Summary: Beyond iPoding

The following is the transcript of the November 2006 E-Learning Classes podcast for the Institute for Interactive Technology (IIT) Podcast Series. The IIT is a consortium of faculty, staff and graduate students in the Master of Science in Instructional Technology program at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania.

Heading List

• Pam Berman: Introduction
• Karl Kapp: Introduction
• Pam Berman: Introduction to the Podcast
• Beyond iPoding
• Use of Audio Files
• Summary

Pam Berman: Introduction

Institute for Interactive Technologies, Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, November 2006.

Karl Kapp: Introduction

Welcome to the Institute for Interactive Technologies instructional design podcast. These monthly podcasts will focus on the convergence of learning, technology and business.

Pam Berman: Introduction to the Podcast

This pod cast is an excerpt from Dr. Kapp's upcoming book Gadgets, Games and Gizmos for Learning: Tools for Transferring Know-How from the Boomers to the Gamers published by Pfeiffer. Look for it in April of 2007.

Beyond iPodding

As with any new technology, at first there is unbridled enthusiasm or irrational exuberance quickly followed by fear and loathing and then the technology settles down into an every day tool. One example is podcasting for learning. It was first thought of as great way to train but now some pundits are warning that "telling ain't training" and that podcasting isn't all that it is cracked up to be.

The answer is that podcasting needs to be thought of differently than just recorded training. Podcasting can be used for far more than just listening to a lecture. Podcasts are appropriate for a variety of purposes.

Use of Audio

Often a short audio narration provides the information and coaching needed to help an employee solve a problem or deal with a customer issue. The wide spread adoption of MP3 Players like Apple's iPod products has lead to an entire ecosystem of tools, accessories and content providers. You can literally subscribe to a podcast on any topic via iTunes or other subscription services. A podcast (for those few who may not know) is a web-based audio file distributed over the web. The file can be downloaded onto a handheld device that plays audio files. The most popular of which is Apple's iPod family.

The concept is just getting started and has room to move in exciting directions. One appealing concept in this area is the creation of of corporate Napster-type software for the exchange of audio files among experts and members of an organization.

Originally, Napster allowed for the free exchange of audio files among a virtually limitless group of internet users, now imagine a corporate Napster where you upload audio files of information about competitors, new product launches, corporate directions and other valuable information all easily searchable and downloadable by members of your organization. Once loaded onto a portable MP3 device, the information can be listened to anywhere at the exact the time of need. Creating files could be easily done with a handheld digital recorder.

Imagine a scenario where a pharmaceutical sales representative, waiting in a doctor's office, accesses a corporate audio server and downloads the necessary information and listens to the drug detail recording just prior to meeting with the doctor. Or imagine a doctor downloading an audio file of a patients' medical history. The doctor listens to the file while preparing for the patient to arrive or fast forwards through the audio file to learn key patient information.

A strong advantage of audio is that it provides the proper tone of voice, inflection and other information necessary to assist sales representatives, doctors or others. Audio can provide information with relatively little bandwidth requirements as opposed to video.

Drexel's University’s LeBow College of Business has 150 online students all over the world enrolled in its MBA program. LeBow College is using podcasting for both presenting class information and distribution of administrative information.

Students can view a slide presentation of an economics lesson along with the audio or download just the slides or just download just the audio. This gives the learners the flexibility of how they would prefer to receive the information. The podcasting allows the MBA students to learn at lunch, after work or when they are exercising. It provides an opportunity for them to multitask.

LeBow College officials like the podcasting of administrative information. It helps to ensure that the students get the right information and are able to navigate requirements, scheduling and other tasks critical to their successful completion of the program. At least every two weeks, the college issues a podcast explaining everything from course schedules, to scholarship rules and regulations to upcoming events.

The students can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes or listen to the information online via a Flash player interface. Erik Poole, associate director Online MBA Programs, explains. "The students are receiving the administrative information they need. They are responding to the podcasts and are incorporating both the administrative podcasts information and the lectures into their MBA experience here at Drexel."

Not only is sound important for lectures or giving administrative instruction, sometimes sound itself contains important information. An experienced production employee may be able to hear when a machine is running out of spec. They can hear the abnormal vibrations of the equipment or the sound the die makes when it is hitting the raw material. A newer employee hearing the same sound or change in sound may not know what it means or even be aware of a sound change. If the various sounds of the machinery can be recorded and placed onto an iPod or other MP3 player, a newer employee could learn, through repetition, the different sounds of the machinery and what each sound means.

