Listen to Any Good Books Lately?
Today’s post points to a variety of free online audio resources. These resources can provide valuable primary and supplemental tools for teaching and review as well as links to research materials for students.
LibriVox
LibriVox is the mother-of-all free audiobook resources on the ‘Net. Nearly 1000 titles are available, all searchable by title, author, category, and genre. Most of the classics are here as well as many modern and contemporary essays. Files are available in mp3 or ogg vorbis formats. Where available, links are provided to text versions (e.g., from Project Gutenberg) of the material. All recorded books are in the public domain in the US, and all are read by human readers. There is an RSS feed available to alert you when new materials are added, and you can even volunteer to be a reader.
Project Gutenberg Audio Books
Known mostly for its vast array of public domain print books, Project Gutenberg also offers many of its titles as audiobooks. Entries are read by human readers (or by synthesized voices; see below) and are available in many different audio formats, including mp3, m4b (iTunes/iPod), and ogg vorbis. Project Gutenberg no longer adds synthesized books to its library, preferring instead to use human readers, but they are migrating to an “on demand” service for delivering synthesized text to visually-impaired individuals. My favorite feature of PG is the full-text search capabilities, allowing the reader to search for occurrences of words or phrases within the texts themselves. Of course, PG also supports searching by author, title, etc.
Free Classic Audiobooks
This site offers a limited range of titles (around 60), but the offerings are compelling–from Huckleberry Finn to Alice in Wonderland to Shakespeare’s Sonnets to Notes from the Underground to the 911 Commission Report. Roughly half are read by humans; the remaining titles using an “advanced” synthesized speech that is quite understandable. All titles are available in mp3 format and in m4b format for iPod or iTunes. Books are segmented into chapters for easier downloading or downloading of specific chapters (great for review purposes). I love throwing these on my iPod for long car rides. They also make great review items for high school British and American literature classes.
LearnOutLoud.com
This web site is a portal to thousands of online books, lectures, podcasts, and videos on a wide variety of topics. Some are for purchase, but LearnOutLoud offers a directory of hundreds of free audio and video resources arranged by topic, including Arts, Literature, Science, and Language. (Scroll down the page to find the free directory.) Items in a topic can be sorted in several ways, including alphabetically, by author, or by title popularity.
I Hear Voices
Three very interesting web sites came my way in the last few days, all dealing with the spoken word. Each is a fascinating resource with lots of potential for teaching and research.
The goal of Historical Voices is “to create a significant, fully searchable online database of spoken word collections spanning the 20th century – the first large-scale repository of its kind. Historical Voices will both provide storage for these digital holdings and display public galleries that cover a variety of interests and topics.” The current galleries point to a wide variety of rich content, and the site features excellent Research and Education areas that include lesson plans, tips for creating aural resources, and example lessons. Historical Voices uses a Flash-based player for audio files stored on its own site, but you may find that you’ll need a variety of audio players (e.g., Real Player) for some of the off-site links.
Talking History takes a somewhat different approach to preserving and presenting aural history. Their mission–“to provide teachers, students, researchers and the general public with as broad and outstanding a collection of audio documentaries, speeches, debates, oral histories, conference sessions, commentaries, archival audio sources, and other aural history resources as is available anywhere”–is similar to that of Historical Voices (above). To implement their mission, Talking History produces a series of eponymous weekly radio/Internet broadcasts which are archived on the web site and are fully searchable. Other educational and production resources are available as well. Aural files are accessible through Real Player or may be listed to as mp3 files with QuickTime Player, iTunes, or virtually any media player.
Finally, there is the Speech Accent Archive. This site “uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed.” It provides a fascinating way to explore different accents. Speakers are categorized by biographical data (age, gender, birthplace, native language, age of English acquisition, etc.) and their speech is carefully transliterated into a native phonetic inventory which is thoroughly documented on the site. You can browse for speakers by language or region, and there is an excellent bibliography of language resources and links to related web sites. The audio files are in QuickTime (.mov) format.
The New Sputnik
I suspect many readers of this blog are not old enough to remember Sputnik (1957) and the massive changes that it brought to math and science education in our nation’s K-12 and post-secondary schools. But we are all beneficiaries of those changes. After Sputnik, the United States embarked on an extended emphasis on math and science that produced the technology that we use today, from computers to cell phones to GPS to the Internet. Sputnik was the wake-up call that jolted us out of our complacency and forced us to make some important changes to the way we educated our children.
