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You know you’ve been around this game a grey haired time if you remember that podcasting had something to do with this thing called RSS. I found shreds of workshops I did back at Maricopa in 2006 “Podcasting, Schmodcasting…. What’s All the Hype?” and smiled I was using this web audio tool called Odeo who’s founder went on to lay a few technical bird droppings.
I digress.
This post is about a radical change in my technical tool kit, relearning what I was pretty damned comfortable doing, and to a medium degree, appreciating for a refreshing change, something that Artificial Intelligence probably has a hand in. Not magically transforming, but helping.
I’ve had this post in my brain draft for a while, but there is a timely nature, since this coming Friday I am hosting for OE Global a new series I have been getting off the grind, OEG Live, which is a live streamed, unstructured, open conversation about open education and some tech stuff… really the format is gather some interesting people and just let them talk together. Live.
This week’s show came as a spin off from a conversation in our OEG Connect community starting with a request for ideas about creating Audiobook versions of OER content but went down a path that including interesting ideas about how new AI tools might make this more easy to produce. Hence our show live streamed to YouTube Friday, June 2 is OEG Live: Audiobook Versions of OER Textbooks (and AI Implications).
I wanted to jot down some things I have been using and experimenting with for audio production, where AI likely has a place, but is by no means the entire enchilada. So this tale is more about changing out some old tech ways for new ones.
Early on I remember using apps like WireTap pro to snag system audio recorded in Skype calls and a funky little portable iRiver audio recorder for in person sessions. My main audio editing tool of choice was Audacity, and still something I recommend for its features and open source heritage. I not only created a ton of resources for it in the days of teaching DS106 Audio, I used it for pretty much all my media project I did over the last maybe 17, 18 years. Heck Audacity comes up 105 times in my blog (this post will make it hit the magic number, right?)/
Audacity is what I used for the first two years of editing the OEG Voices podcast. Working in waveforms was pretty much second nature, and I was pretty good at brining in audio recorded in Zoom or Zencastr (where you can separate speaker audio seperate tracks), layer in the multivoice intros and Free Music Archive music tracks.
This was the editing space:
After editing, to generate a transcript i used various tools like Otter.ai and Rev.ai to generate transcripts, and cleaning up required another listening pass. This was time consuming, and for a number of episodes we paid for human transcriptions (~$70/episode), which still needed some cleanup.
Via a Tweet? a Mastodon Post from Paul Privateer I found an interesting tool from Modal Labs offering free transcription using OpenAI Whisper tech. Just by entering “OEG Voices” it bounced back with links for all the episodes. With a click for any episode, and some time for processing, it returned a not bad transcript, that would take some text editing to use, but it gives a taste, that, AI has a useful space for transcribing audio.
Gardner Campbell tuned my into MacWhisper for a nifty means to use that same AI ______ (tool? machine? gizmo? magic blackbox) for audio transcription. You can get a good taste with the free version, the bump for the advanced features might be worth it. There is also Writeout which does transcription via a web interface and translation (“even Klingon”). And likely a kazillion more services, sprouting every day with a free demo and a link to pay for more. Plus other tools for improving audio- my pal Alex Emkerli has been nudging the new Adobe tools.
There is not enough time in a day to try them all, so I rely on trusted recommendations and lucky hunches,
Descript was a ,luck hunch that panned out.
Just by accident, as it seems to do, something I see in passing, in this case boosted by someone in the fediverse, I saw a post that triggered my web spidey sense
I gave Descript a try starting with the first 2023 OEG Podcast with Robert Schuwer. It’s taken some time to hone, but It. Has. Been. A.Game. Changer.
This is a new approach entirely for my audio editing. I upload my speaker audio tracks (no preprocessing needed to convert say .m4a to .wav nor jumping to the Levelator to even out levels), it chugs a few minutes to transcribe. I can apply a “Studio Sound” effect that cleans sound.
But it’s the editing that is different. Transcribing the audio means most (but not all) editing is done via text- removing words, moving sound around is done via looking at text. The audio is tied to the text.
I can move to any point via text or the waveform. It does something where it manages the separate audio tracks as one, so if I delete a word, or nudging something in the timeline (say to increase or decrease the gap above), it modifies all tracks. But if I have a blip in on track, I can jump into the multitrack editor and replace it with a silence gap.
But because I am working with both the transcript and the audio, but I am done editing, both are final. I’m not showing everything, like inserting music, doing fades, invoking ducking. And it took maybe 4 or 5 episodes of fumbling to train myself, but Descript has totally changed my podcast ways (Don’t worry Audacity lovers, I still use it for other edits).
You can get a decent sense of Descript with their free plan, but with the volume of episodes, we went with the $30/month Pro plan for up to 30 transcription hours per month (a multitrack episode of say 4 voices for 50 minutes, incurs 200 minutes of that). That’s much less than paying for decent human transcription (sorry humans, AI just took your grunt work)
And i am maybe at about the 20% level of understanding all Descript does, but that’s enough to keep my pod.
But it’s not just drop something in a magic AI box and out pops a podcast, this is still me, Alan, doing the editing.
Yet, if you like Magic stuff, read on.
Editing podcasts us work enough, but all that work writing up show notes, summaries, creating social media posts, maybe there is some kind of magic.
Well, a coffee meetup in Saskatoon with JR Dingwall dropped me intro Castmagic – “Podcast show notes & content in a click, Upload your MP3, download all your post production content.”
That’s right, just give AI your audio, and let the magic churn.
I gave it a spin for a recent podcast episode of OEG Voices, number 56 with Giovanni Zimotti (- a really interesting Open Educator at University of Iowa, you should check it out. It generates potential titles (none I liked), keywords, highlights, key points, even the text for social media posts (see all it regurgitated).
On one hand, what it achieves and produces is impressive. Woah, is AI taking away my podcast production? Like most things AI, if you stand back from the screen and squint, it looks legit. But up close, I find it missing key elements, and wrongly emphasizing what I know are not the major points. I was there in the conversation.
I’d give it an 7 for effort but I am not ready to drop all I do for some magic AI beans.
I’m not a Debbie Downer in AI, just skeptical. I am more excited here about a tool, Descript, that has really transformed my creation process. It’s not because of AI and frankly I have no idea what AI is really doing in any of these improbable machines, but maybe aided by AI.
This stuff is changing all the time. And likely you out there, random or regular reader, is doing something interesting with AI and audio, so let me know! My human brain seeks more random potential nuerons to connect. And please drop in for our OEG Live show Friday to hash more out for OER, audio, and AI swirling together.
Meanwhile, I have some more Descript-ing to do. You?
I got downsed!
Alan: The new OLDaily’s here! The new OLDaily’’s here!
with apologies to a scene from The Jerk
Felix: Well I wish I could get so excited about nothing.
Alan: Nothing? Are you kidding?! Post 7275, CogDogBlog.! I’m somebody now! Millions of people look at this site every day! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity, you’re name on the web, that makes people. I’m on the web! Things are going to start happening to me now.
I also got Jon Udell interested too…
And from Jon’s post I discovered more exciting features:
Featured Image: Mine! No Silly MidjournalStableConfusingDally stuff.
Toss together equal portions of luck, fortunate, serendipity, and a sorely needed dose of genuine humanity all went into the mix of the most current episode I am just blessed to click buttons for the OEG Voices Podcast I have been doing for Open Education Global.
This was easily more than just a podcast, this was a moment of sheer positivity that seems more rare these days. I don’t think most of my colleagues truly grasped how powerful a thing we had made possible, simply by offering an invitation to talk, without script or structure.
I’ve already alluded to this episode in my rush of excitement to be part of a series of live, unstructured events for Open Education Week. On the middle day of the week, that just so happened to be International Women’s Day, we had coordinated a conversation with Tetiana Kolesnykova, Director of the Scientific Library at the Ukrainian State University of Science and Technologies, made possible by librarians Paola Corti and Mira Buist-Zhuk (I remain in awe of Mira for her super heroic translation skills to go back and forth between me in English and in Ukrainian for Tetiana).
I had suggested setting this up maybe 2 weeks prior in an email to Paolo who had invited Tetiana who had said she would be there “if she had sufficient electricity.”
