> Let us also remember, she actually built AND shipped.
It's funny how much further this is than the side projects of so many here (myself included)
For me this is one of those 10,000 things. We can either dismiss it, or share in the joy of learning something new and sharing our own lessons. Teachers learning OBS will be as much of a game changer as teachers moving from overheads to powerpoint, I think.
Also, I feel like this is super indicative of the gate-keeping mentality a lot of IT and tech people have around "not-cutting-edge" technology. Even if it is nothing new, let's be the resource
Talking with non-engineers (particularly friends of mine who work in non-profits), I see incomprehensible amounts of potential value in just increasing the uptake of "not-so-special" tech among people who consider themselves "non-technical". That's the point of technology, after all: not being fancy unto itself, but actually doing stuff that people need, whether that's wheels enabling long-distance transportation or lightboards enabling better long-distance education.
> Teachers learning OBS will be as much of a game changer as teachers moving from overheads to powerpoint, I think.
Just an anecdote but as a chemistry student I remembered lessons taught from an overhead far better than those from powerpoint. There was a stark contrast between the lower division organic chemistry series whose instructors used overheads, and the upper division organic chemistry mechanisms class whose teacher used slides. Those slides were mostly bullets and diagrams, sometimes with crude animations which were meant to indicate nucleophilic attack or whatever. Just watching the lecturer draw diagrams and arrows and listening to them talk was far more helpful, for me.
The lightbox seems much more overhead like in presentation. I dig it, and I hope today's college students learn well from it.
>Also, I feel like this is super indicative of the gate-keeping mentality a lot of IT and tech
That lumps people together. I'm in IT/tech but don't value intricate, difficult, extreme novelty over everything else. That would be absurd.
Remember Stanfords $1 paper microscope for looking at blood samples? Now that was badass.
The cleverness is in the saving of $7940 to solve a problem. Dumpster-diving for parts and materials, or even freeganning Whole Foods are all perfectly valid too.
I remember a guy used his seat aisle's window on StartupBus as a whiteboard with dry-erase markers, but I guess he should've brought an LED light strip to make it pop more. The trick is installing it. ;-)
And it's made all the more important by the lack of software allowing economists to graphically demonstrate economic concepts on the fly. The best digital substitute is probably a graphic design program (like skitch or gimp), and most economists would not be competent graphic designers, at least not without practice.
OBS is really the big enabler in (my) online teaching at the moment. I use an IPad with a drawing app, I draw on a predefined colored canvas and overlay it in OBS with a chromakey filter. If that is available to you, it is even cheaper. But then again, I am looking slightly down while writing..
Just the other day I was following some complicated tutorial for getting blackmagic's atem mini pro hdmi capture/mixer board to work in Wine in Ubuntu 20.04 .. I finally gave up and tried decided to play around with a webcam in obs instead. There to my surprise, OBS was listing the ATEM's capture input out of the box no wine required, with no config as a video source!
Same! I don't do anything as elaborate as the article, but I use a combination of OBS, PowerPoint, GIMP, IDEs, and a cheap Wacom tablet to demonstrate all the concepts for my classes.
The "Khan Academy"-style drawing I think really helps keep learning online casual and conversational in a way just presenting slides doesn't.
Yes! Educational research supports being casual and conversational. Although for drawing diagrams, a physical overhead with the instructor's hand visible seems to work far better than Khan style video.
See: Fiorella, L., & Mayer, R. E. (2016). Effects of observing the instructor draw diagrams on learning from multimedia messages. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(4), 528.
Were you using Zoom? I had a lot of trouble using either the OBS virtual camera or sharing the composition window---what was transmitted was either potato quality or the video lagged very far behind.
After a LOT of debugging, I'm convinced it was due to Zoom bandwidth throttling, which I was unable to get waived.
Yes. Zoom is fine, you can either up the resolution for the "speaker view" in your account preferences (maybe just in the paid version), or even better: Use the screen share feature and under "advanced" you can share a second camera, or in this case: the virtual OBS camera. This will usually not be compressed as hard as the speaker views.
FYI: This is a good article about a DIY hack that can be made at low cost and with minimal effort. If you want extremely detailed information about the state of the art in this space, it's here:
It's a fantastic ingenious hack for, IMO, a model that needs to die.
There is no reason to reteach the same class every semester . The best minds need to get together and put in N (say 10) semesters worth of effort into creating the highest production value lectures that all can use until the material fundamentally changes. Most of these kinds of lectures have little to no interaction which can come at other times and the need to "do it live" leads to subpar teaching production.
Back in about 1988, I took a required history class from a local community college. (To help make up for the fact that it took me four semesters to get through the two semester calculus course.) The course consisted of...
1. A high-production-value TV program transmitted on the local PBS channel.
2. In-person mid-term and final tests.
3. "Teaching assistants" (it was a local community college; I'm not sure what their exact status was) with office hours for questions.
It...worked. I learned the material, such as it was. As such, it was somewhat better than the worst in-person classes I experienced.
On the other hand, there was no engagement with the material. You read the textbook, watched the TV, and went in to take the tests. End of story. There were no asides---having a teacher take part of a class to look at some current event from the viewpoint of the class, having the teacher answer a completely off-the-wall question that leads to a good discussion. There were no discussions, in fact. I'm sure some of the students who knew the material got together to review for the test or something, but honestly, I don't see why. The whole experience was aimed at the lowest common denominator with no way for the teacher to dial it up for some or all students.
It worked, but it was a worse learning experience than many 500 students classes that I had from enthusiastic, engaged teachers.
I suspect that's why the model hasn't caught on, at least at the level of decent schools---people have been saying (and attempting) that video would take over from lectures literally since Edison invented the movie. (I'm sure it's more appropriate for the degree-mills of the world, though.)
Video _should_ take over from lectures, but there needs to be a model to properly replace it. On my part, I think it's an utter waste of the teacher's time to keep repeating the same lecture over and over, when he/she should be doing exactly the conversation and engagement part. It's just we don't have a good, universal model for this. I'm sure lots of places tried and succeeded, but for some reason no particular way of skinning this cat got out to become well known.
Partly, I suspect, is because 80% of the value of education is signaling, so any "revolution in teaching" would be just optimizing the 20% left.
> the need to "do it live" leads to subpar teaching production
That heavily depends on the subject and the students. The goal of teaching is to teach, not to achieve a high production value of a performance in the Hollywood sense.
What really needs to die is lectures themselves. They are a TERRIBLE method of creating learning. However they are very good at creating the perception of learning. That contradiction is not surprising, it speaks to how we actually learn, by engaging with our reflection and metacognition about attempts at things that end in errors.
I highly agree with you. I remember back in my university days (now long ago). We'd be in chemistry class trying to copy from the professor's writing on the board, and he went so fast that he'd be erasing while you were still writing.
Spending that time on trying to actually understand (from the student's point) and on explaining more/better instead of writing (from the teacher's point) would have been immensely more useful.
Huh it looks like she horizontally mirrors the camera so that the writing appears forwards not backwards. At first I thought she might have been writing in reverse, which would be doable on simple graphs but harder with more words. Later shots show her writing on-camera, forwards from her perspective.
In the past century, glass chalkboards and reverse writing were actually used in the military, mainly in air defense. Specially trained writers were putting objects scanned by radars on the board with coordinates and related info, while officers were reading them from the other side.
For a minute I was wondering how did she teach herself to write so well in reverse (and so fast), until I realised that it's trivial to flip the output.
The principle behind why the writing glows (i.e., totally internally reflected light from the LEDs in the plexiglass getting scattered by the ink) is also how some of the earlier multi-touch systems worked (like the one in Jeff Han's 2006 TED talk). So, with the right software, it might be possible to convert one of these DIY lightboards to support input (maybe to change slides or something).
Perhaps use hand tracking[1] to get candidate finger-tip positions, to simplify using the FTIR touch blobs for contact detection and precision position?
The lightboard.info site has instructions for building an $8k professional setup, using tempered glass etc. It does explain the mechanism of the lightboard (frustrated total internal reflection), but otherwise doesn't seem very useful for DIYers.
Readit News
Let us remember, she's an Economic major, not an engineer. Let us also remember, she actually built AND shipped.
It's funny how much further this is than the side projects of so many here (myself included)
For me this is one of those 10,000 things. We can either dismiss it, or share in the joy of learning something new and sharing our own lessons. Teachers learning OBS will be as much of a game changer as teachers moving from overheads to powerpoint, I think.
Also, I feel like this is super indicative of the gate-keeping mentality a lot of IT and tech people have around "not-cutting-edge" technology. Even if it is nothing new, let's be the resource
Talking with non-engineers (particularly friends of mine who work in non-profits), I see incomprehensible amounts of potential value in just increasing the uptake of "not-so-special" tech among people who consider themselves "non-technical". That's the point of technology, after all: not being fancy unto itself, but actually doing stuff that people need, whether that's wheels enabling long-distance transportation or lightboards enabling better long-distance education.