A similar process is being used to teach young doctors how to distinguish between the different sounds of a heart. After hearing a recording of different heart sounds about 500 times, young doctors reliably discriminate between different sounds made by various heart problems. Before listening to the recordings, the young doctors only correctly identified 50% of the heart sounds; after the test they could identify 80% of the sounds correctly.

Nike, the athletic footwear, equipment and accessory company, has even created an iPod enabled shoe. The shoe has a built in sensor that "talks" to the runner through an iPod receiver. The runner can receive real-time audio feedback about his or her time, distance traveled, calories burned and pace. Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO states that "the result is like having a personal coach or training partner motivating you every step of your workout." It even has a feature that plays your favorite running tune when you are near the end of your workout—so download the Rolling Stone's Start Me Up or Survivor's Eye of the Tiger and run off those boomer pounds.

Another innovative use of an iPod or MP3 player is a game called iGAMEZ. Each player plugs their iPod into a hub and gets ready to "face the music". The hub selects the first DJ who, in turn, chooses a song from their library for everyone to hear. Then the players have to buzz in…and name the artist and song title. Could this be adaptive to the sounds of machinery or failing harddrives or any other sound that is important in a manufacturing or business process. What a great learning opportunity, in a class, a person listens to the sounds of a machine running and describes if it is in spec or out of spec.

Another application would be to listen to competitor's web sites or any web site for that matter. A company called Textic has a product called Talklets that actually allow you to download an entire web site or certain web pages as audio files. Imagine asking your assistant to download a competitor's web site and then you could listen to the information while driving or exercising or on a plane. It gives you the ability to shift-time to listen to something that you normally need to read. This can be a tremendous time saver.

Summary

So in summary...

Podcasting has the potential to provide audio-based instruction anywhere. A mechanic can play the sound of well tuned engine vs a not-so-well-tuned engine. A sales representative can listen for the proper enunciation of the name of a complicated medical procedure, a novice trial attorney can listen to the proper inflection of questions during a cross-examination by a seasoned attorney.

These are the types of applications we need to envision for iPods, not simply automating a lecture but using the ability to have sounds, any sounds in a simple, portable format that can be listened to anywhere. We need to think outside of the lecture and expand the use of this new tool instead of being stuck with our old paradigms.

Summary: Interview with Charles L. Chen, Creator of CLC-4-TTS and Fire Vox

The following is the transcript of the February 2006 interview with Charles L. Chen for the Institute for Interactive Technology (IIT) Podcast Series. The IIT is a consortium of faculty, staff and graduate students in the Master of Science in Instructional Technology program at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania.

Heading List

• Fire Vox Screen Reader
• Karl Kapp: Introduction
• Pam Berman: Introduction
• Charles L. Chen answers the question, "What is Fire Vox?"
• Pam: What about it's history? Why did you choose to create Fire Vox?
• Pam: How are things going with the project?
• Pam: What are some of the challenges you faced in doing this whole project?
• Pam: How is this helping you prepare to enter as a professional in your field?
• Pam: How important then is networking with other people?
• Pam: Yeah, it takes a team.
• Pam: Do you have any advice for students like yourself that might be going through a program; maybe in taking opportunities to work on projects or build networks of communities?

Fire Vox Screen Reader

HTML Title: IIT Podcast Series.

Body with 0 headings and 0 links.

Institute for Interactive Technologies, Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, February 2006. End of document.

Karl Kapp: Introduction

Welcome to the Institute for Interactive Technologies instructional design podcast. These monthly podcasts will focus on the convergence of learning, technology and business.

Pam Berman: Introduction

This month we talked with Charles L. Chen, creator of CLC-4-TTS and Fire Vox, a screen reader for Firefox.

Charles L. Chen answers the question, "What is Fire Vox?"

Fire Vox is an extension that transforms Firefox into a talking Web browser so it delivers the features that you would expect from a screen reader such as the types of features that you normally see in JAWS and Internet Explorer. The main difference is that Fire Vox is an open-source freeware project and it works on Firefox. So when I say typical features of screen readers, what I mean by that is that they give users more information than just reading the text directly. They might identify headings and links, and assist the user with some navigation tasks. So one feature that Fire Vox has that isn't typical is that it's cross platform. Fire Vox works on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. This gives users the same user experience regardless of which system they happen to be on. The best way to think about it is that it is an independent screen reader for Firefox.

