The audio on this post was recorded and uploaded with the Workflow.app on my phone. The images were too. The posts was written in drafts and posted from there with a Workflow action.
Yesterday’s post was just about using workflow.app to post to a blog in a way that other tools can do. The method might suit some people’s needs better than using the WordPress app or the browser. It could be altered and improved too. But essentially it is just another way of doing something. I think this next step is a much bigger deal.
Workflow has actions that allow you to record audio or take video. It also has an encode media action.
This looked promising. I have now got a workflow that will record audio, encode to MP3 and upload to my blog.
I will end up with the link to the MP3 on the clipboard ready to paste into a post.
Getting the url to the MP3 took me a while to figure out. The action returns the url to the attachment page. I had to uses a few more actions to get the content of that page and then get the url to the MP3 with a regular expression. I don’t know much about regEx and less about the flavour used by Worpflow.app. I got there in the end.
A couple of OSs ago this seemed impossible on iOS. Now you can save an MP3 created with one of the myriad of audio apps to Dropbox, iCloud, one drive ect and upload through mobile safari.
I like to think this is a bit better. It is certainly a wee bit quicker if you do not need to edit the audio.
There were always apps that would record and publish audio to the Internet. What I like about this method is it goes along with the idea of owning your own data, posting to your own domain and having a little more control.
I am now wondering if it would be worthwhile seeing if you can trigger workflows from a draft.app custom script. This post on the drafts blog: Drafts 4.1.2 – Workflow Integration | Agile Tortoise makes it look as if that would be possible. This would turn the drafts app into a WordPress editor. One could upload images and audio directly from drafts, perhaps inserting the image or audio code at the insertion point.
I’ve had a lot interesting audio interactions this week.
A couple of weeks ago I mention Anchor and I’ve continued to play with that. Simon Thomson (@digisim) invited me to participate in a storytelling idea, folk just take turns to record the next short segment. It is only Simon and me at the moment but I am sure he would be happy to hear from others:
Back on the anchor beat I tried a few times to record a trafficjam anchor, I’ve not quite managed to make them loud enough yet or avoid running over but I did post this weeks review after I parked.
There are a lot of nice things about Anchor and it will be interesting to see where it goes. I think it is going to be one of those apps where you need pals on the same platform, at the moment the twitter search brings back very few folk for me. Hopefully this will grow, the anchor folk are intending to add an android app into the mix.
Looks like an interesting app for mobile audio. Ease of use and the ability to reply seem to be the features they are going for. Setup was largely audio, for instance you don’t type your name, you speak it.
Pasting the link to a piece of audio into WordPress here embeds it, via oEmbed I guess. I can’t see any sign of RSS yet. I’ve not found the documentation yet either. Seems to be iOS/iPhone only so far.
They do say:
Once published, conversations can be shared as podcasts, and heard all over the web.
Finally ios allows upload of files from more than the photo library. This is just the first mp3 I found in my Dropbox. It is a recording n Buchanian st. In Glasgow.
The more includes OneDrive for glow folk.
This opens up lost of possibilities for blogging and podcasting on the move.
If you going to the Scottish learning festival this year I would like to invite to contribute to EDUtalk.
EDUtalk is, among other things, an open to any contributions podcast. EDUtalk started at the Scottish learning Festival in 2009 when David Noble and myself invited any of the attendees to submit audio to a podcast SLFtalk (lost when posterous stopped). We were trying to provide alternate sources of information and reflections about the festival and make it as easy as possible for people to both contribute and listen to the contributions of others.
This year given the ubiquity of personal mobile devices is even easier to contribute to EDUtalk.
Here are three simple ways:
Audioboo an application for both iPhone and android, Audioboo allows you to record short segments of audio and upload then to the Audioboo site. If you tag the ‘boo’ #EDUtalk they will be brought in automatically to the EDUtalk site.
Just record some audio on anything a computer on smartphone whatever you got. Then you can email it to audio@edutalk.cc and we’ll take it from there. There are usually a few computers on the floor at a SLF that are connected to the Internet many of these will have built-in mics it should be pretty easy to record something there and email it to edutalk.
Another app you can use is a ipadio, this is an app like audioboo – available for android and iOS to record audio and sent to ipadio. Again if you tag it #edutalk we’ll pick up automatically and post it to edutalk.
So what do people talk about. You could talk about a session you been to. A keynote. You could talk to a colleague or friend.
You can have conversations with anyone about anything educational, at the coffee bar , in a quiet corner. it can be about whatever, educational, topic you like. Your thoughts we want them.
