The November/December, 2005, issue of Educause Review carried an article titled “There’s Something in the Air: Podcasting in Education” by Gardner Campbell. He predicted that podcasting would assume great prominence in higher education. Describing a scenario in which students subscribed to prelecture course materials, Campbell pictured these learners eagerly listening to warm-up materials as they skipped merrily to an in-person class session. Podcasting generated interest for a time and many faculty began to think about recording classes or talks and sought devices to accomplish this (we found that the Sansa Clip, at a six-hour recording capacity and a cost of under 25 dollars became a favored item). But by 2010, it doesn’t seem to be a prophecy fulfilled. As Bugs Bunny would chomp on a carrot and ask, “What’s up, doc?”

What’s up is that several factors shine the light of reality on a premise that seems to have been formed in the dark! Here’s why:

• Faculty learned that there’s no free lunch in creating quality listenable audio. Just recording classroom audio isn’t enough. It takes time to edit out gaps, noises, and uninteresting segments. (If this weren’t the case, cassette recorders would have become a classroom staple beginning in the 1960s when they became commercially available.)
• An audio recording device doesn’t necessarily pick up both student questions and answers—giving you the equivalent of the sound of one hand clapping.
• It takes more work to copy audio from a sound recorder, transform it into mp3 format, and upload it to an accessible place than many people thought.
• And maybe Campbell’s idea wasn’t very accurate in the first place!

To be sure, our iTunes University Web site has accumulated some types of course-supporting audio material. Available statistics show that the most listened-to recordings are those that either are required listening for some assignment or in some way support an assigned textbook—for example, an audio version of a textbook for use by students with reading difficulties. But we suspect that Campbell’s happy scenario has suffered from some of the realities of life. For one thing, anecdotal comments of students indicate that they regard iPods and their ilk primarily as entertainment devices, not learning tools. Then too, technology may have already passed plain audio by—sites like YouTube are much more interesting since they provide video as well as audio. In addition, the options for how students spend out-of-classroom time have greatly expanded with cell-phone texting and social networking sites, both of which now consume ever greater amounts of attention—and how many hours in the day does a person have anyway? And quite likely most important of all, technical or detailed lecture content that demands focus and concentration is just not the same as music when it comes to listening and doing something else. You can miss a few bars here or there in a tune and still catch the vibes. Miss a few phrases or sentences in a lecture on some complicated concept and you may pretty well be lost for all that follows.

What’s the point? The point for faculty interested in moving ahead with technology is that you need to choose your shots wisely. Don’t invest your precious time and energy based on assumptions about a technology that looks like it simply can’t miss. Get some help on your forays into teaching technologies from course designers who can help you benefit from what’s out there to enhance your pedagogy and make your class-prep and in-class time—and your student’s out-of-class time—as productive as possible. If your institution has the foresight to provide access to course designers who can help you, make use of their expertise and assistance. They’re not there to tell you what to teach or how to teach but to help you channel your efforts into techniques that are optimally productive for your specific requirements. And they might even show you some things that you didn’t even know existed!

To be honest Dr. Gardner, we felt your 2005 scenario rocked! But it’s 2010 and the world seems to be marching to the beat of a different drum.

I like watching certain TV programs with the captions on, which strikes non-family members as odd. After all, I’m not hard of hearing, I don’t have an auditory processing disorder, and English is my native language. But I did grow up in an immigrant household where my parents relied on captions to understand what was going on while they watched TV. I didn’t need captions the way my parents did, but they added to my enjoyment of television shows by turning them into animated books. I loved to see the words on the screen; to me, they offered a typographic translation of the sound. My relationship with television evolved into something not only visual and auditory, but also textual. It turns out that I’m not alone in this among so-called “normal” people.

There is a broad misconception that only the deaf and hearing-impaired benefit from captions. But in fact, there are many others who may not be as obvious. A surprising BBC study found that over 80% of television viewers turned on the captions. It’s doubtful that 80% of the television-watching population in Britain is hearing impaired, so who are these people? Some of them are students for whom English is a second language, and some are people with auditory processing disorders. Others are viewers who have trouble hearing over background noise and use captions to fill in what the ear misses. And for children, studies have found that captions help with learning to read because they tie together the spoken and printed word, each symbol system reinforcing the other. And then there are probably others like me, who just like the extra dimension that captions give.While captions enable learning for the hearing impaired, they can also enrich the experience for many others.

Despite the fact that captioned video is clearly recognized as a valuable way to help ESL learners, the learning disabled, and the deaf and hard-of-of-hearing, captioned online video is still difficult to find. By online video, I mean the video you might find on YouTube or on sites like NBC (newly captioned!), CBS (inconsistently captioned), MIT’s Open Courseware (no captions), or John McCain’s website (no captions either). Though YouTube has made advances in this area, thousands of clips are added each day to this massive video-sharing site, and kind-hearted captioners just can’t keep up with the content. So the many YouTube clips like lectures, video tutorials, and student-created content that are integrated in courses wind up excluding entire groups of students. And change isn’t happening any time soon. Since online videos, unlike broadcast TV, are not required by law to have captions, there is no tremendous groundswell for change.

What’s the excuse? Captioning tools exist, right? There’s DotSub, Veotag, TubeCaption. But regular people typically don’t have the time or resources to caption that “Third Video Remix of Lazy Sunday”. And some of the do-it-yourself tools for captioning videos can produce some really poor quality captions which detract from any learning experience. Captions that can’t be turned off or are barely legible are a visual nightmare. Outsourcing is the most logical solution, but if colleges do have the funds to pay someone to outsource, they certainly don’t put that random student-created video at the top of the captioning heap. But there is a new service that sounds as if it could make a difference—an organization called Project readOn. This group has partnered with the Obama campaign and has captioned every single video on his website (can’t we follow this lead?). Project readOn will caption any web-based video for you at no cost. You can send in your request and it will be placed in a queue. The length of time your video will be in the queue is unknown. I’ve had some videos in the queue for over three months now. But when captions are added, they appear in a pop-player above the original video. This service is still in the development stages, so the interface is not perfect and the website itself is a navigational nightmare. But I am not going to pick it part excessively because I’m just happy to see an organization that is providing this service for free. What a boon to a huge population of people whose lives are enhanced by being able to see the spoken word. I just hope they get back to me with my captions soon…

I gave a presentation at the New Media Consortium conference back in June on a slew of web 2.0 video and slideshow tools I’ve been testing. The idea for the presentation began nearly a year ago when I was frustrated with the growing divide between the amount of foreign-language media available on the web and the number of teachers taking advantage of it. Initially, I thought the presentation would focus largely on JumpCut.com, a site that offers a fairly robust, web-based video editor. Users can upload video, audio, and images to their JumpCut accounts, then use the editor to create short movies.

One of the features that excited me about JumpCut was its ability to let users remix each other’s work. After watching any movie produced on JumpCut.com, users can click a remix button, which launches the video-editor interface and populates it with all of the video footage used in the movie. I thought this feature had great potential, and dreamed of assignments in which students would take a pool of raw footage, add their own material, do a little creative editing, and create spectacular mini-movies.

Unfortunately, I learned very quickly that there were several flaws in my plan. First, JumpCut doesn’t allow users to share audio, making it difficult to provide students with any sort of communal pool of voiceovers, sound effects, background music, etc. In addition, obtaining raw footage for students to manipulate was time consuming. I was able to download some great public domain video from the Internet Archive’s moving images database, but breaking these clips up into manageable chunks for use in JumpCut wasn’t easy. As an alternative, I experimented with capturing scenes from the game The Sims 2. The Sims proved an excellent visual resource for domestic drama and for reinforcing basic household vocabulary. As a result, I was able to work with Claudia Fernandez, a Spanish professor at DePaul, to create a sort of “video dictionary.” The goal of the project was to demonstrate everyday actions to help students master simple phrases in the past, present, and future tense.

As I started to push the limits of what could be captured in The Sims, I began exploring a variety of other tools that I thought might help faculty spice up their lectures and assignments with multimedia. I started my search in the hopes of finding a tool similar to JumpCut, but with the added ability to import video directly from YouTube and other video sharing sites. (Omnisio was the closest thing I could find, but it paled in comparison to JumpCut as a video-editing tool.)

