Monday, March 20, 2006

Podcasting the future of language education? Pt3

Apart from remixing the material provided in language podcasts to suit your own needs there is real potential for a much more sophisticated solution. Once you have a critical mass of audio material it should be possible in theory to link this to a query engine.

Apart from remixing the material provided in language podcasts to suit your own needs there is real potential for a much more sophisticated solution. Once you have a critical mass of audio material it should be possible in theory to link this to a query engine. I would expect that this would be a subscription service (it would take a fair amount of maintenance and setup). Suppose you could enter a query such as "dialogues on eating out, upto intermediate level, with english translations and seperate vocabary for any words above basic" You press submit and are rewarded with an mp3 that contains all of the above.

This service would require in-depth tagging of podcasts so that a seperate process could pull out segments that met search criteria. It sounds a little like science fiction but I am sure it will happen at some point despite the technical difficulties.

A limited version of this is available already at sites such as ITConversations. For example you can create a clip url for a conversation on free culture by Lawrence Lessig.

I hope to draft a more comprehensive article on the subject of remixing podcast material which will include details on how to use Audacity to perform editing of audio files. I need to organise some webspace to work with this blog first though.

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