iLinc and speech recognition applications

I recently experimented with one of the better speech recognition software applications, Dragon Naturally Speaking/Preferred v10 (from Nuance). This allows one to dictate and have words captured as text, as well as control MS Office actions through commands. I decided to try this in combination with iLinc. The two applications work together beautifully, without any conflict of audio. One can present and speak, record the video and audio, and have the words captured. However, the words captured must be in the chatbox, which is within the active application window during the presentation. Further, to create grammatically correct text, one also must say the punctuation marks, which may be annoying to others listening to the presentation. Without the punctuation, the chats can still be saved and later editted for clarity, despite being a string of words in the video recording.


While Dragon will also work to capture the words as text within its "Dragon pad" or MS Word, one must toggle between these applications and iLinc in order for anything to be captured. The moment one selects anything in iLinc and makes that application window active, this deactivates the Dragon pad or Word window. Nevertheless, the ability to capture your words in the chatbox, while speaking and presenting, is a great step forward in steamlining the process of creating accessible materials.


The Dragon software costs about $100 on sites such as buy.com.

Effective web conferencing

Faculty are often searching for helpful suggestions about designing and deploying an effective synchronous online meeting or class using web conferencing applications. There is a useful webinar available from the Adobe website, entitled "Web Conferencing Tips for Training and Education". The audience is polled to determine how and why people use webinars, and then the speakers present examples of effective training and educational webinars. Planning, design and pedagogy are addressed. You must register on the Adobe website in order to view the recording. It is worth a look, as about one third of the way in, the speakers themselves experience an amusing techno glitch, in which the slides magically and rapidly change on their own. The take home lesson here is to go with the flow, like the speakers.

I would encourage others to comment here and share their own lessons learned, best practices and experiences using synchronous online sessions for training and education.

iLinc performance issues

We are trying to implement online curricula using synchronous communications, with the ultimate goal of creating a virtual networked community of faculty, staff, and students on our campus. iLinc has been extremely robust, performing far better than any other similar product on the market today, in facilitating virtual classrooms as well as training sessions and research experiments on scientific instruments. If connected users are all on PCs, the performance is excellent.

However, there have been two recurring issues. One concerns iLinc users who use Macs. Generally, the audio quality of VoIP has been less than optimal, and it has taken a couple of practice sessions to make the audio intelligible, because Macs transmit at a different bit rate. USB headsets work best. A second issue has arisen when Mac and PC users intermingle. There are problems with PC users at half duplex, having to reset the audio wizard in order to restore being able to hear the remote participant. Finally, the ilinc client has sometimes failed to launch on Macs, giving an error message about a missing resource file.

When the audio has crapped out, I have resorted to using my cell phone (a Blackberry Smartphone) in speaker phone mode, either directly broadcasting or holding the phone to the mic on my computer.

I would welcome commentary from people who have used iLinc successfully on the Mac OS, as well as those in general who have come up with creative solutions to VoIP problems. Users can view my tipsheets as they evolve at http://fdc.fullerton.edu/technology.