Thursday, October 3, 2013

Day 9. Binge-watching the MOOC



M​ore of the SciWri ​video modules opened up, and I'm watching them like I watched "How I Met Your Mother"--one episode after another, for hours.

The videos all have closed captioning, apparently produced by either voice transcription software, or a human court reporter who is uncommonly devoted to getting every word. So it becomes very noticeable that informal speech is a thousand miles from written language. Unless you are accustomed to reading transcripts, you'll be surprised by the number of kinda's and gonna's and sort-of's in her lecture. Yet the prose she is showing the class how to write is, while not excessively formal, always extremely correct.

Sometimes the transcriber (robot or human, I haven't decided) doesn't hear quite what the teacher is saying. Today, "abutting" turned into "a budding."


In a few more days, the part I'm really waiting for: the first essay assignment. Stay tuned.

P.S. Here's a big Same-Day Archaeology hello to the Russian spammers who have suddenly noticed the blog and are giving it their full attention. Thank God for comment moderation.








2 comments:

Jason said...

Believe it or not, we pay for the captioning of each video!

Jason said...

oh, and the transcription is by humans -- unless we're not getting our money's worth!