Taste of Tech

In 1984, Richard Saul Wurman collected some of the brightest stars in Technology, Entertainment, and Design for a conference in Monterey, California. The Macintosh computer was introduced at that conference. So was Sony’s new method for storing and distributing audio: the compact disc. Benoit Mandebrot explained how he uses fractal geometry to map coastlines.

Six years later, the TED conference became a regular event. The roster of speakers expanded to include scientists, philosophers, musicians, and others. TED speakers have included Bill Gates, Frank Gehry, Jane Goodall, Billy Graham, Herbie Hancock, and Larry Ellison.

This year, TED will put “fifty remarkable people” on stage and let them share whatever they are passionate about. I’m probably not going to be there. For one thing, it starts tomorrow. Then, there’s the fact that it costs $4,400 to attend, and you have to be invited. Sure, it’s not impossible to get an invitation, and there are educational discounts, but I have a feeling my school district still isn’t going to be willing to foot the bill.

Thanks to sponsorship by BMW and a partnership with WNYC/New York Public Radio, Ted Talks are available online. Each week, they release at least one new talk in both audio and video formats. At the moment, there are sixty-four talks online. You can watch Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life, talking about his book. Then, you can watch Tufts philosophy professor Dan Dennett respond to the presentation, taking issue with claims in the book. Or, watch Richard St. John explain the secrets of success in three minutes. Astronomer Sir Martin Rees urges 21st century scientists to provide the moral compass that will guide wise societal decisions. Charles Leadbeater argues that the open-source movement has allowed everyone to become an inventor.

You’ve read enough. Go watch them. Or download the audio and listen to them on your mp3 player.

About a month ago, I started listening to the Immigration Tales podcast. The show features interviews with people who came to the United States as immigrants. The program is produced by Cuban American Vitor Cajiao, who came from Cuba at age 11. The first episode tells his story. Since then, he has interviewed people from El Salvadore, Montenegro, Poland, and England. Each talks about his or her experience, life in the old country, the process of coming to the United States, and the sometimes difficult adaptation to American life.

It occurred to me that many of our English Language Learner (ELL) students are probably immigrants. They may be able to relate to some of these people. Because most of the guests on the podcast are non-native English speakers, their language may be easier for our students to understand. Their use of idioms and colloquialisms is kept to a minimum, and they tend to be more consistent in their application of grammar.

Several applications of this resource came to mind:

• Students could listen to the podcasts, discuss some of the challenges faced by the guests, and relate the stories to their own experiences.
• Students could volunteer — either individually or collectively — to be guests on the show. The podcast is actively seeking guests for future shows.
• Students could use simple, inexpensive recording devices to record their own stories, borrowing the concept of the show for their own use. This could be burned to audio CD to share with families or published as a podcast.

It’s definitely a resource that could help these students work on their English while also addressing some of the social challenges they’re facing. I sent a CD with the first couple episodes to some of our ELL teachers last week. We’ll see what happens….

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 This is a test [2:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I’ve been writing so much about podcasting that I decided that it should have its own category. I added it yesterday, and went back and updated all of the posts so they show up in the right places. Previously, I had lumped Podcasting into the Web 2.0 category. But it’s not really Web 2.0.

Will Richardson was talking on Ed Tech Talk last week about his reluctance to embrace podcasting. While it is a neat new tool, it doesn’t really fit into either of the Web 2.0 definitions. It’s a broacast technology. One person or group records an audio program, and sends it out to other people, who can listen to it. Sure, they can provide feedback to the originator, but there’s no real sense of interactivity. There’s no online community. This isn’t the read/write web. The fact that it uses RSS, and that people can have it automatically downloaded to their computers, doesn’t change that.

It’s also not web-as-platform. That’s the other way web 2.0 is described. You can do word processesing, calendar management, spreadsheets, graphs, even presentations online. The operating system on your computer doesn’t matter, and you don’t need any productivity applications. But podcasting doesn’t fit into that at all.

So it’s really more of a one-way communications tool. It’s broadcast. Old school. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I’ll try to categorize it correctly from now on.

You may have noticed that I write quite a bit about podcasts, yet I don’t actually have one. While it’s true that I’m kicking around a couple ideas for podcasts, and that I am encouraging other educators to get involved with podcasting, I’m more of a writer than a talker.

At the same time, I am a consumer of audio. I listen to a dozen or more podcasts, but only read a couple blogs. Because I have a substantial commute, it’s much easier for me to listen to content than to read it.

What we really need is for someone to read blogs to me. If I could take the content that I most want to read, and get someone to record it to a podcast, then I could listen to it in the car and stay caught up.

Talkr sort of does that. After signing up (for free), you can give it up to three blog feeds. The service records them as podcasts, and makes them available in a separate feed. So people could subscribe to your podcast feed, which gets updated automatically whenever you create a new blog entry. You can get an idea of how this works by listening to this blog post.

Of course, it’s not perfect. It’s the typical, computer-robot-tech voice that’s been around for a generation. It’s hard for computer generated speech to sound right, because it doesn’t include the right inflection or tone. Still, it’s a lot better than some of the old text-to-speech tools.

How can we use this in schools? First of all, anyone who has a blog could now have a podcast. This would certainly help with visually impaired students, but others may benefit as well. At the district level, we could use the RSS feed from the school sites to create a daily podcast of district news, though I’d like to combine the feeds from all of the schools before we do that. While the tool is meant for bloggers who want to provide podcasts, you can enter any feed, so you could create podcasts for your students of other sites that you want them to hear.

It’s not the holy grail. I don’t think I’ll be listening to hours of computer-generated speech. But this is better than I thought it would be.

By the way, my feed is here: