Please join us Thursday, December 8, noon EDT, for a Facebook Expert Hour on the topic of “Automated Captioning for Lectures in Higher Ed” on the IBM Accessibility Facebook wall.

Joining us will be experts from Liberated Learning Consortium:

• Ginny Perelson, Director of Ross Center for Disability Services, University of Massachusetts, Boston
• Keith Bain, International Manager, Liberated Learning Consortium; Adjunct Prof. Department of Finance, Information systems, Management Science, Sobey School of Business
• Dr Mike Wald, Senior Lecturer, Web and Internet Science Research Group, ECS, University of Southampton

And joining us from the IBM Human Ability and Accessibility Center:

• Peter Fay, Advocacy and Outreach Program Manager

You can view the Expert Hour without a Facebook profile, but to participate in the real-time discussion you must have a Facebook profile and “Like” IBM Accessibility.
Screen reader users can use http://m.facebook.com/home.phpPlease feel free to forward this invitation onto colleagues and friends — this is an open, worldwide forum and all are welcome.

Synote has won the Times Higher Education Outstanding ICT Initiative of the Year Award for The University of Southampton. The trophy was presented to Dr Mike Wald, Synote’s creator, during an evening ceremony hosted by Rob Brydon at the Grosvenor House Hotel, Park Lane, London.

Synote at The University of Southampton has been shortlisted for the Times Higher Education ICT Initiative of the Year Award to be presented during an evening ceremony on 16 June 2011 at the Grosvenor House Hotel, Park Lane, London. Dr Mike Wald, Synote’s creator, will be attending and hoping to be awarded the trophy.

you can listen to and read and add comments to the accessible Prime Minister’s New Year Podcast at:

http://www.synote.org/synote/recording/replay/52007

Mike Wald has won his third major award of the year for his development of accessible technologies, including an open source Web application which transforms learning for all students, including those with disabilities.

Mike has been named runner-up in the Individual Award category in this year’s Association for Learning Technology (ALT) Learning Technologist of the Year Award, which was announced at the ALT conference in Nottingham.

Mike received the award for the development of the innovative Synote annotation system.

Synote makes multimedia resources such as video and audio easier to access, search, manage, and exploit. Learners, teachers and other users can create notes, bookmarks, tags, links, images and text captions synchronised to any part of a recording, such as a lecture.

The ALT judges were impressed by the wide applicability of the Synote product and its extensive tagging facilities.

They commented: “Mike led the development of the Synote system […], a free Web application used to transform learning from recorded teaching materials for all students including disabled, dyslexic and second language students. This builds on 10 years of work on speech recognition and is in use in a number of universities in the UK, Europe, and worldwide.”

Earlier this year Mike won a National Teaching Fellowship awarded by the Higher Education Academy for his work in accessible technologies, which also recognised his work on Synote and described it as a tool “used by universities worldwide to transform learning for all students”.

Mike also won a University of Southampton Vice-Chancellor’s Teaching Award this year for his inspirational, innovative teaching in this field.

Commenting on these achievements, Mike said: “It’s great to have my work recognised through all these awards, and I look forward to this encouraging more teachers, universities and students to use Synote at www.synote.org.”

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/about/news/3389
http://repository.alt.ac.uk/817/2/LTOY201020v1.520for20web.pdf

Mike Wald presented and demonstrated Synote at the following recent conferences :

ICALT 2010

ICCHP 2010

CAA 2010

Net4Voice

Synote’s creator Mike Wald was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship for his work on Synote and accessible technologies.

http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/contacts/detail/ntfs/2010/Wald_Mike_2010

We plan to upgrade Synote (www.Synote.org) on Thursday 29th July to include many new features and so Synote will not be available for a few hours from 8.00 GMT on Thursday 29th July and we apologise for any inconvenience this may cause you

New features include:

* All recordings, transcripts, slides and notes can be searched and the recording replayed from that exact time.

* The URL of any point in the recording can be saved and shared with others so the recording can be easily replayed from that exact time.

* Live synchronised notes can be taken from virtually any mobile device using twitter so any user can take live brief notes that will synchronise with the recording

* Recordings can be replayed without logging in

* ‘Update’ button gets current time of the recording

* Filter the Synmarks to view your own, owners or all Synmarks

* current replay time displayed

* ‘forward 5 second’ button added to player

* automatically transcribe the multimedia (only available for the University of Southampton).

Find out about the world’s first seminar using Twitter for creating synchronised notes by going to

 http://synote-server.ecs.soton.ac.uk:8083/synote-r0492/recording/replay/17028

 to replay the seminar with tweets & speech recognised transcript.

Login to write/annotate or select “Read, Watch or Listen Only version” without a login.

You should change ’synmark filter’ to show ‘all synmarks’ to see everyone’s tweets.

Synote now has over 500 recordings (most with synchronised transcripts and slides and annotations) and over 600 registered users