With the huge changes going on in Education this is a chance for us to join in the conversation, to talk across boundaries, of local authority, of hierarchy and think about what really matters today.
Tell a story using nothing but sound effects. There can be no verbal communication, only sound effects. Use at least five different sounds that you find online. The story can be no longer than 90 seconds.
When I was working out what to do with this one I seemed to have missed sound effects and no longer than 90 seconds.
This is an idealised walk combining sounds I’ve recorded over the last year or two when walking, some as audioboos.
Starting with traffic, there is bird song & rooks, footsteps through some wet ground, ducks, footsteps on a rocky path, a raven, a hill burn (small stream) finishing with the sound of one lark. It is mostly pretty quiet. it is also about 5 minutes long.
Five minutes of footsteps and tweets
This is as noted above a lot longer than the 90 seconds limit. While this particular example may not hold a listener for 5 minutes I do think that longer audio without speech has its place. Last year when I went to Field Recording at the Scottish Music Centre I noted:
what I’d take away was the quality of listening shown by the audience & presenters. The time taken. Timothy Cooper’s Blast beach gave plenty of time to look at the images: audio can be slower. I am thinking again about Ian Rawes’ “the ravenous eye and the patient ear”, Tim Nunn’s theatre performances in the dark.
One of the things I’ve really been enjoying about DS106 is riffing off the ideas of Alan Levine (CogDogBlog) like many edubloggers I’ve been following and being inspired by his blog for years. 50+ Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story is a standard teacher 2.0 text I’ve also, like many, used Feed2JS on several occasions. A while back I even tried to get a piratebox working after reading of the Storybox.
Anyway it is great to watch Alan teach his ds106 sub group and to follow his hyper activity on his blog. The other day, playing with the current #ds106 audio section he blogged: CogDogCodeAcademy: A Random Freesound Generator – CogDogBlog, this struck a cord as I recently posted #edtechcc Assignment 2 The Sight of Sound using the wonderful Freesound site. Revisiting it and looking at Alan’s code I notice that Freesound has an API. This looked interesting. I’ve now managed to create what I hope may be a ds106 Assignment flickrSounds.
flickrSounds
flickrSounds is a simple mashup that searches Freesounsd and flickr for the same word. It then display the sound and picture. You can reload either until you get an image and sound you like. This can be added to a list, and the exercise repeated. Once you have a set of picture/sounds you can grab an embed code to put hem on a blog. A set of pictures/sounds could create a story, illustrate a quote, saying or slogan.
Example
This is for searching for ds106 4 Life. I clicked through a few images and sounds for each word.
ds106 by electrovert Attribution-NonCommercial License
I’ve built in a Jim Groom busy widget into the webpage, the default search is dog, my example plays off the ds106 4life meme. Stephen Downes suggested in a comment that ds106 might be being over-branded I love ds106 but I think it’s being over-branded, this didn’t go down too well, but has inspired a lot of interesting stuff:, Martha Burtis’ The Cult of 4LIFE a graphic jokey one and I’m Still Chewing on that Over-Branding of DS106 Comment | mbransons and the comments on that post stand out for me.
It was an interesting idea, as someone just joining in I can see what Stephen Downes means. A lot of the DS106 rhetoric is fairly full on, there is a lot of self reference and pride/ego involved. I also could be put off by not sharing a culture with many of the other participants, being much older, having different frames of reference etc. Looking across the Atlantic it there is a very USA vibe. Lots of other folk with different backgrounds would have different reasons, I can see how DS106 could seem a bit hard to penetrate when looked in on. I thought a wee bit before joining in. but…
There are a couple of things that point the other way, DS106 is incredibly welcoming, the instructors are obviously giving a huge amount of time to the course and still have time to engage with the drive-by participants. They even made an effort to include my rather non standard blog RSS feed in the ds106 site. This seems to me to more than compensate for any exclusivity that ds106 might project.
The over-branding can be seen as glue, very important when you are trying to get participants to work together, and is more over more often than not obviously jokey, mocking the course and the organisers. #jimgroomart (eg: Blue Jump Suit #JimGroomArt #ds106:) is just an example, mock the teacher is one way to strengthen the connection, personalise the course, have fun and in weird way honour the amount of effort Jim makes to comment and make folk feel welcome in DS106.
I am also blown away 1 by the delight ds106 participants take in someone else grabbing what they have created and playing with it. The flickrSounds page is an example of this, without Alan’s positive reaction to my first tests I would not have carried on with this and had so much fun learnig a wee bit more JavaScript.
