The use of technology in education has come a long way since pocket calculators were first allowed in classrooms. Across the world, technology and its role, not only in education, but also in overcoming the digital divide has come sharply under the spotlight.
"Technology has caused a shift in how most educational institutions attack pedagogy. One trend is the move towards distance education which is not purely paper-based," says Piet Dempsey, MD of local Convera distributor Knowledge Focus.
Distance education no longer relies on paper- and text-based resource materials, but rather incorporates a number of technological advances such as video and other multimedia. The challenge, however, lies in managing this content and providing it to students in a format that is easy to access and both quick and easy to search.
"Multimedia content is a perfect fit for most distance education institutions, but the problem is that a lot of multimedia is bulky," he says, referring to the bandwidth requirements and sheer file sizes of multimedia, especially video content.
"This is where Convera comes into its own, as it provides an easy way to stream content over the Internet or intranet, by creating a 'thinner` version of the video that can be viewed at varying data rates," he explains.
Dempsey points to California State University (CSU) Sacramento`s distance and distributed education programme, in which Convera Screening Room enables students to view course content within minutes after the actual lecture is given, no matter where the student is located, as an example of this trend.
Previously, finding specific content from lectures proved to be a time-consuming process as students had to manually search through different tapes to find specific content. Now, students can search using terms relating to the content of a specific lecture. This capability enables students to review course material quickly, making the learning process more efficient.
Dempsey says this technology is ideal for the South African education environment. "A number of South African institutions have shown interest in this product, as it allows for critical learning to take place, irrespective of whether a student is able to attend a particular class or not. Its application in the South African context is being investigated and we hope to make some announcements about local implementations soon."
This technology, says Dempsey, can also be put to use in a corporate training environment, as it provides companies with the opportunity of videotaping experts in specific fields and making the lectures available over the corporate intranet. Convera`s Screening Room technology works with most media players, such as Windows Media Player, and conforms to all the normal technological standards on Windows and Unix environments.
"In organisations that offer internal training, Convera technology offers a chance to capture knowledge from senior management. This knowledge can then be managed as part of a company`s knowledge management process," he explains.
Academic information suppliers like Oxford University Press, Macmillan and ProQuest have also started using technology as a tool.
"These companies make their money by providing access to educational material and research offerings. It is imperative that their clients, such as students and lecturers, have easy access to the information. The academic information suppliers have found that cheaper search tools do not supply the correct type of information to paying content subscribers, and have turned to Convera RetrievalWare for assistance in making their businesses more profitable. Most have had a return on their investment within three to six months," Dempsey says.
He explains that one of the strengths of the Convera search engine is its ability to search across semantic differences (ie spelling or typos) to provide the kind of information that students and lecturers are looking for. In addition, Convera can accommodate a multi-lingual environment, and provide searches for video, PowerPoint, Word, HTML and a number of other document formats.
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Knowledge Focus was formed in August 2000 after a management buy-out (MBO) of Excalibur Technologies Africa from Grintek Electronics. The company markets a range of products to help customers manage their information assets. Knowledge Focus is managed by Piet Dempsey and Graham Melvill-Smith, who both have extensive experience in the field of digital asset management. The company supports and serves organisations which have a need to retrieve information (knowledge) with accuracy and speed. In short, it is able to assist any organisation that has problems finding their information. Knowledge Focus concentrates on the Knowledge Retrieval and Knowledge Preservation markets with special attention to the delivery of information (knowledge) for the competitive intelligence (CI) and strategic marketing intelligence (SMI) markets, and is a master reseller for a number of exciting technologies that enable these business functionalities.
Through these technologies, including Convera products, the company is able to assist companies in storing and retrieving data from the following internal and external sources: general office documents, Intranets, groupware applications, ERP systems, existing document management systems, the Internet, relational databases, digital images, video and paper-based documents. The company head office is in Pretoria, and its clients include Eskom, Technikon SA, Gensec, Kumba Resources, M-Net and NEMISA (National Electronic Media Institute of South Africa).
Convera`s RetrievalWare
RetrievalWare is a high-performance multimedia, cross- and multi-lingual search system that allows broad flexibility and scalability for implementation across corporate intranets and extranets. RetrievalWare enables users to index and search a wide range of distributed information resources, including text, video, image and audio files, HTML, XML, over 200 proprietary document formats (such as word processors and publishing systems), relational database tables, document management systems, and groupware repositories. Advanced search capabilities include concept and keyword searching, pattern searching, and query-by-example. RetrievalWare excels in distributed client/server environments with thousands of users, documents, images, and/or multiple media assets.
Convera`s Screening Room
Convera`s Screening Room provides scalable, high-performance access to any video asset (analogue or digital) from an ordinary Web browser. With Screening Room, users can automatically capture video; browse visual summaries (called "storyboards"); catalogue content using metadata, annotations, closed caption text and voice sound tracks; search for precise video clips using text and image clues; and create rough cuts and "Edit Decision Lists" for further production; and publish those video assets to the Web for streaming. Screening Room turns video assets into useful resources in a cost-effective way.
Convera
Convera is a leading provider of mission-critical enterprise search, retrieval and categorisation solutions. Convera`s RetrievalWare solutions maximise return on investment in vast stores of unstructured information by providing highly scalable, fast, accurate and secure search across more than 200 forms of text, video, image and audio information, in more than 45 languages. More than 750 customers in over 29 countries rely on Convera`s search solutions to power a broad range of mission-critical applications including enterprise portals, knowledge management, intelligence gathering, profiling, corporate policy compliance, regulatory compliance, customer service and more.
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