Apple's Macworld announcement about professional and celebrity music instruction as part of GarageBand '09 may have been impressive, but what might be a little more eye catching (and ultimately useful) is iPerform3D. This browser-based music learning system shows users how to play guitar in 3D, and works on both Macs and PCs.
iPerform3D eschews A-list music celebrities like Sting and Sarah McLachlan in place of guitar-playing veterans who have undergone motion capture recording of their entire bodies (fingers especially) to teach you various lessons. To learn, you get control of a 3D video player that lets you change vantage points, as well as slow down or speed up the lesson.
The service's claim to fame is that this 3D viewer gets rid of some of the limitations that come from simply watching someone play in a video or over a Web cam. You can zoom around behind the neck of the guitar and see through where your fingers are supposed to go. It's pretty neat, and a lot easier than trying to reverse the image in your head to do what you're seeing. Each video comes with three view presets, although you can simply click and drag around with your mouse to adjust each angle further.
iPerform3D's player lets you zoom around to whatever angle you want, and includes three button presets to let you skip to ones that cover finger placement. Click to enlarge.
(Credit: CNET Networks)The service offers both a beginner course ($40) and three different monthly membership subscriptions ranging from $30 for one month all the way up to $140 for an entire year. These give you access to set of intermediate lessons and "jam tracks" which serve as background loops for you to practice what you've learned.
One thing worth noting is that the service won't work without the installation of the Unity-3D rendering engine (which isn't just a simple browser add-on). The upside of this is that once it's installed on your machine you can run the lessons from almost any of your browsers, although IE, Firefox, and Safari are the only ones "supported."
Here's the video pitch:
Last week NBC quietly released a learning tool called iCue in conjunction with MIT. (See coverage on CNET TV's Loaded.) It's been designed as a "learning environment" using a large collection of news clips taken from NBC's video archives to enable anyone to catch up on news coverage and current events. This archived footage is put into context, as long as viewers are willing to acknowledge that the content is coming only from one source (NBC), and for now only with the focus on the U.S. presidential elections.
To get going, users can simply wander around the site, viewing various footage that's been meticulously categorized and documented (complete with transcripts). They can also put their knowledge to the test with a smattering of editor-created mini games that require both a contextual understanding of what was going on at the time of the clip, along with whatever other bits of historical insight are found in the one- to two-minute segments. There's a whole lot going on, and I'm betting the casual user is going to get lost very easily.
That's not to say NBC hasn't created a very powerful tool. If you've got the time and patience to learn the system and sit through a bunch of old news clips, you're likely to pick up some knowledge, albeit slightly outdated. Some games are even easy, like the clone of concentration that has you matching pairs of presidential candidates with former U.S. presidents based on which state they're from--that's downright fun.
Concentration is one of iCue's more enjoyable excercises, having you match up presidential candidates from different eras based on what state they're from.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Another thing NBC has definitely gotten right is the video player. Each clip is housed in a tiny floating window that can be flipped over like widgets in OS X's Dashboard. This B-side contains the video's metadata, including an entire set of keywords that pull up a listing of related clips. Users can add their own keywords, in the form of tags, as well as color each video item one of six colors, which I think is superfluous, unless you're planning to color code your entire collection of videos--a nice touch for library science majors, but likely to be useless for most.
NBC's video playing widget is simple yet full of extra options on its 'B-side' that you can flip to.
(Credit: CNET Networks)The site is also a social network in the making. iCue users can befriend one another and send each other their small video collections (iCue calls them "stacks") that contain whatever notes, comments, and tags that have been added to each clip. I couldn't wrangle up anyone to swap stacks with me, but in practice you can chronicle an issue from beginning to end with a collection of clips and pass it on to someone else to watch in whatever order you want. That's pretty neat, albeit time-consuming to put together.
So to answer the question I asked earlier, NBC's iCue can definitely provide a whole lot content and context for current events if you're willing to jump through some hoops. There are a ton of clips on there, and parsing through them can be as easy or as difficult as you're willing to make it. NBC's greatest asset is in some of the pre-made sets of exercises and games, which put the grunt work on the editors instead of the users.
