Audio Book Thoughts.

I've been thinking a lot about Liz's post a couple of weeks ago about listening to someone read, and whether it makes it better if the author is the one who is reading, since they would know best what the affect is supposed to be. It is certainly an interesting thought, though I think many people still would prefer to add their own affect anyway, since that is part of the enjoyment!

When I was in elementary and high school I read TONS of books. In the last 3 or so years I've started listening to a lot of audio books, due to the development of vision trouble. Since I grew up reading books and adding my own interpretations, and I'm not blind, I don't think that my experiences are very representative of how blind people typically feel about audio books, but I do appreciate the storytelling feel of having a narrator. The thing that trips *me* up is that sometimes several books that I want to listen to are narrated by the same person, who dutifully creates different voices for each character in a book, then then reuses some of those voices for other books! I've found myself stopping my iPod, and trying to figure out how I changed stories w/o knowing it, only to realize that I'm still in the right story, the narrator is just reusing a character voice that I've heard before.

It could be interesting to experiment with different people reading the same passage and see how listeners feel about the different voices. In most screen readers you can choose among several voices, and the same for GPS navigation systems. Sometimes people choose one voice over another because they have a hard time with a cerain range of tones, or they want to listen to something with an accent (do people who rely on screenreaders for information like the accents?). I recall reading a study about the selection of voices for GPS navigators...specifically that they favored male voices because women don't mind as much hearing directions from men (or male voices) and men DO mind hearing directions for women (or female voices). Though, in constrast, the only person I know who uses a GPS navigator regularly is a guy, and he prefers the female voice and has named her 'natalie'. Goes to show that a trend is a trend, but not representative of EVERYONE! I wonder what goes into our preferences for different voices?

My Notes from class April 7

T560 Notes
Monday, April 7, 2008

We tend to think of educational needs like a medical model--triage...but this neglects the change in medicine away
from crisis management to public health model that figures out what triggers the problem and then try to prevent it.
Education needs to work on anticipatory aids rather than patching things up when the fail totally for someone.

curriculum is non-responsive to individual differences

What is different about images? Art does not read like a sentence. you see the whole, as well as details.

different to view the parts from the whole...can view the parts sequentially and separately, but also SIMULTANEOUSLY
view the whole--(picture of sitting room and chair). A blind person can only see things point by point, so need to
find ways presenting two-handed information...one hand gets the whole picture, the other details.

text tends to be sequential, which is better than oral, which is sequential and time-locked.

images are good for
1) representing concrete objects or settings
2) representing the relationships between objects or ideas: illustrating or capturing their relationships--concept
maps, etc.
3) representing the relationship between things and their context--maintain both figure and ground
4) capturing simultaneity: eg. parts and wholes simultaneously
5) direct representation: not encoded, fairly direct and accessible

can recognize things in context--parallel info. actually facilitates, makes it easier to recognize in context,
plate on table, letters vs. words vs. sentence--priming effect. ex. two concentric ovals don't mean much alone,
but when placed in line drawing of table, silverware, chair, we suddenly realize it is a plate.
context processers

brain separates elements of an image...color, motion, even objects...like faces, processes them in different areas.
Damage to one area inhibits processing of the associated element

web site Face Blind--bill's face blindness pages http://www.choisser.com/faceblind
damage to the part of the brain the processes faces. he uses other cues to identify people. didn't know until he
was an adult that other people recognized others by their faces!

illusions as top-down constraints on understanding images--size, shadow, background knowledge about orientation,
etc.

background knowledge--old picture (damage) man, officer, military (inferred from clothes, hair, etc.)

alternate means of representation--
image to tactile transformation
tactile diagrams
finding how to translate images into *meaningful* tactile representations. Picture of woman in a dress, with raised
surfaces, does not translate to a dress for the blind people who tested it.

images...using words to describe...are we describing it for? what is a house? what else is meaningful or not to
them? making it tactile does not always communicate the content though.

have to know the purpose for which you are describing it before you can do it before it is meaningful. making the
content accessible should not delete the goal of the activity. Federal style house...if the goal is to count the
windows, should not say "there are 13 windows"!

start with the broad overview--big picture in context

focus on a few relevant details--see purpose
describe relationships and comparisons, facts
leave interpretations to the observer

image detective--website for how to strategically look at images.

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Final Project

cast lesson plan builder, especially for those who haven't made lessons before
UDL lessons start out detailed, but as you do more, they don't need to be quite so explicit
there are existing lesson plans online to look at as examples

can download Word template to fill in offline

what is an anticipatory set? thinking about what you are doing and how you set the stage for the lesson. what
background knowledge do the students have or need?

lab 3--should be getting feedback this week if you haven't already
lab 4 due next Monday

sections--Rachel and Yvonne will be doing one on turning lessons into UDL lessons--workshop format, so bring
projects and can have open discussion

Chris and Bart will be doing section on using images

for final project proposal, will be getting feedback this week. rubric will be posted
if you have trouble viewing the webpage, e-mail peter to get access to the documents
look at each other's book builder projects

final project due may 12

Technology in Education

Here is an interesting article a friend sent to me, about the advancement of technology, particularly as it affect the development of education.

Click here for the article

My First Book!

Well, maybe not my first book, but my first digital book! This is the story of two teddy bears that belong to my mom. They like to travel, and get into mischief. The story itself has been under development for a while...this is just the beginning. Enjoy!

Click here to see the book!

Click here if you want to download it!

Forget text-to-speech...how about THOUGHT to speech?!?!

Wonders never cease. Check out this article about a new device for translating THOUGHTS into speech! Maybe we'll eventually see a decrease in the number of people who appear to be talking to themselves while walking down the street...

http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn13449-nervetapping-neckband-allows-telepathic-chat.html

Super Cool Instructional Video

I'll teach you in less than 4 minutes how to make homemade bread, without a bread machine!

I used my digital camera to take pictures of the process.
I used Adobe Photoshop to add text to the photos and to create the slides.
I used Audacity to record and edit the sound.
I used Final Cut Pro to sync the images and sound.

Too many blogs to keep track of?

For those who find keeping up with the 60+ blogs of your T560 classmates overwhelming, check out www.bloglines.com . Once you register at this site, you can add 'feeds' from blogger, or any other site that uses feeds (other blogging tools, news feeds, etc.). Then, you log in to bloglines and can view all of the posts by any (or all) of your feeds updated since the last time you logged in, or in a specific time period (last 6 hours, last week, all...). This is nice because you don't waste time clicking through a bunch of pages that haven't been updated. You can also search all of your feeds, and/or the rest of the web for key words, so if you want to see who else in the class has posted about neural nets, you search for 'neural nets' and it will list all the entries containing those keywords, reguardless of when the post was made. I used this search feature when I wanted to find a video one of you had posted, but I didn't remember who it was! If you want to view the actual blog site, or post a comment, the blog entry is hyperlinked to the actual site, so you can get there in one click. You can also mark entries to keep in your display, so you can see them as 'new' the next time you log in. It's a pretty helpful little gadget, in my humble opinion! And saves me a lot of frustration over tedium!