Cross Media Annotation System
October 1999 — December 2006
The Cross Media Annotation System (XMAS) provides tools to enhance the use of video and image collections in humanities
courses and in any subject in which precise reference to visual materials is needed. Close reading, analysis, and sharing of interpretation of textual
materials have long been a central part of humanities teaching and learning. XMAS is based on the idea that humanities education is increasingly multimedial
in character. We now need to reference film segments and images as rapidly and precisely as we can turn the pages of a printed book to find a marked passage
to discuss or incorporate into an essay. And we need to share our interpretations in online discussions and as image-rich essays that can be read and
responded to over the Internet.
Developed in conjunction with MIT’s Shakespeare Electronic Archive project, XMAS has been used in MIT Shakespeare and
Shakespeare on Film classes, with collaborators at Vanderbilt and other universities, and in distance seminars organized by the Shakespeare Association
of America. XMAS can be used in conjunction with image and text collections, and is currently optimized for use with commercially available DVDs as video
source. XMAS allows users to rapidly define segments of film that can be replayed by clicking on automatically created links that can be saved in a list
or dragged and dropped into discussion threads or online essays.
Students find that, when working on their own, XMAS helps them identify and define important clips, watch them repeatedly,
analyze them closely, see things they believe they would not have seen without the tool’s help, and generate and build on new ideas.
As the “connector” between the films and pedagogy, XMAS places the film “on a near-equivalent level with the
text,” reported a student. “It’s like if you were in the theater and you had the actors on hand to play the scenes on demand.”
Investigators:
Prof. Peter Donaldson, Literature; Belinda Yung
Additional Information:
http://icampus.mit.edu/xmas/
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Technology Infrastructure for Project-Based Learning
October 1999 — December 2006
"This project will produce a core asset of robot-specific content, tagged in a manner such that it can be reused and
repurposed. This content can form a valuable asset to drive the scaleup of the Robot World community to include other universities. Furthermore, it can
function as a template for mapping and tagging content in other domains. We believe that there is an opportunity for MIT to take a world leadership position
in the use of Design Project-Based Learning."
—Professor Alex Slocum, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering
Project-based design courses are an increasingly popular way of teaching robotics engineering because of the hands-on
educational benefits. These types of classes, however, can be difficult for instructors to run because of the logistical challenges of requiring access
to hardware and software laboratories, as well as a high degree of student autonomy outside of those settings.
Robot World systematized such courses to make them more deployable. The faculty team developed several tools and systems that
leveraged Web-based learning services and knowledge checkpoints to ensure the learning of fundamental concepts and project-based design education stayed on
a focused track. This includes “Take-A-Part,” a set of modules where students used Tablet PCs to simulate the assembly of various mechanical artifacts, such
as power tools; CoMeT, a design environment for creating compliant mechanisms such as springs and tweezers for micromechanical devices; PREP, a Microsoft
SharePoint® –based environment to support the peer-review design process; and Inkboard, a Tablet PC–based multiuser sketching tool to support
collaborative design.
Investigators:
Prof. John Williams, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Prof. Alex Slocum, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering
Prof. Martin Culpepper, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering
Additional Information:
http://pergatory.mit.edu/robotworld/
http://icampus.mit.edu/CoMet/
http://icampus.mit.edu/projects/robotworld.shtml
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