Code Thoughts
The root of this bit of fun was Alan’s post, in it he compares ds106 style learning with the new badges style learning:
Heck, I would rather do my own code challenges than someone else’s monkey see, monkey do. Thats the rub with this stuff, the motivation changes completely when it is something you need/want, versus someone else’s rote exercise for badges.
I commented to the effect that I found codeyear quite useful. I’ve been trying to keep up with the weekly JavaScript lessons there (just 3 weeks behind at the moment), as an afterthought I noted that Freesound have an API. This got me started on flickrSounds. In a way this proves Alan’s point, I’ve spent much much longer playing with this than I have in several weeks of codeyear. Partly because of the intrinsic interest of the task and partly due to Alan’s encouragement (blog comments and twitter).
But… I have messed about with javascript a few times now, but this is much neater code than usual (still horrible but relatively better). some of the improvements came from my experience of another CogDog/ds106 inspired piece Visualize That Quote but partly due to codeyear, where for the first time I’ve had the beginnings of an understanding of the basics of JavaScript.
There is a way to go with FlickrSounds, I need to add the ability to remove sound/pics from a ‘saved’ set and I need to test in IE, I’ve never manages to write any JavaScript that worked in IE first time.
Spirit of DS106
This has not been a ds106 assignment, I’ve not done any this week. I’ve only done one daily create, but I feel pretty much in the ds106 zone this weekend.
Footnotes:
1. blown away is the nearest I can get to the DS106 comment style. This is much less reserved that my usual nice ↩
For this assignment, combine audio effects into a soundscape to represent a place or an event. This assignment may not be suitable for all educational areas, so please feel free to create a soundscape for a scene from a favourite book or a poem, or come up with another idea.
Took me a while to figure out a text. Limited my searching to Freesound to save time. Downloaded a bunch of files and loaded them into audacity. Just sliced, changed the volume, and made some fades. This is a good fun assignment that I’d really like to try in a classroom. Would need plenty of time as I guess this is the best part of 3 hours play for me. A fair bit of this was being distracted on freesound.
Time Saving Attribution
The only tip I can offer is only tangentially linked to the task and mac only. To gather the links for attribution I open the links in a set of tabs in Safari and then run a wee AppleScript this puts a list of html links to each tab on my clipboard, paste into TextMate and wrap in li tags. (I use FastScripts for running applescripts).
While I don’t think the result is particularly creative or interesting I though the workflow was worth recording.
Easiest way to download the mp3s from AudioBoo was to switch to the RSS feed in safari and right click the MP3 link and choose save as.
Open One file in audacity.
Import other file with File -> Import ->Audio…
Fade out the first sound, as the second was so quiet in comparison I just left it in place. Deleted the section of the first track after the fade.
Bonus Image Merge
As Both AudioBoo, the source of the sounds and SoundCloud, where we were to publish the results, allow you to add a photo I thought it might be interesting to create an image fade to go with the audio.
Here is the recipe I used:
Open first AudioBoo page in Safari, view the larger image.
Drag image onto FireWorks on the dock.
Open second image and drag onto the first image in fireWorks
Drag a rect in fireworks over the second image.
Make it white and give it an opacity gradient.
Select the gradient Layer & the Image below.
Modify Menu->Mask -> Group as Mask
Adjust the opacity of the masked image so that the image below shines through.
The whole process was pretty quick which is quite important as I try to keep up with the daily create.
I though with the previous post I’d finished blogging for the year, but this is too good to keep.
This morning firing off the EDUtalk bot brought in a couple of new podcast episodes one from iPadio and one from AudioBoo.
I is always interesting seeing what comes in to an open invite and the flow of posts on EDUtalk comes and goes, some times a trickle and occasionally a flood, I didn’t expect much over the holiday period.
The two posts today are both interesting and exciting in themselves and as an indication of a couple of recent branches that have developed on EDUtalk.
MAT4ESL iDeaCast 04 by Scottlo this is Scottlo‘s second contribution to EDUtalk. The phlog has bee echoing round my brain all morning lots of exciting ideas for all sort of things. The Scottlo Radio Blog comes from Japan, Scott is a contributor to DS196 and involved in ds106 Radio which of course provided inspiration and instruction for Radio Edutalk. David and I have been starting to plan with Scott about possible collaboration between Radio EDUtalk and ds106 Radio.
As I blogged a couple of posts ago, I am going to try joining in with ds106 after the new year, it looks like leading to some very interesting places.
Both of these posts link nicely, in my mind, both linked deeply to ideas of hacking education both philosophically and practically. Hack To The Future has the same spirit as the mashup culture of ds106. I really hope we can get most of this in 2012.
I’ve deliberately not embedded the audio here but I hope lots of folk go to EDUtalk and have a listen.