Pam: What about it's history? Why did you choose to create Fire Vox?

Charles: It's actually a couple of things. It's a combination of wanting to try out and practice all the software engineering techniques and principals that I've learned and wanting to do something that would help people and, of course, there is that sense of adventure; trying to build something that's really interesting, really complex and there is just a little bit of arrogance there that says, "Yeah, I think I can do this really large, really complicated project."

A bit of background about myself; I'm someone who has always loved computers. I've worked as a free-lance computer technician throughout high school and I still do some of that work today. So when I got into college as a EE major at the University of Texas at Austin, I had to take some programming courses. I've never programmed before them but it fit like a glove. I felt that I really had a knack for it and I just got into software more. And this interest led me then to get a research job so I am now a research assistant working on software architecture research for Dr. Dewayne Perry at ESEL. ESEL is the Empirical Software Engineering Laboratory at UT. That's the first part.

The second part about wanting to help people; the thing that got me involved in with all this was a computer science course three semesters back, Software Engineering. This course is designed to give students a real software engineering experience by putting them into teams, giving them a client, and then they need to try to build software that meets the client's requirements. My team ended up doing a project for Dr. John Slatin. He's the director of the UT Accessibility Institute. He is blind and he uses JAWS extensively. At that time Firefox was gaining a lot of popularity, people were worried about Internet Explorer because of all the security holes and Microsoft wasn't fixing them so what he really wanted was for JAWS to work with Firefox. JAWS has this built in scripting system that is designed to let users write scripts and then those scripts should make it work with programs that it doesn't already support. We tried to use that system. We ran into a few major problems using it; a lot of it was documentation-related. Freedom Scientific, we contacted them and told them about the project we were working on and they said, "Sure, we'll help you with this project. You are working on something with our product; we will help you work on it." and they said they would give us a limited timed-version of JAWS, which meant that it would be fully-featured for six months and run as a full version because the trial version we were using would force us to shut down and restart every 40 minutes. If you didn't save your scripting work, you lost that so it was really painful.

Anyways, they promised they would help us but then they kept putting it off. When we asked them about it after several weeks of delays, they finally changed their minds and just said, "We don't have time. We are not going to help you." They never actually sent the limited timed-version, which meant every 40 minutes that we worked on a project, we had to restart our systems. This was very frustrating and, like I said, the documentation was somewhere between really poor and incomprehensible to just being plain wrong.

The worst error they had was, there was a statement that if you called this function, it would enable what they call the HTML cursor and it claimed it let users navigate HTML documents. What we found, actually, it wasn't an HTML cursor. It was an IE cursor that worked for Internet Explorer and this meant we didn't really have any control. All we could do was to just make it read everything on the screen in Firefox.

We still managed to complete the project to Dr. Slatin's satisfaction. He tried, liked it, but personally I didn't feel very satisfied with it because I really don't like hacking around this way and I knew there were other limitations. For example: you couldn't do form controls and, because we were dumping everything directly, if you had anything that was complex, with like CSS or tables, you would have to fully linearize it. If you linearize it, the page doesn't look anything like the way it used to before. It wasn't the ideal solution but it was the best solution we could do under the constraints.

In this project, I was the team leader and, as such, I did a little bit of everything and that really got me in touch with the problems that visually-impaired people face. I discovered that screen readers are quite expensive; JAWS professional edition runs over a thousand dollars. The other thing is screen readers are not cross-operating system compatible. If you are really used to using JAWS on Windows, you can't take those skills and use JAWS on a Mac or a Linux machine because JAWS does not exist on a Macintosh or Linux. I felt somebody really should step up and make an open and freely available screen reading tool that would work everywhere.

Mozilla seemed to be a really good platform for that because they have an open and freely available product like Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. and those work everywhere. And, I've also had experience with those extensions. I thought, "Why not?"

On the last point of this as being an adventure; I started this over the Christmas of 2004 and my thinking at that time was, "I wonder just how hard it is to make a screen reader? I bet I probably could figure out something." I fiddled around with Microsoft SAPI for a couple of days and with two weeks I had the bare bones framework.