Let that one sink in.
Now I am tempted to describe it all over again, but it’s more or less been blogged already by me, and you get as well the full audio of course, transcripts in English and Ukrainian, but mostly, take the time to listen to Tetiana tell how she and her colleagues managed to keep their university mission alive through a war time invasion– just a year ago.
Just to summarize, just three weeks after bombs fell on Dnipro, Tetiana and her colleagues put into operation a crisis plan developed during the pandemic, organized how to provide all kinds of support, including course, library, and research, and she and her staff were at their library just 3 weeks later carrying out this heroic effort.
And it was not like Open Education had to swoop in to offer the OER goodies as a new offering of benevolence; Tetiana and the Scientific library had been practicing, facilitating open access publishing, OER awareness since 2009.
I could not be more honored to just have this time, and in fact, after an hour when I offered and out, Tetiana wanted to keep talking.
After I had published the episode, I drafted an email of thanks to Tetiana, relying on Google Translate to try and turn my words into Ukrainian. She replied (in turn I think by translation):
Hello, dear Alan!
You made me and my family extremely happy people late last night!In my previous life (before the war), I would never have thought that I would be a part of such a wonderful international project. In addition, you created a very cozy and friendly atmosphere in which I, as a guest, felt very comfortable.
At the beginning of the meeting, I was very nervous because: firstly, I didn’t have such experience in recording; secondly, I didn’t have time to prepare; and thirdly, I didn’t know what questions you would ask me.
But your kindness and sincere support, the enormous help of Paola and Mira, as well as the pleasant faces of Marcela and the other participants in your online studio, removed all barriers.Thank you very much, Alan!
You, along with Paola and Mira, gave me wonderful emotions!Alan, my colleagues and I (librarians, teachers, researchers) are also very interested in creating opportunities for collaboration. I would be happy to bring your suggestions to them. I look forward to it.
Thank you very, very much to you, your friends in the studio, your family and everyone who supports Ukrainians in this terrible war.
email from Tetiana Kolesnykova
Your help is invaluable.
I remain firmly convinced that open education is often too focused on the stuff- the resources, licenses, courses, platforms, when really, the most important factors are just being able to have human conversations and connections like these.
Just sit down and say ??????.
Featured Image: My own combination (no artificial intelligence even allowed) of a screenshot of the Ukrainian State University of Science and Technologies web site, a screenshot of the zoom session where we recorded the podcast, and 2011/365/63 On The Air flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
How often do we get to participate in small group open discussions of our practices? I am not talking about blipping in social media. Last, I chose to to be organize/be in 18 of them, and energized more energetic than any zoom webinar.
That week was full on for my organization, Open Education Global with the annual celebration of and awareness raising for Open Education Week.
As it has been done every year since like 2014, OEWeek promotes institutions, organizations, inspired individuals, to plan events/activities during the first year of March that are organized into a single calendar (255 total this year). The goal is to make visible a world wide attention to open education through events and it also collects assets (aka resources, 173 of them this year) to it’s library.
So it’s a completely distributed event. There is always of course too many things to take in, but that’s okay. I’ve tried a few things to encourage people to share back what they experienced in our OEG Connect community, even offering open badges for sharing.
In thinking of some ideas for generating more excitement, connection between events, I naturally fell back to previous experiences, and as often it goes, I draw upon my DS106 experience.
What comes back again and again, is the voice of Jim Groom in that very first year of the open DS106 course and likely around the concept of DS106 radio, or maybe it was just the exuberant days of early twitter as a fresh concept- what Jim described as trying to create a sense of “eventness.” This is when there is a hub of excited energy, be it a group of people in a conference hall lobby, or a hashtag on twitter, that emanates outward, that there was something exciting going on. That others would notice it and say to themselves,”I want to be part of that.”
To me, I find it energizing to do unscripted live broadcasts, be it for DS106 but also later doing it for Virtually Connecting.
So I came up with a crazy idea- to do twice a day live webcasts during Open Education Week. Partly to give updates and highlight what was happening, but more so, to ask people to enter a virtual studio and be more or less like a live radio show. On the web.
My colleagues were very supportive of the idea (as they seem to be for a long list of previous ones) though I sense they did not understand the concept. Likely I had it more in my head than I could put into meeting notes.
So I just did it, I created a web-based show– OEWeek Live! Without writing out all the details few care to read, I plotted a schedule, created a google signup form, sent out requests, and responded with calendar invites. The production was done using Streamyard which provides a studio space for participants; viewers watch on YouTube, but can send comments/questions to the studio, which can be put on screen. The livestream URL becomes the recorded archive, automatically. I really like what you can do during a live stream to switch layouts, put other messages on screen, and anyone in the studio can screen share.
It’s rather refreshing in feel and form than the dreaded wall of zoom bricks.
Okay, enough, blather, on to the conversations.
The full slate was posted in our OEG Connect Community space (a big bonus of Discourse is that event times can can beentered to display in the viewer’s local time). A quick recap (is quick possible with me?)
But the real joy was so many open, in all ways, conversations that happened in the sessions. After people shared projects/activities, we ended up getting into conversations that crossed between what might seem as separate focuses. We got to topics like finding the joy in learning, the ever present hanging cloud of unknown about AI, and also wha emerged maybe Thursday from a tweeted question, a fantastic round of sharing of what gives people hope.
Even as I write this, I am falling short of really describing what these were like. Perhaps you can get a sense from the recordings, all available linked from the main event list, but also as a playlist.
But wait there were more open conversations!
Another element I have added to Open Education Week is doing two recording sessions during the week for the OEG Voices podcast. The open part is extending invitations to any interested in sitting in to listen or participate, keeping seats open for 8-10 extras in the zoom studio. In many ways it’s not much different from the way these podcasts are run year round, but I feel like the idea of having more people present maybe changes the atmosphere?
I aim for all of the OEG Voices podcasts to be conversational, but the topics do revolve of course around the work and interests of guests.
This year included two beyond outstanding sessions:
I honestly have been eager to meet/talk to Delmar Larsen, the dynamo behind LibreTexts for a long time. His human character comes through on cross twitter/OEG Connect exchanges, and even more in this conversation. The excuse was that LibreTexts won 2 OE Awards for Excellence, but what a joy to learn more about Delmar, the origin story of LibreTexts, how he manages to run a company while at the same time teaching as a full professor of Chemistry, and his humble plans of “world domination.”
I did not think it was possible to top that session, but one that we were able to arrange for Wednesday, that in full synchronicity coincided with International Women’s Day, was maybe the most inspiring conversation I have been lucky to be part of:
I was also eagerly waiting to record a podcast about the OE Award for Excellence in Open Resilience that recognized Tetiana Kolesnykova, Director of the Scientific Library at the Ukrainian State University of Science and Technologies for the efforts made just a year ago using open education resources and practices to support education under the war conditions of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine.
My idea to do this emerged maybe twos prior to Open Education week when I reached out to Paola Corti, the SPARC librarian who helped coordinate a stunning collaboration. The phrase “long shot” was in my subject line. Paola responded almost immediately. She volunteered to organize not only the participation of her European Network of Open Education Librarians (ENOEL) colleague Mira Buist-Zhuk, but also to arrange to have Tetiana herself in the conversation “if she has sufficient electricity.”
Read that line again? Look up resilience in my dictionary, and it links to Tetiana.
“Amazing” would be a major understatement for this open conversation, especially heroic was Mira’s deftness and translating between English and Ukrainian.
I apologize that you will have to wait for my slow podcast editing to bring you this recording, buti short,know first that Tetiana and her colleagues have been supporting and promoting Open Education at the Ukrainian State University of Science and Technologies since 2009. But beyond that, after the bombing started in Dnipro in February 24, 2022, from their basements and bomb shelters, this University implemented the crisis plan already in place. And while courses were disrupted and students dispersed to safety, Tetiana was back in the library supporting educators just 3 weeks later.
This conversation was __________________ (fill in any synonym for amazing and then emphasize it much more).
Stay tuned to voices.oeglobal.org for both of these episodes.