BookLamp is a project that the people at Amazon.com would be idiots to pass up buying.
It's a machine learning tool that's been designed to go through books and analyze not only how they're written, but also help group together novels that share similar structures and styles. The hope is to help people discover books they may like based on previously read novels, or what kind of reading experience they're going for. Internet radio recommendation service Pandora does something similar, employing a thumbs up and down system combined with listening history.
Because BookLamp's system uses machine learning, it skips the three major aspects of each book that humans usually tally: story line and plot, the characters, and writing style. Instead, it figures out bits of these three items by using written cues and quantifiers like word density, pacing, action, character dialogue (as noted by quotations), and level of description. The system also blends in one to five star ratings from Amazon.com.
(click to enlarge) BookLamp's stats analysis looks at a book and figure out how it's written based on five factors.
(Credit: CNET Networks)So far, the database has 179 books, but is tracking more than 700,000 data points over 30,000 scenes from those titles. If it were to scale to track more works, in theory the results for related items would be even more precise. In its current state, users can go in and pick from one of the titles and get recommendations for similar titles, or view the graphs of what the system has recorded for its pacing, density, and other characteristics.
One of the coolest features, and the one I think is the killer app is the pacing analysis. It will go through and figure out when the pace of a book speeds up or slows down.
In the video demo (embedded after the break), creator Aaron Stanton picks Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park as an example, and demonstrates that BookLamp was smart enough to detect when the pace ramps up, including on what page that change occurs. I could see this being a great way to check and see if you're wasting your time on a read that's off to an incredibly slow start and potentially going nowhere. Instead of giving up, you could simply give the chart a quick look.
The project has been around since 2003 and continues to build up its database. There's a sign-up form to request a work to be added. You can also play around with the browsing and stats tool by registering. Be sure to hit the read more button to check out the video walk-through.
[via Digg]
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Far separate from RSS readers lays the land of news aggregators. One of the more well-known ones is Google News, but there are also social solutions like Newsvine that let the community decide what news items rise to the top based on what's coming over the wire. A new service named Tiinker (that's somewhere in the middle) opened its doors earlier this week. The site's been in private beta since late last year, and can most easily be described as a mix between Google News and StumbleUpon. It's not meant to replace a standard news page by any means, but instead is designed to let you whittle down what types of stories you like in order to get future recommendations that are similar. The ones you mark as not liking, Tiinker will simply get rid of.
Everything on the site is handled with three basic controls, a thumbs up and down button, and a way to bookmark content that goes into a separate feed that you can share with others. The service will also keep track of which stories you've marked as liking, so you can go back and read them later. In order to abate users limiting themselves to just a few types of content, there's also a "lucky" dip section, which chooses a story that's outside of your taste.
The ultimate goal of this and services like Spotback are to help you get a news feed that's been hand-tailored to your preferences so that the only stories you'll see are ones you're interested in. Of course what makes that part critical is the source list, which is where Tiinker's a little short-sighted. There are many good sources that articles seem to pop up from, but there's no way to go in and "tinker" the complete list to see what's on it or add new, independent sources. This is mostly because of the machine learning system that's set up to balance the tastes of the entire user base, but it's a bummer when you're in the dark about where the content is coming from. Interestingly enough, up until last month the service had a built-in RSS reader that let you do such a thing, but it was pulled down for retooling.
I like the idea of Tiinker, although it's not useful to me for news or content suggestions as I'm an RSS enthusiast who reads a lot of social news sites. It's definitely a handy way to get a smattering of new feeds and story suggestions, and the machine learning concept shows promise, but until they give a little more control over where the content is coming from, advanced users will likely want to stick to a social news service or feed aggregator like Feed Each Other, and still private Streamy to get interesting news links from humans.
Tiinker pulls in news from a variety of sources. Pick the ones you like, and it will do its best to find you more that are similar.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Plenty of language learning tools leverage technology. Recently I've taken to listening to the Coffee Break Spanish courses on my iPod during my commute, and last week Jessica Dolcourt covered the new online language learning system Mango. There's yet another system being released at DemoFall tomorrow that also looks very compelling: LiveMocha.
