MP3 files from an Audacity audio recording

Audacity is a great piece of free software for audio recording and editing, but unfortunately creating an MP3 file from a recording isn't entirely straight-forward and regularly perplexes some of the Open University's Languages students (who have to record themselves speaking their target language and upload the audio file to the online assessment submission system). The fact that questions about this keep coming to me suggests that not all OU staff are entirely clear about it either...

There are two complications.

(1) The "encoder" which Audacity needs to produce an MP3 file isn't built in. (Apparently US patent law says that the Audacity people aren't allowed to build it into the software, but they ARE allowed to point us to another website where we can download it and build it in ourselves. This is one of those cases where the law is an ass and makes additional work for the rest of us. D'oh!)

Assuming you've already downloaded and installed Audacity (from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/), you also need to follow the link to the "LAME MP3 encoder" and install that too. When you first try to export a recording as an MP3 file (see below), Audacity will ask you to find a file called "lame_enc.dll"; hopefully it will be in somewhere obvious like C:\Program Files\Lame for Audacity, and once you've pointed Audacity towards it you won't have to do it again.

(2) The second complication is (apparently) simpler, and therefore (paradoxically) more difficult: the difficulty isn't obvious so the solution is harder to remember. To create an MP3 file from your recording you DON'T select "Save As" (or its nearest equivalent, "Save Project As") from the file menu, as you would if you were saving a Word file in a different format (such as .RTF or .DOC instead of .DOCX). You don't want to do that, because that would save your recording as an Audacity project, which won't be readable by anything other than Audacity.

What you need to do is to select "Export..." from the file menu; then under "Save as type..." select "MP3 files".

Easy when you know how. (But harder to remember.)

(For Open University staff: you can see the Department of Languages' guidance on installing and using Audacity on the website for any Modern Languages module, amongst the resources for assessment.)

Seen and heard January 2010

New Year's Day concert from Vienna (shown live on BBC TV)
"Kindlemania could suffer from bite of the Apple", John Naughton Observer column - including reflections on how new information technologies don't necessarily displace old ones but usually co-exist alongside them (as when email led to increase in paper consumption).
"The Secret Life of the Dog" (Horizon programme on BBC TV, on experimental investigation of social and cognitive kinship of humans and dogs)
"The E-nigma decoder: A teacher’s guide to intercepting enemy communication" (blog post on pontydysgu.org - revealing list of online kidspeak abbreviations)
"Delia through the Decades" (BBC series)
"The British Family" (BBC series)
"Up in the Air" (new film, black romantic comedy, with George Clooney - on how technology can be used to keep relationships from becoming compassionate and intimate, for those who prefer them that way)

Seen and heard - December 2009

"The Art of Russia" (BBC TV series, with Andrew Graham-Dixon)
"Cranford" (BBC TV series, inspired by the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell)
"Oliver Postgate: A Life in Small Films" (BBC documentary about the Quaker storyteller, whose animations with Peter Firmin touched the lives of every child growing up in Britain between the 1950s and the 1970s, and who died at the end of 2009)
"Carols from Kings" (the Xmas eve service of nine lessons and carols)
"A Celebration of Classic  MGM Musicals" (BBC Promenade Concert 22, reshowing of live broadcast from the summe)
"The Incredibles" (Pixar animation, the BBC Christmas Day family film)
"Hamlet" (filmed version of RSC production, with David Tennant and Patrick Stewart)
"Black Books" (repeats of Channel 4  comedy series from 2000, with Dylan Moran, Bill Bailey, and Tamsin Grieg, written by Dylan Moran and Graham Linehan)

Seen and heard - November 2009

Enneagram workshop at Turvey Abbey

"Is It Better to Be Mixed Race?" (Channel 4 TV)
"Two Cheers for Cyberspace?", long blog post by John Naughton

"Bright Star" (new Jane Campion film about John Keats and Fanny Brawne)
"Literacy in the Digital University", seminar by Robin Goodfellow to the Open University's Technology and Learning Research Group (see his notes, slides, and blog post)
"The Waters of Mars", episode of "Doctor Who"
"A History of Christianity" (BBC series)
"The Legacy of Domestic Violence" (article in The Guardian - Patrick Stewart, actor and patron of Refuge, on his own violent upbringing and how it has affected him)
"How to Save the World with eLearning Scenarios" (slideshare presentation by Cathy Moore - itself a scenario about re-designing an information-heavy course in competition with a flashy business rival)

Digital literacies (2): Why academic literacy is about texts

This arises from a long blog by Robin Goodfellow for the Literacy in the Digital University project, following up a presentation in which he started from the position that "literacy" is not just about reading and writing and the comparable digital activities ("new literacies"), or about communication skills (presenting, reviewing, discussing) but about social practices: that is to say, literacy is purposeful and relational, drawing on "a complex and distributed understanding of the network of personal and occupational relationships that give the text its purpose".