As synchronicity happens, my long time friend and colleague Todd Conaway invited me to participate in another open conversation session that he runs to support faculty as part of the University of Washington-Bothell’s Teaching & Learning on the Open Web— specifically sessions called Epiphanies where he invite in– oh let him explain it:
At the start of the 2021/2022 school year our learning community decided to invite monthly guest speakers to share “epiphanies” they had experienced in the field of teaching and learning. It turns out that the epiphanies they had helped us have our own.
From December through May, we spend an hour each month with some really remarkable educators. We used a Google dic to write some reflections on the topics discussed and then posed them here on the website. The writings are filled with resources and examples that others can see and share. That is of course the ethos of our learning community. To be open in our work and to share our ideas. Is there anything more useful?
https://uwbopenweb.com/epiphanies/
Todd invited me and more importantly two of my former colleagues from Maricopa Community Colleges, Alisa Cooper (still innovating in teaching at Glendale Community College) and Shelley Rodrigo, currently the University of Arizona. The ask was to share with Todd’s colleagues the story of Shelley’s creation while we all were at Maricopa of the “CyberSalon.”
This happened in a time after the end of a key system wide effort at Maricopa to coordinate faculty and technology staff to brainstorm and collaborate on educational technology (the thing once called Ocotillo, hey look and seem Martin Weller, an old metaphor). Mmissing this means of convening and sharing, Shelley proposed to her network to go outside the system, and meet once a month in a local restaurant or bar that had wireless, and anyone interested would come with their laptops (this was the era pre-smart phones) and “geek out.”
It was one of these sessions that Todd, who worked at a different community college 2 hours north of us, showed up, and eventually became a life-long friend.
This (open, unstructured) conversation seems timely for what Todd has been trying to organize at UWB, as official support for what was a university learning community, has been removed. But they are looking to keep going, unofficially (I hope I am getting the story right).
As much as this (unrecorded) conversation was looking back, it really meant to get at what a participant driven/organized community could do simply by convening (maybe around food?)
Todd agreed in turn to appear on the OEWeek show the day before his session, where he shared this concept. I reminded Todd of his description of the Yavapai College 9x9x25 Writing Challenge (which was replicated in the other formulations, e.g. Write 6×6 active now at Glendale Community College)– as a response to observing that faculty have so few opportunities just to sit down and have open conversations about pedagogy. His concept was to aim for that through networked open reflections in blogs, with a formula geared to provide prompts for regular writing.
Again, it is refreshing to have unstructured open conversations. But the flame is on at University of Washington-Bothell.
But, wait there was one more conversational gathering last week… an impromptu serving of #educoffee.
Here was another version of unstructured gatherings for conversations spawned during the pandemic by another good friend and colleague, Ken Bauer, professor of computer science at Tec de Monterey in Guadalajara. He opened for a long time weekly drop in sessions for local colleagues and students plus distant ones to an open zoom room shared as #educoffee.
Hey, I just remembered that I asked Ken and participants to record a session in 2021 to be used as an OEG Voices podcast:
When Ken posted in Mastodon how busy he has been (his teaching load is unreal) and how much he misses community
I of course could not resist replying with my Google Translated Spanish suggesting an educoffee session. And he opened one up, on Friday of Open Education Week.
Often these are small groups, but what a joy to open to a screen of 9 others in the room! Here is a peek in featuring people from Mexico to Oklahoma to me in Saskatchewan to Windsor and even to the U.K.
Nothing more than an hour of coffee and conversation. How simple is that?
The answer is much more than 14. I am hopeful to continue more of these live “shows” at OEGlobal (my colleagues may be shaking their heads).
And it goes back to Jim’s idea of live energy and “eventness” mattering even more in 2023 with the added noise of social media (which looks like conversations, but it’s a poor substitute) and schedule saturation of structured video meetings.
This photo I used below was a very early live bit when Jim, myself, and Martha Burtis were attending an EDUCAUSE conference in Washington DC, and he went live on DS106 radio for a conversation in his open DS106 class.
Where does all this land for you? Is unstructured conversation time valuable? Or is it madness? I add up 14 and 2 and 2 and get a “hell yes”.
Featured Image: The “madness” of going live for Open Education Week!
FreshRSS 