Brian Jordan's texty thoughts

Hi.  Before I ease you in to my half-baked proposal for a better solution, here are three things that are really cool, and I think are very useful for taking notes at a presentations (university lectures, keynotes and the like):

A Wiki

Wikis are great for asynchronous collaboration. They store versions, they scale well, even when you let anyone contribute, and the word wiki is just fun to say.

A nitpick: The self-described “non-computer” types, those who just hate it when their computer “is blowing up” or “spazzes” on them, often have trouble learning the MediaWiki interface (used on a large portion of popular wikis, like Wikipedia (and pretty much anything else set up by the Wikimedia Foundation). Adding media to wiki pages tends to be especially tough for first time users. Some simplification may be worth its weight in future contributions.

Some possible solutions (which probably exist as plugins, or as different wiki software): modify MediaWiki to streamline the uploading of images or the on-page instructions for doing so easier, add an internet meme esoterica quiz to the front page of your wiki, go to your local public library and teach a wiki editing course.

A partial solution: commercial entities such as PBWiki and Wikispaces have created wikis that allow for pretty-freakin-easy wiki creation and media uploading.

PBWiki

Like: the everything-on-one-page-height-interface, simple image uploads, comment functionality, page navigator, useful sidebar.
Hmm…: Edit/view distinction, synchronous editing in large groups, no flash-based audio or video players, no exposition of image and audio metadata

I suggested PBWiki when my roommate asked for a simple wiki for taking course notes, and his wiki was a hit come exam time (and other people helped edit it, too).

Synchronous Collaboration

If you haven’t tried synchronous collaborative text communication (ytalk, screen, ICQ, etherpad, gobby, subethaedit, google wave), you are missing out, my friend.

Google Wave preview (abridged):

These collaborative tools let you see what’s being done by other people as it is being done. When you’re taking notes in a class, this becomes immensely useful, as you can see if something that’s been said has already been jotted down (no duplication of effort and merge conflicts).  Imagine you have a question — you could ask first on this collaborative backchannel before interrupting class or the presentation.  And if others have the same question, you might mount an internet-information-gathering-expedition before your professor stops to ask “any questions?”

Google Wave and etherpad seem to also offer built-in wiki-style version control and time-based playback. Because lectures are time-based (the lecturer speaks and introduces new ideas at their pace, your notes are taken around the same time), this can be incredibly useful if you have an audio or video recording of the lecture that you are working along with… which brings me to the next and final wonderful thing.

“Timelining”

Timelining, to me, means organizing multiple pieces of media (photos, audio, text) in a way that exposes the temporal relationship between events. Imagine taking an audio recording, and while you are doing that, taking a bunch of photos. You could independently listen to the audio and leaf through the photos when you hear your camera shutter. It would be like video with a very low framerate. Now, what if both of these things were on your computer and had timestamps. Then you could write a program that will automatically leaf through your photos when audio start timestamp + time elapsed = photo timestamp (or more realistically, audio end timestamp – length + time elapsed = photo timestamp). If you have your program write the output of this and the audio stream to a video, you would essentially have a low framerate video.

This photo + audio time exposition is exactly what the unreleased Microsoft Research’s MyLifeBits project software does (new book about a couple of the researchers coming out in a month). And it is kind of like what video lifecasters do (except at a high framerate, and often broadcasted for anyone to see online).

This has to do with collaborative backchanneling because different people have different media acquisition tools, angles, etc. I have an audio recorder and recorded a 1 hour long mp3 of the class, you have a cell phone camera and shot 30 photos of the blackboard at different times. Temporally combined audio and photos (and text notes taken on-wiki during the lecture), could be a decent record of the class if someone missed it, and a great extra study tool. Video of a lecture is pretty useful if you can get it, but even when you have that, having collaborative class notes alongside the lecture would be quite bonus (and searchable!).

So, in a nutshell

I’d like to see a web service with:

1. Wiki-like open collaboration with Wave/etherpad-like synchronous speed
2. The ability for any attendee to upload media, and play back the notes alongside audio and photos (and video?)

How hard is this to make? Who will make it?

The technical limit here, I think, is the mechanism for obtaining the absolute times of photo and audio material. The three social limits are, and apologies for being completely out of my element, (1) will someone make this, (2) will students want to use it, (3) will students be allowed to use it, and under what terms.

Oh, and making sure everyone has their clocks set correctly.

I think the people behind PBWorks, Etherpad, justin.tv and any Joe off the street (even me?) using the Google Wave APIs are well poised to make something like this.  But I hope someone makes it tonight, because my classes start tomorrow.

Do you have tips?  Links?  Starting points?  Do you know if date created/modified information survives browser-based uploading?  Leave a comment!

Useless Mockup

‘ere ya go!:

Bonus Points

Make an offline client, for those lectures and presentations made far away from the ever spreading internet.

Add a new terms / vocabulary / flashcard section in the toolbar.  Tie in with the Quizlet API, or some spaced-temporal memorization service.

Allow for on-the-spot drawings (javascript or Flash-based) in addition to photo uploads.

Tags: idea, want