My original intent, by the way, was not to make Fire Vox what it is today but rather just to make a framework that could then be used to develop screen readers and other accessibility tools for Mozilla products. What I did was created CLC-4-TTS, which is Core Library Components for Text-to-Speech. It was a set of library functions that can be used in any extension.

The first version of Fire Vox, just to show how not serious I was about it, I didn't even name it Fire Vox. I just called it the screen reading demo extension and it's entire purpose was to prove that CLC-4-TTS works as a library. It's kind of funny how things turn out sometimes; right now Fire Vox is far more popular and more talked about than the library that spawned it. This is another case of things not going exactly the direction you've planned although that's not always a bad thing. That's sums up the history.

Pam: How are things going with the project?

Charles: I would say things are going pretty well. Just late last night I managed to release an update. This makes it compatible with the newest version of Firefox which is 1.5.0.1. The new version of Firefox has a lot of security fixes and stability fixes so I urge everyone to upgrade to it. My update not only makes it compatible, it also fixes a huge Linux problem that I had earlier which caused it to not work with several Linux users.

The problem was the obvious, easy-to-use command to create a Java object, which works perfectly in Windows and Macintosh, doesn't really run on a lot of Linux systems. So the solution was then to use something that was unobvious and very complicated to do the exact same thing. The good news is that Windows and Macintosh are okay with doing that solution as well so this new release uses that system. It works everywhere and has a lot fewer problems on Linux than it did before.

The other thing this new release does is it does lay all the groundwork needed to build in speech property support in the near future. That's were you and I are going with that.

Pam: What are some of the challenges you faced in doing this whole project?

Charles: A better question might be, "What hasn't been a challenge?" (laughter) The answer to that is probably nothing. (more laughter)

About the challenges, there are too many to list but the main issues have been documentation problems. They are everywhere. There is either a lack of documentation and you waste hours trying to Google for a solution to it. Or, even worse, you get bad documentation that's just flat out wrong. The other thing is a Firefox-specific gripe. There is really strange cursor handling in Firefox.

Something else that is more of a problem with what I know in my domain is that I have to learn a lot about the Web standards. I'm not primarily a Web developer; that's not my primary domain so I'm actually picking up a lot of this stuff just as I go along. It's not like I have much previous experience with it.

Pam: How is this helping you prepare to enter as a professional in your field?

Charles: I think a better way to state it might be to say, "How does working on this project in a safe environment prepare one for work in a company as a software engineer?" Because as far as I'm concerned, this project is very much like working in this field as a professional with the upside, you have a very flexible schedule and you define your own goals, and the downside, you are not getting paid for doing any of this.

It really is very much like a real project as opposed to what would be considered a student project. Whenever I hear student project, what pops into my head is basically an over-glorified homework assignment where they are trying to teach basics of programming and they tell you, you have to implement a stack or create a string-handling routine or write a sort function.

The really cool thing about school ... okay, maybe it's not that cool ... if you are really smart, what you will do is you will write a one-line solution to your program and the way you will do it is you will use a library call. Yet for being really smart like that, you will get a zero for the assignment, at best, and, at worst, you will probably get into trouble for cheating. That's not real life at all because in a real programming situation, that's exactly what you have to do. You really need to work smarter and you really need to take advantage of libraries.

Fred Brooks is the person that wrote The Mythical Man-Month. It's a very famous software engineering book on classical software engineering problems written in the '70s. Most of those problems are still applicable today. As Fred Brooks put it, "Buy, not build." That means that rather than try to reinvent the wheel, you should just go and buy a wheel that someone else has made and use it. The open-source version of that is to Google for an open project, not build your own.

The other thing is, when you don't know how to do something, ask a student. What you do is you go to the TA's office hours and you beg for help and if it turns out it is not your fault and there is a problem with the original assignment, they will fix it for you and people will say, "Oh, good job!"

As a real programmer, there is no TA to go crying to. What you have to do is spend hours Googling, posting on message boards, going on to IRC, and so forth trying to ask for a solution whenever you get stuck. If you want to make any progress, you really have to find your own way around it and doing all this is really quite similar to doing a real job.

How does an actor get better? They rehearse. How do rock stars get better? They have jam sessions. How do programmers get better? Well, they have to write programs and practice. So really I think it's practice and it is really similar to a real job except I don't get any money out of it.

Pam: How important then is networking with other people?