I'm reminded of this brief but profound interaction in the pilot episode of "Halt and Catch Fire": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQLbi4VXYcA
Just an anecdote but as a chemistry student I remembered lessons taught from an overhead far better than those from powerpoint. There was a stark contrast between the lower division organic chemistry series whose instructors used overheads, and the upper division organic chemistry mechanisms class whose teacher used slides. Those slides were mostly bullets and diagrams, sometimes with crude animations which were meant to indicate nucleophilic attack or whatever. Just watching the lecturer draw diagrams and arrows and listening to them talk was far more helpful, for me.
The lightbox seems much more overhead like in presentation. I dig it, and I hope today's college students learn well from it.
That lumps people together. I'm in IT/tech but don't value intricate, difficult, extreme novelty over everything else. That would be absurd.
Remember Stanfords $1 paper microscope for looking at blood samples? Now that was badass.
The cleverness is in the saving of $7940 to solve a problem. Dumpster-diving for parts and materials, or even freeganning Whole Foods are all perfectly valid too.
I remember a guy used his seat aisle's window on StartupBus as a whiteboard with dry-erase markers, but I guess he should've brought an LED light strip to make it pop more. The trick is installing it. ;-)
Great example for her students.
https://www.utoday.nl/news/69384/ut-professor-makes-glow-in-...
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The "Khan Academy"-style drawing I think really helps keep learning online casual and conversational in a way just presenting slides doesn't.
See: Fiorella, L., & Mayer, R. E. (2016). Effects of observing the instructor draw diagrams on learning from multimedia messages. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(4), 528.
https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000065
After a LOT of debugging, I'm convinced it was due to Zoom bandwidth throttling, which I was unable to get waived.
For drawing diagrams, a physical overhead with the instructor's hand visible seems to work far better than digital drawing [2].
[1]: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2019.103713 [2]: https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000065
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https://lightboard.info/
There is no reason to reteach the same class every semester . The best minds need to get together and put in N (say 10) semesters worth of effort into creating the highest production value lectures that all can use until the material fundamentally changes. Most of these kinds of lectures have little to no interaction which can come at other times and the need to "do it live" leads to subpar teaching production.
1. A high-production-value TV program transmitted on the local PBS channel.
2. In-person mid-term and final tests.
3. "Teaching assistants" (it was a local community college; I'm not sure what their exact status was) with office hours for questions.
It...worked. I learned the material, such as it was. As such, it was somewhat better than the worst in-person classes I experienced.
On the other hand, there was no engagement with the material. You read the textbook, watched the TV, and went in to take the tests. End of story. There were no asides---having a teacher take part of a class to look at some current event from the viewpoint of the class, having the teacher answer a completely off-the-wall question that leads to a good discussion. There were no discussions, in fact. I'm sure some of the students who knew the material got together to review for the test or something, but honestly, I don't see why. The whole experience was aimed at the lowest common denominator with no way for the teacher to dial it up for some or all students.
It worked, but it was a worse learning experience than many 500 students classes that I had from enthusiastic, engaged teachers.
I suspect that's why the model hasn't caught on, at least at the level of decent schools---people have been saying (and attempting) that video would take over from lectures literally since Edison invented the movie. (I'm sure it's more appropriate for the degree-mills of the world, though.)
Partly, I suspect, is because 80% of the value of education is signaling, so any "revolution in teaching" would be just optimizing the 20% left.
For an introverted autodidact like me, that’s all I want. But I recognize I truly am in the minority here.
That heavily depends on the subject and the students. The goal of teaching is to teach, not to achieve a high production value of a performance in the Hollywood sense.
Spending that time on trying to actually understand (from the student's point) and on explaining more/better instead of writing (from the teacher's point) would have been immensely more useful.
[1] https://viz.mediapipe.dev/demo/hand_tracking Web demo - run button is top right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oaikJCR6ec
I would like to buy/build one of these for my home office? What's the best guide or best pre-built?
Honestly I'd rather just throw money at someone whose built one for me. But either way is fine.
Also lots of places to buy them. Here's one: https://www.desktoplightboard.com/product/desktop-lightboard...
Instructables is the goto site for this sort of thing, I found these instructions for building a small one for under $100: https://www.instructables.com/DIY-Lightboard/
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