of context. It was both preceded by four other examples covering Ebola, Brown V Board of Education -- a case of equal access to education even --, and discussions with Bill Gates and Noam Chomsky. The Lady Gaga video was submitted to show how laughable the automated captioning system is; it creates useless word salad out of videos. Your alma mater can do better than that.
    - hga 12y ago
      Not when those examples are immediately followed by this comment: “Worse still,” said attorney Timothy Fox, “a sampling of the videos available illustrates the problem with inaccurate captioning, making them confusing and sometimes completely unintelligible.” Where he's explicitly saying those above examples are not as bad as Lady Gaga et. al. being inaccurately captioned (apparently auto-captioned by Youtube). "The Lady Gaga video was submitted to show how laughable the automated captioning system is..." If so, it's entirely unapparent in the link (supply a quote if you disagree). Which as far as wel can tell starts out with false framing by claiming MOOCs are included in the problems, at least if the claims elsewhere in this discussion about all edX courses being professionally treated are true. Looks like, at least for MIT, that NAD is trying to confound that with Open CourseWare, which has an explicit mission limiting it's remit to making MIT course material useful to other teachers; anything else is gravy. This is mendacious, invidious PR thuggery; we'll see what the lawyers have to say after analyzing the lawsuit; ah, yeah, the Instapundit is going to be all over this. When faced with the above, my alma mater simply cannot win. And it certainly doesn't have the money to caption all this stuff; see elsewhere where I speculate one outcome will be a large fraction if not all the content will simply be pulled, the creation of future content will be severely curtailed due to this being moved from the arena of (not) good (enough) works to the legal one, and the remediation of the pulled works will be limited at best. One wonders just how many people in the entire world these SJWs will seriously piss off....

handojin 12y ago

A thousand times yes. With a suitably rocking implementation (as outlined by other posters up/down of me) this would be a net benefit to everyone not just the deaf. The number of people on this thread who think this is a zero sum game is just massively depressing.