Smelly Knowledge

From visual searches to verbal searches, (without intending to pull an Annie Hall) Marshall “The Medium Is The Message” McLuhan must be having a celestial party right now.

Podzinger is a search engine for podcasts. Rather than allowing you to just search for a podcast based on the title, description, tags, or categories (as podcasting portal sites such as Odeo, The Education Podcast Network, PodcastAlley, and iPodder do), Podzinger lets you search the transcript of the podcast itself. Built upon speech-to-text technology developed by BBN, a searchable transcript is automatically generated whenever one of the indexed podcast feeds is updated. The context surrounding your search term(s) is displayed in the search results, so you have the option of listening (and subscribing) to the podcast in its entirety, or clicking on one of the words to jump directly to it.

While I’m on the subject of audio technology tools, I’ve installed Talkr functionality to to this blog. Talkr reads the RSS feed of this blog and then using text-to-speech technology creates an mp3 file of individual posts being read using fairly high-quality synthetic speech. You can either subscribe to the Talkr feed or listen or download individual posts by visiting the original post entry (the link to listen to the article is at the bottom).

Just as I brought up the notion that certain individuals may favor images and visualizations to words, there is also research to support the idea that some (or many, depending on who you talk to) learners’ reading comprehension skills are facilitated by computer-based text-to-speech functionality (e.g., Text-to-speech software for helping struggling readers, Applying Principles of Universal Design to Test Delivery, and Jumping off the page. Since I mentioned Marshall McLuhan earlier, it should be noted that this research, and more or less Talkr podcasts (my own included), do not really delve into or exhibit the power of the spoken word as a medium in and of itself. Instead, the transformation of printed text into spoken text is considered and represented. I hope to tackle these ideas later.

Just as a point of reference, someone who does a great job of taking advantage of podcasting as a medium in its own right, is Bob Sprankle and his students of Wells, Maine (US). In a professional development institute I co-lead last summer, entitled Shaking Up The Classroom, I introduced podcasting to the group of teachers through a clip from the Summer Literature Circle 02 podcast (kids and parents discussing books together? During the summer?).

*****

N.B., I’m realizing that this post on Podzinger and Talkr, as well as my earlier post on Retrievr is helping to put a focus on my talk for November Learning’s Building Learning Communities 2006 conference this summer. I’m listed on the Main Conference Sessions page along with all very impressive people, including one of my professors from graduate school. Not that there’s any pressure or anything. But some of posts in the near future may take this tact. At BLC ‘06, I’ll be talking about using social software to help build inclusive learning communities.