Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Useful Resources - Description of Subsequent Posts

Below are a bunch of short screen movies about General Equilibrium in the Edgeworth Box. These were inspired from reading the recent book, How Markets Fail, by John Cassidy. The videos are based on an Excel workbook that has simulations students can play with to help understand the basic concepts. After the initial video, which introduces the content and shows how the students might use it, the subsequent videos pertain to a particular worksheet. I hope the matching of video to worksheet is transparent.

I have been trying my hand at making accessible content. So there are transcripts for each video. YouTube has a tool that converts the transcripts to captions. That's what I used. The timings aren't perfect. But they are pretty good.

To make the transcripts I ripped the audio portion of the videos into a separate MP3 file. Then I ran that audio through Dragon Naturally Speaking. That gave a preliminary transcript file that I subsequently cleaned up. Again, it isn't perfect, but it is pretty good.

It occurred to me that students on a subsequent viewing might like to have the audio only and the spreadsheet in front of them. So I've got an embedded audio file below each video, in case the students would rather use that. Also, the audio files can be downloaded.