What's Going On?
Contents
A video interpretation tool for teaching
What's Going On? (WGO) is a video interpretation tool with fully-modifiable content. It has been developed at the London School of Economics (LSE) as part of the Digitial Anthropology Resources for Teaching (DART) project.
We suggest that you first have a look at the tool by following the link below, then return here to find out more about it.
What is it supposed to do?
The idea is to present a video clip that is enhanced by the addition of synchronised subtitles and 'captions' (text containing hyperlinks) . There is also a synchronised 'hotspot' feature, allowing areas of the video image to be hyperlinked. All the hyperlinks point to background information that describes different aspects of the video content. The students use this tool to try to interpret what is going on in the video clip, and write an analysis which can be assessed and shared.
That's a brief explanation of the intended function - please follow the link below for more details:
- Pedagogical aim of What's Going On?
Features
What's Going On is a Flash program, embedded into a web page. It works by adding contextual information onto a video clip. This is done in 3 ways - with subtitles, captions and hotspots.
Subtitles are the pieces of text that appear superimposed over the bottom of the video image. They can be used to provide simultaneous translation of dialogue, or for a commentary on the video.
Captions are the pieces of text that appear on the top right-hand side of the video image. Unlike subtitles, they can contain HTML links, so they can link to other files and web resources. This feature can be used to link to contextual material at appropriate moments during playback.
Hotspots are semi-transparent areas of colour superimposed on the video image. They can appear and disappear at any time, and can move or change shape to follow objects in the video. A click on a hotspot pauses the video and causes a hotspot caption to appear to the bottom right of the video image. Like ordinary captions, they can include HTML links. Hotspots can be turned on or off using a button on the interface.
Modifying content
All the content you see - the video clip, the subtitles, captions and hotspots - is specified by a set of XML configuration files. In order to change any of the content, one simply modifies the XML files. Therefore the Congo-based example shown above could easily be replaced by a completely different piece of video, with corresponding subtitles, captions and hotspots.
A suite of authoring tools is available to facilitate the creation of subtitles, captions and hotspots. These allow teachers without technical knowledge to create new versions of the exercise themselves. The following links provide demonstrations of these tools - try these first to get a feel for how they work:
- Subtitle authoring tool - demonstration
- Caption authoring tool - demonstration
- Hotspot authoring tool - demonstration
Finally, if you would like to use the authoring tools to start editing your own content, please follow the link below:
