Wednesday, March 27, 2002

Seton Hall's Technology Center Creates Free Software for Multimedia Presentations By JEFFREY R. YOUNG Seton Hall University has developed free software that helps instructors turn their lectures into multimedia presentations for course Web sites. The software, called SyncStream, makes it easy to mix video of a lecture with a PowerPoint presentation or other slide show. To use the program, however, instructors must first record their lectures in the streaming-video format developed by RealNetworks. Combining a digital slide show with a video recording of a lecture makes for a more engaging presentation than does a lecture alone, says Samuel N. Shiffman, a digital-media specialist at Seton Hall's Teaching, Learning & Technology Center. "You're recreating the classroom environment at least a little better than having a talking head," says Mr. Shiffman. The technology center developed the software over the past year to encourage more professors at Seton Hall to use video on their Web sites. "If you want faculty to embrace technology, you have to make it attractive and easy to use," Mr. Shiffman says. He says he hopes the software will help him and his colleagues as well, by encouraging instructors to do some of the formatting work that a media specialist would have done in the past. The center decided to make the software available to anyone at no charge -- provided that the software is used only for noncommercial purposes. Instructors who use the software are also asked to display a copyright disclaimer. Seton Hall is not the first university to develop such software, but it might be the first to make it freely available to other institutions. "There are a few systems that have done this kind of service over the past five or six years," says Gregory D. Abowd, an associate professor of computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "However, I don't know of systems that are making themselves freely available." Mr. Abowd helped developed a similar tool as part of his eClass project, but he says he did not have the time or money to make the software available to others. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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