You can chat (using text or audio) with other language learners.
Like other language learning tools, LiveMocha has online lessons you can take at your own pace. Compared with Mango, I found LiveMocha easier to get into. My test case was beginning Spanish, and lessons flew by as my vocabulary and comprehension grew quickly. But what really sets LiveMocha apart from other systems is its social system: after you take a lesson, you can practice your knowledge by either writing or recording your answer to a question aimed at other learners of your level.
Other LiveMocha users who know the language you're learning are the ones who critique your response. If you're learning Spanish, then a native Spanish speaker will give you feedback. Likewise, you'll be asked to give feedback for people learning the language you speak. You can also connect in real time with other users (either already speaking your language or learning it) and talk with them using guidelines for conversation that pop up when you connect. Eventually, you might set up a network of fellow learners.
Language is a social tool, so it makes sense to learn one in a social setting. If you can't get yourself into a classroom or immerse yourself in a new culture, this system--free during beta test--is worth a try.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
It's clear that a lot of work went into Mango's compendium of online language lessons. If the choice of 13 languages doesn't impress you, how about the fact that more than 100 lessons constitute each course, and between 70 and 150 slides or more add up to a single lesson? Or how about conversational lessons appearing in their own alphabet, with AJAX pronunciation pop-ups to reinforce the visual and phonetic learning combo?
To begin, choose a language from among Asian and Romance languages (or Pig Latin) for English speakers, or English lessons in Spanish and Polish. Like most language software, Mango shows and plays conversations between two people in a variety of social relationships. The next hundred or so slides dissect and recombine the conversation line by line and word by word until you've become familiar with the phrases by dint of repetition if not actual absorption. Each ensuing level builds on skills learned in the last.... Read more
While YouTube continues to be one of the most popular and widely recognized Web video sites, there's a rather large smattering of niche video services out there. Sclipo (formerly known as Visuarios) serves up a bevy of instructional videos in nine different categories. The service won "Best Start-up" last week at the StartUp 2.0 awards in Bilbao, Spain.
Like other video-hosting sites, Sclipo users can rate, comment on, and share the videos with others. What makes it so interesting is its revenue-sharing model. "Masters," or users who provide skills videos, will get a portion based on traffic (a la Revver). They will also soon be able to opt-in via PayPal to be "tipped" by their viewers.
For a young site, there's already a considerable amount of content. Sclipo encourages its users to post multiple videos on the same subject, and you're likely to spot some overlap here and there. One of the more enjoyable categories is food and drink, where you're likely to find a technique or recipe that's both entertaining and instructional.
Where Sclipo varies from some other how-to sites is its upcoming platform SclipoLive. It's essentially a video-conferencing tool, where users can teach their own classes via Webcam. Sclipo is integrating a revenue model, so teachers will be able to charge students and make money off their efforts. Students and teachers will be able to record these sessions, including a transcript of the accompanying text chat. Compared to something like Skype's Prime service, there's a potential for serving more users, and effectively making more than you would if limited to one-on-one expert sessions. While Sclipo is marketing this as a teaching tool, it could just as easily be used as a consulting platform. The SclipoLive service is currently in private beta.
I've embedded an example video off Sclipo below.
Other similar how-to video services: SuTree, HelpfulVideo, TeacherTube, ViewDo, Expert Village, 5min, and VideoJug.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
Quizlet is a cool flash card tool that lets you design and use your own study guides for tests, exams, or anything else that needs to be burned into your brain. Quizlet lets you design your own simple questions and answers. After you're done you can quiz yourself onscreen. Quizlet randomizes the questions and keeps track of the ones you miss for retesting. You can also share your quizzes and get in touch with other Quizlet users to discuss changes to the content or tips on how to remember the tough ones.
As a recent college grad, I remember all too well what a pain it was to write out flash cards. Even worse, trying to borrow someone else's. Part of the learning process is certainly writing things down, but considering most of us type faster than we write with a pen or pencil, Quizlet is on to something good.
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