Divace: Not Your Everyday Media Player-Recorder (*)

	"Divace is not your everyday media player-recorder, for it has pedagogical "smarts" that all teachers and learners can appreciate."
Dr. Joel Goldfield is Director of Culpeper Language Resources Center and Associate Professor of Modern Languages and Literature at Fairfield University, Fairfield, Connecticut. He is co-principal investigator in the International Studies/Language Technology Initiative funded by the Rockerfeller Brothers Fund.

DIVACE* (Media Assistant Duo/Solo) is not your everyday media player-recorder, for it has pedagogical "smarts" that all language teachers and learners can appreciate. One of the most compelling features for faculty in our interdisciplinary project was its easily controlled bookmark function. For an audio passage, teachers can set a maximum of 10 starting points, allowing students to find clips appropriate to homework assignments without wasting time. Similarly, students themselves can also set a maximum of 10 bookmarks per clip for temporary use during their session and save them to a personal file.

The other high-priority feature group, to which faculty as well as student assistants gravitated early in the initial training and implementation stages, is the row of nine function buttons: play, pause, stop, rewind, fast forward, speak/record, recap and repeat.

Resembling a VCR control panel, these buttons' labels and pictograms are relatively self-explanatory. However, three are somewhat special. One of them contains a button that switches its label from "Speak" to "Record", depending upon whether users are either recording their own speech or audio from another source to a separate file, such as from an audio CD to the computer's hard drive. Another button, "Recap", automatically searches back to the last pause, allowing users to easily repeat the last phrase; no previous programming by student or teacher is required. And by using the pointed, tab-like time markers on the Divace interface, an ad hoc review segment can be created and repeated as many times as desired. Our first students tried this feature often to better understand what seemed like interminable or rapid phrases in audio materials at beginning and inter-mediate levels. Additional functions, mostly of interest to teachers, such as associating a Web site (URL) with a lesson, clearing preprogrammed bookmarks, setting the type of server for lessons one wishes to deliver via the web, text-to-audio/video synchronization, and security protocols appear on the pull down main men~ They are viewed by clicking on the highlighted  "c" in Divace. Synchronization constitutes the principal authoring feature. Within minutes, faculty was using it to associate text with audio and video segments; thus creating captions and subtitles. One can also segment and edit audio portions by typing in the start and end times. Divace recognizes strong punctuation like periods, question and exclamation marks, colons and semi-colons and will automatically segment textual passages which can be audio and video transcripts, short stories, newspaper articles, taken from the Internet or even an entire novel. To synchronize the textual passages thus created, users need only click the mouse immediately after they have heard the final sound in each displayed phrase.

An additional feature, "AACC" (Audio Active Comparative Corrective), allows teachers to set one of three pedagogical sequences for any audio portion. While there is no comparison made by the software itself, such as through speech recognition, each type of sequence prompts students to listen to, the practice or answer audio prompts two to three times. Recordings can be stored centrally and even transferred ~o audiotape for faculty to take home and evaluate.

Caveats regarding this product are few. While Divace's user manual lists 23 PC and Macintosh encoding formats it supports, we could not use one set of Macintosh-based audio files on the native Windows platform, although the manual lists them as being in a readable file format. The only other platform issue we encountered is that the current version of Divace cannot be run under NT4x because of the latter's lack of DirectX support. However, the earlier version of Divace is still available and does work under NT, and the vendor states that the current one is fully compatible with Windows 2000.

Divace (Media Assistant Duo/Solo) is distributed by Tandberg Educational, Inc., (www.tandberg-us.com) and comes in several versions. Divace can be downloaded free from the web (www. sanako.com) for a 30- day evaluation as of writing. For the independent user, Divace Solo, may be more appropriate with its many learner and teacher orientated functions. Certain features and configurations may dictate a particular version or hardware add-on, so potential users should be sure to check the best match. The attractive and easily under-stood Divace interface, a small window, represents a natural digital development from the pioneering DOS-based

VoiceCart products created in the 1990s by Tandberg Education (Brewster, NY, and Skedsmokorset, Norway). Importantly, Divace (Media Assistant Duo/Solo) has integrated the seamless use of video under a Windows interface, and Divace (Media Assistant Duo/Solo) contains encoding software allowing for the painless digitization of both audio and video (creating .avi files), assuming the user has a sound card and video capture card, respectively. Tandberg's high-quality installation, technical support and training time policies also do much to recommend this product. We have also used Divace successfully on iMacs and GJ PowerBooks with at least 64 MB RAM and running the Connectix Virtual PC emulation software with Windows 98. Divace's user manual, 38 pages plus glossary, has clear and illustrated explanations for references as well as self-propelled early adopters. Overall, Divace (Media Assistant Duo/Solo) is clearly a welcome product for both language learners and instructors.

* The product name Divace has been changed to Media Assistant.