In 50 Years Later, A New ‘Sputnik’ Crisis: The War of Minds, James Goodnight makes a very strong case for the need for a “new” Sputnik. The threat that concerns Goodnight–and most educators–isn’t as immediate or as obvious as Sputnik, but it’s potentially more pernicious. It’s the war for the minds of our children and the pressing need to use technology to reform education. Many countries that have invested significantly in education–China, India, Korea are cited–are producing more engineers and scientists than we are. Our students use a staggering array of technology, but very little of it gets used in school for learning activities. Where are the next technological innovations coming from–from a country of kids with iPods and cell phones or a country with advanced educational practices aided by technology?
And speaking of using technology in education, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative seems to be nearing fruition after three years of fits and starts. For those of you unfamiliar with OLPC, it’s an effort to design a rugged, self-powered wireless laptop that can be produced in massive quantities and used by poor children in developing and third world countries so that they can gain an educational advantage. David Pogue, technology reviewer for the New York Times, has an excellent review of the XO laptop in an article called Laptop With a Mission Widens Its Audience. The article includes a nice video that demonstrates the major features of the laptop, some of which are not available on any existing laptop. I love the networking features, for example.
Would you like to get your hands on one of the XO laptops? As it turns out, you can. OLPC is making the laptops available for purchase in the United States for two weeks only on November 12. For $399, you can buy one for yourself and donate one to a child in a developing country. You get a laptop, a tax deduction, and the ability to help a child in the third world. Pretty nice Christmas present…
TextCasting the Easy Way
EDIT: I decided to drop this blog’s connection with Odiogo a few months ago. While I was initially excited about the idea of having blogs spoken, there were some elements of the service that did not suit my purposes very well. First, the availability of the audio portion of the blog expires after a few months, so you can’t listen to archived posts online (although you could still listen to the mp3 file if you happened to have download it before it expired). Second, the preponderance of technical terms and brand names in my blog entries created pronunciation problems that I found distracting. Odiogo is a fine service that should work well for many purposes, but in my case it wasn’t what I expected.
Regular readers of this blog (both of you) may notice something different with this entry–the small “Listen Now” button at the beginning of each entry. It seems trivial, but it has opened up a huge landscape of possibilities for podcasting, student self-review, and serving visually-impaired or learning disabled readers.
A few weeks ago I became interested in text-to-audio possibilities through a colleague of mine who suggested that I take a look at BlueGrind, a web site that allows you to upload text and have it converted into a downloadable mp3 audio file. I signed up for an account, uploaded some text, and, after some rather non-intuitive clicking was able to download the mp3 file. The text, while clearly synthesized, was completely understandable and well-inflected. Although the site advertises easy conversion to podcasts, it was not immediately apparent how to do this so I went in search of other possibilities.
I found this article from profy.com that reviewed BlueGrind as well as Talkr and Odiogo, additional services that promised to turn my text-based blog into audio that could be accessed directly in the blog by clicking a button or by subscribing to the feed as a podcast. I played around with Talkr for a bit and then tried Odiogo. I ended up liking the ease of use of Odiogo as well as its multilingual possibilities. As a result, I submitted two of my blogs (this one, using WordPress) and Skip’s Tips, a Blogger site, for testing. A day or so later, the Odiogo folks had processed my blog and sent me directions for activating audio services. In the case of Blogger blogs, it’s quite easy–just click on a link, agree to allow Blogger to install the Odiogo widget, and you’re off and running. In the case of WordPress blogs it’s a bit more complicated, but the directions from Odiogo are clear and easy to follow. Once set up, readers can click the “Listen Now” button to hear the text spoken aloud (try it!), download the mp3 file, and even subscribe to the blog as a podcast.
The first thing that crossed my mind was that visually-impaired or learning disabled readers would have an easy way to access my blog. As I experimented more, some other equally intriguing possibilities occurred to me. One was the simplicity of listening to a blog while doing some other task that didn’t require complete concentration–reading e-mail, catching up on news, installing software, etc. Odiogo’s player has a convenient pause button if you need to focus on the task at hand and pick up your blog later.
The possibilities for teachers are endless. Students can listen to your blog entries for study or review or download and listen to them in iTunes or on their iPod (or any other mp3 player). Then there is the possibility for self-review. For this purpose, BlugGrind seems to work best. You can copy a block of text, paste it into a text window on the BlueGrind website and download it as an mp3 audio file. This strikes me as a great tool for rote memorization of text passages or plays, vocabulary review, etc. And again, visually impaired or learning disabled readers can upload a text file and have it returned as an mp3 file.
There is, of course, one major difference in audio files created this way as opposed to those recorded directly from speech–the speech in these files is synthesized from text. They will not have the richness of pronunciation or inflection that a native speaker might bring to a language study task or that an inspired orator might lend to a speech or lecture. But, I think you’ll agree that all of these sites produce clear, intelligible speech that has a myriad of uses for educators.
If you don’t, please let me know.
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