My search quickly expanded beyond online video editing, and I found myself fiddling with subtitling tools like Overstream, slideshow presentation and annotation tools like VoiceThread, and multimedia-enhanced timeline generators like CircaVie. I quickly realized that I was going well beyond the original intent of my presentation, which was supposed to be a hands-on demonstration of JumpCut’s features. I decided to expand the focus of the presentation (even though it was too late to change the description in the conference agenda) and I offered attendees a comparison of nearly all the video and slideshow tools I had tried.

In the end, this approach seemed to go over very well with the audience. Several people thanked me for taking the time to do more than just recommend a long list of trendy tools I had never tried. I also got a lot of positive feedback on my example uses of the video editing and slideshow tools. Hopefully, by sharing them here, more people can benefit from what I’ve learned. Feel free to email me at dstanfo2@depaul.edu with any questions about the tools or my experience using them.

I am truly at a loss as to why we are still arguing about this, but we somehow still are! (See “Retailers Giving Vinyl Records Another Spin.”) Here is the quick answer: digital-audio techniques and media can capture and reproduce sonic events far more faithfully than any analogue technique and medium. Note that the focus of the above statement is fidelity not preference, a distinction that most “LPs versus CDs” debates wrongly blur.

Old news

More than twenty years have gone by since the first time CD sales surpassed those of LPs, and several highly qualified acousticians and engineers have since weighed in on the LPs-versus-CDs topic, outlining in numerous books, scholarly journal articles, and presentations the mathematical, acoustical, signal-processing, and perceptual issues involved. (See the relevant, well-written article on Wikipedia for a partial bibliography. See, also, an intelligent talk on the topic by Princeton University’s Paul Lansky.) Some of these experts have also sent relevant letters to the popular press or have published blogs and other online resources. (See this post by analog-integrated-circuit designer Mike Demler.)

Still, self-proclaimed “experts” and die-hard lovers of popular myths, who seem to approach knowledge almost exclusively through what C. S. Peirce, in the 19th century, called “the method of tenacity” (holding on to one’s already established beliefs at all cost), insist on keeping the analogue-versus-digital-sound debate alive. See, for example, this thread on Audiokarma.org’s discussion forum, which includes a typical example of the types of arguments used by LP advocates: “I know vinyl is better because… it just is” (emphasis in the original!).

I will not waste any time here repeating in detail the arguments for the superior audio fidelity of CDs versus LPs. Interested readers can find more information through a relevant Google search, assuming they know how to weed through the returned results and evaluate Internet resources. (e.g. Does the author identify him/herself? What are his/her credentials? Are the arguments supported by references to credible, peer-reviewed sources? Are the sources of information properly cited? etc.)

I will simply outline the inherent and unsurpassable limitations of analog media, such as vinyl LPs, and highlight an important distinction between fidelity and preference that seems to be overlooked in digital-versus-analog debates.

Limitations of LPs

The mechanical nature of sound-signal capture and reproduction in LPs and the associated issues of inertia, momentum, and interference impose frequency and dynamic response limits (i.e. limits in both the range and fineness by which a signal’s frequency and amplitude content can be captured and reproduced without interfering with adjacent signals) that constitute an unavoidable fidelity bottleneck within the medium. CDs completely bypass these issues thanks to optical methods of sound-signal capture and reproduction, assuming appropriate digitization (sampling-rate and bit-depth choice), storage (CD-surface and surface-coating choice), and handling (CD-surface protection during use to minimize the need for digital error correction).

Fidelity versus preference

Advocates of LPs and other analog sound media often cite the analog sound’s greater “warmth,” “smoothness,” and “fullness” as the main reasons for choosing analog over digital. Interestingly, these subjective sound-quality characteristics are related to acoustic side effects imposed on live, sonic events by the analog media themselves. Preference for such sonic qualities may be based on familiarity and habit (having grown up listening to music exclusively through analogue media, showing a conditioned preference towards the “familiar”) or may constitute a conscious aesthetic choice (intentionally altering a sonic event, through the sound-quality distortions introduced by analog media, to achieve a given aesthetic result). Regardless of the reasons behind some listeners’ preference for the sound-quality distortions introduced by analog media, the fact is that the sound quality carried by such media is exactly that: distorted. Preference for analog over digital and the other way around occupies an inherently subjective, gray area, and discussions on it can and will continue. However, when it comes to sound fidelity (how accurately an acoustic vibration is represented by a sound signal) it’s just black and white, with digital coming out the clear and undisputable winner.