Charles: Speaking of networking; this actually has put me in touch with quite a few interesting people; some people that I didn't think I would ever really get in touch with. I didn't think that they would really want to talk to someone like me; just this college student. For example: I've gotten emails from Dave Raggett. He's actually interested in text-to-speech in terms of multi-modal Web applications.

This has put me in touch with Willie Walker. Willie Walker is the lead behind Java-FREETTS. He was also the lead developer for the Sphinx project, which is a Java voice recognition program. He works at Sun and I think it is really cool to get in touch with people like this and be able to work with them and learn from them. It's a really good experience and, hey, it really helps to put all this stuff down on your résumé.

Pam: Yeah, it takes a team.

Charles: On that note, even though on this project it looks like it is a one-man job; even though it looks like I am the person doing it, I'm still getting a lot of help from outside. For example: you are helping me with the [speech style] examples. That gives me knowledge and information that I need that I don't have from any other source.

I frequently have to talk with Aaron Leventhal, the accessibility chief architect for Mozilla and ask him questions about why does this work this way in Firefox? It really is a very community-oriented thing and it is important that you have interactions and look for help when you can.

Pam: Do you have any advice for students like yourself that might be going through a program; maybe in taking opportunities to work on projects or build networks of communities?

Charles: First and foremost, I would say the most absolute important thing for anything, not just programming but for anything, is that you have to like what you are doing because if you don't you are never really going to be good at it and you certainly won't be happy doing it.

Now if you enjoy your work, then this next bit of advice basically is a natural response that you would probably have. I'm going to give it anyway. Don't be afraid to reach for the stars and what I mean by that is that you might have some crazy ideas about how to accomplish something; you might have this huge project you think might be great to try but then you might think, "Well this is kind of far out there. I'm not sure if I can do it." Sometimes these crazy ideas work out and you've find that you've managed to do something you couldn't have done otherwise.

Now I'm not saying that all crazy ideas always work. They are called crazy ideas precisely because they are crazy and they are expected to fail. Often times they meet those expectations. So for every success I've had, I have dozens of what some people might consider failures. The key to remember is that if you can attempt it safely, like you won't get fired if you fail, while sometimes it is a mistake to try it, it is always, always, always a mistake to not make the attempt.

The first of the podcasts produced by this class has been posted as a part of the Institute for Interactive Technologies podcast series. It is entitled "eLearners" and was produced by Ann Kieser, Kathy Kollar, and Julie Schmidt. More podcasts will be posted in the future.

Summary: Podcasting

Julie Meyer, one of our MSIT graduates, joined me to talk about podcasting today. We met in Centra and recorded the session. Afterwards, I recorded a separate session on how to use Audacity to put together a podcast. The links to the executable versions of the sessions as well as the PowerPoint file used are included here for your convenience.

Heading List

• Executable Files of Recorded Centra Sessions
• PowerPoint File Used in Podcast Session
• Additional Links

Executable Files of Recorded Centra Sessions

Two different sessions were recorded. The executable versions of the sessions are available here:

• .exe - Podcasting by Julie Meyer and Pam Berman
• .exe - How to Use Audacity by Pam Berman

The section on how to find the number of bytes for the "length" attribute of the "enclosure" element for RSS 2.0 did not show up in the "How to Use Audacity" recorded session. I've included the MP3 properties graphic for one of our podcasts here:

The value of "length" is equal to the number of bytes for the file, which is 15,413,464.

PowerPoint File Used in Podcast Session

The PowerPoint file used in the Podcast session is available in the following formats:

• Podcasting.ppt - 2003 PowerPoint version
• Podcasting_97-2003.ppt - 97-2003 PowerPoint version
• Podcasting_HTML.htm - HTML version of the PowerPoint slides

Additional Links

Julie has provided some additional links to resources at Penn State Great Valley:

• Penn State University's testing grounds for educational podcasts
• MP3 file of software engineering data-mining course overview
• MP3 file of Doctor Laplante's course overview

The podcast of my interview with Charles L. Chen is done. It hasn't been updated through the IIT Podcast Series yet but you can get the file at http://iit.bloomu.edu/pam/fire_vox_charles_chen.mp3

Charles talks about Fire Vox, the screen reading tool he created, as well as his experiences in working on the CLC-4-TTS and Fire Vox project.

It's about 16 minutes long.