This is part 1 of a series of posts documenting a vist to Apple headquarters in February, 2005. For the full series, see part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5. and part 6.
We arrived in Cupertino today. I flew JetBlue non-stop from JFK to San Jose for an amazingly low price. I have to say, JetBlue has become far and away my favorite airline.
At any rate, we had an uneventful trip and a nice dinner hosted by Apple. The real meat of the visit comes tomorrow. In the meantime, I had an interesting lunch-time conversation with Steven and Beth about the pros and cons of podcasting as an educational medium.First of all, we all agreed that podcasting/vodcasting is going to be sharply limited in value unless students can be producers as well as consumers. Coursecasting…has it’s place, I suppose, but the really cool stuff is most likely to happen when we send our students out into the world with microphones and digital recorders (or video cameras).
Beyond that, it’s important to recognize the particular strengths and weaknesses of podcasting. On the plus side, Steven pointed out that we have to triple-underline that podcasting is more than just audio. The two salient distinctions are that (1) it’s mobile, and (2) it’s syndicated. So applications that are location-specific, that benefit from serialization, and that support a diverse range of glosses on the same topic are all good candidates for podcasting.
On the downside, we often forget that multimedia comes at the cost of some control over speed through the content for the learner. I saw this in corporate training development all the time. Sponsors loved audio, but learners mostly hated it (in that context). They wanted to be able to skim content quickly and the audio controls they got rarely gave them significant ability to fast-forward in any useful way. Also, because polished audio production often tends to be time-intensive, it’s important to look for applications in which the production values don’t matter that much. So content with a lot of affective value that one wouldn’t want to skim is good, as is more personal journaling/reporting, where a quick-and-dirty narrative without a lot of editing or splicing works.
Hmm..I was just thinking of this disadvantage (lack of user control over speed through content) while listening to podcasts on the subway this morning. The “skimmability” and the searchability of text is a very important feature, and it means that text is always going to be more subject to random access (not really random, but you know what I mean) than audio can be…
Until, and unless, we can develop a really workable indexing/bookmarking system for audio.
In listening to an hourlong podcast (or even 20 minutes), if I’m reminded of something that I heard in last week’s podcast, it’s very tedious to try to skim, and almost impossible to really search, for that exact moment from last week’s podcast.
Even the ability to bookmark exactly where you left off when stopping a podcast is pretty unevenly implemented in today’s technology.
I wonder if some advances in voice recognition software (the advances we keep being promised) would make it possible in the future to search a podcast for words and phrases.
In the meantime, I think there’s an important lesson about podcast production–chunking the content, with logical divisions and relatively brief segments, needs to be part of the production process.
Thanks for keeping the flag hoisted for moving podcasts as “lectures online”.
The capability of the enhanced podcasts are all the elements needed for basic digital storytelling.
For Joe’s comment above, try Podzinger (not the best but a start):
http://www.podzinger.com/
or Podscope:
http://www.podscope.com/
As big a limitation is the inability to easily link to a specific time code within a cast, as a shortcut to access desired segments easily within a cast.
Apparently, it’s possible to speed up or slow down a voice recording without changing the pitch using Apple technologies. I’m not sure whether this is in iTunes or the iPod, but the Apple folks specifically mentioned it several times. This doesn’t solve the problem the way speech-to-text would, but it mitigates it somewhat.
I would be cautious regarding any compression used to “speed up” voice playback. Yes, it certainly can be done – just listen to those incomprehensable legal disclaimers on any car commercial on terrestrial radio (“tax, license and other fees incurred. Yadda yadda yadda”). There is obviously a threshold at which speed and comprehension diverge…
Now, if there were a way to meta-tag audio files and insert cue points (analogous to tracks on a CD), now you’re talking usable.
Interestingly, Apple has introduced enhancements to AAC which include chapter points (and those chapter points can be synchronized to a slide show). It’s non-standard, but it’s an open extension to the standard, much like the RSS standard allows for extensions. What I don’t know is how the iPod behaves with the chapter points. (iTunes offers up a very nice interface to them.) If you have access to Garage Band and any iPod with a color screen, you might want to try playing around with it.