Lecture enhancements

[Marielle Lange]

Hi Al,

Thanks for your contribution to the wiki... I also posted information  
about the two projects you mention... still need to add mention of  
your question bank, feel free to do it)

About the presentation, what is unclear to me is whether what is  
needed is only an export facility, to convert from powerpoint into  
reusable interactive content or a slide show.

Note that there is a commercial plugin that does something vaguely in  
that vein: http://www.impatica.com/. I tried it and did not like it  
(very very very slow on macs). This could be a starting point for  
thinking about the problem, though.

I have a VBA script that takes all the pictures of a powerpoint  
presentation and save them as gif or jpeg files. It wouldn't be very  
difficult to adapt it to also export animations. I have no cue on how  
to achieve the same with runtime revolution reading the binary file.

The easiest is to use runtime revolution to start powerpoint and call  
the VBA macro to powerpoint and process the result. In fact, I  
already have something running along these lines in Applescript. I  
use it to automatically save a powerpoint presentation in different  
formats (compressed pdf , 4 slides a page grayscale, compressed pdf,  
2 slides a page color, uncompressed powerpoint show, printing the  
handout, etc.). This makes my students very happy (some have vision  
problems and broadband, others have a modem and limited space on  
their computer) without costing me too much time (before it toke me  
nearly 30 minutes per lecture to do all these exports manually).

Richard suggestion to provide remote control of runtime revolution  
(using Kensigton device) for classroom  or seminar presentation is  
something we should address, indeed.

> i'm interested in collaborate in an open source RR/MC
> application that were able to produce learning
> objects compatibles with SCORM and others standards.

Me too!!! Revolution would be just perfect for that job

> multiple choices test, drag and drop exercises,
> click on the right answers, simulations, demos,
> etc, etc...

I have a full FOLDER of such exercises, both paper and digital  
version. If  you understand French enough to navigate their website,  
check out http://usinaquiz.free.fr/. Plenty of exercises, easy to  
adapt (and open source).

Thanks for the links I added the ones I did not about yet at: http:// 
revolution.lexicall.org/wiki/tiki-index.php? 
page=LearningObjectNotesToSort

> <http://www.iuphar.org/autonomical/autonomical.zip>

"The requested URL /autonomical/ was not found on this server"

> <http://lists.runrev.com/pipermail/use-revolution/2002-November/ 
> 009329.html>

Agreed, we should write some basic statistical or numerical functions  
that others can easily call to. But we should be careful about not  
reinventing the wheel.

I wonder if you know about this: http://www.stats.bris.ac.uk/R/
An open source (free), cross-platform package for statistical  
analysis, that is easy to script. It simply excels at matrix  
handling. You cannot design GUI interfaces... but you can use  
revolution to execute R, crunch the number and provide a nice visual  
display of the results.  It did not take me more than a day, not  
knowing anything about R beforehand, to transform freshly collected  
questionnaire data (on students' perception of webCT use in our  
department) into this: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/mlange/eLearning/ 
webCT/page_intro.html
(R proposes built-in latex & html export)

************************************************************************ 
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Marielle Lange (PhD),  Psycholinguistics, Lecturer in Psychology and  
Informatics
University of Edinburgh, UK

Homepage:  http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/mlange/
Lexicall project: http://lexicall.org
Revolution-education project: http://revolution.lexicall.org