Here's a small series of humorous episodes related to recent Blackboard and Open Source Learning Management Systems.
The mashups are made with snippets of classic Hindi Bollywood films, overlaid with user created subtitles, from a fun online tool called BombayTV from Grapheine.
The role of Blackboardwala is played by none other than Amitabh Bacchan, of course.
- Ep. 1 Paying The Annual Licensing Fee
- Ep. 2 Dealing with Customers Looking at the Open Source Alternative
- Ep. 3 Dealing with the Patent Invalidation Ruling
- Ep. 4 Confronting the Open Source Challenge
- Ep. 5 Live from Blackboardwala World 2008
- Ep. 6 Dealing with Customers Looking at the Open Source Alternative, Again
- Ep. 7 Improving Customer Support
- Ep. 8 The Patent Pledge Explained
- Ep. 9 The Future of Blackboardwala
Seriously though, a tool like this could be very valuable in the teaching of Foreign Languages for use in assessing oral comprehension.
Hey Randy, good stuff! Very creative.
You're right about the foreign language part. I have learned English in large part watching DVDs with the subtitles on, so any web-based technology that can create mashups of audio-video and text is great to enhance the learning of a foreign language, but I doubt I'll learn Punjab by watching your videos ;-)
Posted by: Mathieu Plourde | April 07, 2008 at 07:06 AM
Mathieu,
Yes, I think a tool where a teacher could choose clips and then do custom subtitles would be very useful -- it could be graduated to learning level or grammatical focus, or used for assessment.
The language of the videos is actually Hindi, and I found watching Hindi film really helpful when I was learning the language (which was in the days before the DVD).
Randy
Posted by: Randy Thornton | April 07, 2008 at 09:14 AM
I love the Blackboard stuff!
We used this a while back to for students to do Shakespeare summaries. They'd read, pick a clip and give a quick plot summary in the subtitles.
What's interesting to me is that through tools like http://www.omnisio.com/ you can mix up and annotate clips from any movie in Youtube.
That starts to make things pretty interesting.
Posted by: Tom | April 07, 2008 at 12:42 PM
Tom,
Yes, better mashup/mix up tools could be a boon for not just FL teaching, but cultural courses in general, cinema courses in particular.
Thanks for link to omnisio
Randy
Posted by: Randy Thornton | April 08, 2008 at 09:46 AM
HAHA! I love it! This link was just sent out to the entire Amsterdam support office.
Good suggestion to you had for improving customer support, I will pass it along to The Boss for approval! :)
Posted by: Marcus | April 11, 2008 at 07:27 AM
Glad you enjoyed it. Hope that one gets approved for you guys.
-R
Posted by: Randy Thornton | April 11, 2008 at 07:40 AM
Kool stuff mate...
Posted by: Krishnakant | May 23, 2008 at 01:19 PM
HI Great Post I really found it Interesting. Looking forward for similar posts from you
Posted by: Preeyanca Agnihotri | October 06, 2008 at 12:25 AM