[Sugar-devel] GSoC Proposal: Multimedia Broadcasting

[Geza Kovacs]

On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 8:54 PM, Eben Eliason <eben at laptop.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 8:44 PM, Jameson Quinn <jameson.quinn at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It sounds as if your proposal is not so much an activity as the ability to
>> screencast whatever you're doing on the XO, p2p. And it would be even better
>> if the "watchers" had the ability to participate. Chris Ball has already
>
> I've put some time into thinking about this idea from an interaction
> perspective. It's a really exciting concept, and I'd be happy to
> provide design help if needed!
>

Thanks for the responses. While I did consider the usefulness of
VNC-type remote desktop control interaction, which "Multi-point remote
desktop" seems to be, considering the fact that for most activities
like Write or Paint, the ability to instantly share and update data
already accomplishes much of the "collaboration" aspect, I don't see
how this would be any more useful in a practical context than just
straight-out Google Docs-type collaboration. Additionally, this
wouldn't be a very general solution for collaboration in activities,
since the behavior and response to multiple pointers, and the
associated conflicts when two users are attempting to accomplish
conflicting goals for each activity would differ enough that this
"share" functionality would likely have to be re-implemented for each
activity.

I perhaps didn't quite clarify enough that I intend for this to be
used primarily in "presenter-directed" activities oriented towards
demonstrations to be viewed by the entire class, rather than
one-on-one student-to-student interaction as these other tools seem to
focus on. Thus examples of such situations would be where a teacher is
displaying a live lab experiment (in the context of broadcasting the
external webcam and audio input) or displaying how to use a particular
activity to the class (in the context of broadcasting the X11 output).
In this context, given that the students are more passive learners
that raise questions than active participants, I believe that the best
form of interaction, if any, would be annotation; as in the student
circles a term in an equation that they don't understand, or point out
something in the video they want the teacher to clarify; that way the
teacher can receive the input without disrupting the presentation.

To summarize, this is essentially more of an attempt to replicate what
projectors, presentations, and laser pointers are used for today
(broadcasting info to the students and soliciting their feedback),
rather than an activity-specific rich-immersion one-on-one student
collaboration attempt. The advantage is merely convenience; if the
student is receiving the stream from the teacher, he can view it from
the convenience of his laptop, or he can for example pause, rewind, or
record the stream if it's being cached, which he would be unable to do
if the teacher is merely displaying information on a projector. Thus I
don't really believe that any of these existing tools are quite
adapted to this niche; both video chat and activity sharing are too
specialized towards one-on-one interaction.

If this idea isn't really considered interesting, I could of course
revise my proposal to introduce more rich and direct forms of
interaction. I merely believe that this more conservative approach
would be more appealing to teachers who have grown up teaching with
projector-based presentations all their life, and would be more
immediately useful and require less maintenance by introducing no
activity-specific code.

> They way I've envisioned it working is to add a "watch" option to
> every shared activity (in addition to the usual "join" option), which
> would allow precisely that...observing someone elses activity (just
> that activity...not full screen sharing, which we might support by
> adding a "watch" action to XO icons themselves, as well). I envisioned
> making a composite icon for a "watch" session which wrapped the
> activity icon in an icon representing the screen, and logging that
> session in the Journal like any other activity. Finally, I envision
> the watcher to have the ability to grab screenshots (or perhaps video
> segments?) of the presentation, such that the resulting Journal entry
> serves as a record of what they watched.
>
> Eben
>
>> made a prototype of something like this. It would be an excellent GSoC
>> project to take this prototype and get it closer to where it could be a part
>> of sugar for all activities. Just how close you think you can get it, is
>> something you'd have to research - perhaps with the help of IRC.
>>
>> If you can come up with the beginnings of a workable proposal for this, and
>> get it submitted before the deadline, you definitely deserve to be on our
>> GSoC team! Get busy...
>>
>> Jameson
>>
>> On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 4:52 PM, Geza Kovacs <gkovacs at mit.edu> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> I am proposing a Multimedia Broadcasting activity for GSoC 2009, and
>>> would appreciate any feedback or potential mentors. The idea is
>>> described at:
>>>
>>> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Multimedia-broadcasting
>>>
>>> This proposal is somewhat a variation on the standard audio-video
>>> chatting concept; rather than having students audio-video chat
>>> one-on-one, which would be redundant in a classroom where the person is
>>> physically nearby, I believe broadcasting audio and video streams
>>> displaying presentations or live experiments locally to the masses via
>>> streaming on their laptops, thereby replacing the need to use
>>> projectors, would be a good usage of the available video and audio
>>> capture sources, in a classroom setting. For full details please read
>>> the proposal.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Geza
>>>
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>>> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
>>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>>
>>
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>