All fairly uncontroversial, one might think. But there was one question which was posed in discussion, and which stayed with him and which is the subject of his blog: "If Literacy is 'social practice' why talk about Texts? Why not just talk about social practice?"

His immediate response had been that "we are focusing on practices in the university, which are uniquely defined in terms of texts" - while explaining that he meant the word "text" in an extended sense, referring to any kind of communicative artefact, not just printed words and not just words at all (so including pictures and recorded music).

But in his blog he poses the question: "it is always going to be the case that what we currently call texts are what define practice in higher education? As HE gets more intermingled with other social fields (industry, commerce, the professions, popular culture - see Mandelson's 'Higher Ambitions' framework) and as practice-oriented communication becomes more mutimodal and time-shifted and otherwise dispersed won't the notion of text as a defining characteristic of university practice become less and less relevant?"

I think the answer is No - or at least, it shouldn't. I follow Diana Laurillard (Re-thinking University Teaching, 2nd edn, p. 21-2) in taking the defining feature of university practice to be its second-order character: "the point about academic knowledge is that, being articulated, it is known through exposition, argument, interpretation ... through reflection on experience and represents therefore a second-order experience of the world." Academic discourse is characteristically not only about knowledge, but about knowledge-about-knowledge: epistemology, or how-we-come-to-know. It is not only what we believe to be the case, but why we believe it to be the case, or why my view of what is the case is better than yours. It is about theories and models, interpretations and frameworks, inferences and arguments.

Here perhaps is the practical meaning of Helen Beetham's summary of the key difference between academic knowledge and internet knowledge (referenced by Robin Goodfellow): that academic knowledge practice is about truth value while internet knowledge practice is about use value. If you value knowledge only for how it can be used, you will not be interested in how the knowledge is derived; you only care about whether it is reliable: Yes, or No. But if you care about the process by which knowledge is made and justified, challenged and revised, then you will need to get into second-order discourse.

Does second-order discourse require the use of texts? No, but it certainly makes it a lot easier. By making the knowledge (the theory, the data, the model, the interpretation) an artefact, it becomes easier for us to stand back from it and view it as an object and conduct the second-order discourse. The text does not need to be a physical thing, or even a digital thing: it can be a spoken object, as for example the thesis or the various points of argument in the formal disputations at pre-modern universities. The technology to accomplish a second-order discourse can be rhetorical and procedural, as well as physical and material.

But do we need this second-order discourse? Do we actually need academics and universities to conduct it, to look at the foundations of knowledge, instead of just using it?

As the historian Susan Faye Canon observed a long time ago (Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period, 1978), the best justification for the existence of historians is that, unless you have people whose professional responsibility is the reconstruction of the past in all its complexity and subtlety, then the only accounts of the past which are available will be the simplified and interested accounts of politicians and those with a political axe to grind.

I think we need academics and academies for essentially the same reason: that unless we have people whose professional responsibility is in defining and challenging the basis of knowledge, then all we will have is the claim and counter-claim of parties who value knowledge only for its usefulness to them and its service of their interests.

When learning isn't "learning"

One problem which confronts anyone trying to investigate learning in workplace culture is that much of what you, as a researcher, want to count as learning isn't called or maybe even recognised as "learning" by the people concerned. This is particularly the case with so-called "informal learning".

I've just seen this issue nicely typologised in a white paper on "performance toolkits" by Peter Casebow and Owen Ferguson. There they distinguish three levels of engagement from an employee:

• Just-in-time: "Employee seeks help and suport at the time they need it to deal with an unfamiliar task, challenge or problem." They won't consider this as learning, but as "getting the job done".
• Explore: "Employee recognises that the issue justifies investing some time to investigating the task, challenge or problem." They won't consider this learning, but rather "research" or "investigation".
• Deep dive: "Employee recognises that they need time away from work to immerse him/herself in 'learning mode' to acquire new skills and perspectives." This is where formal learning is involved, and is the only one which employees are likely to consider unproblematically as "learning".

The implication, of course, is that corporate training and development should be concerned not only with helping people "learn" but also with helping people "research", "investigate" and "get the job done". I wonder what parts of learning in higher education might not be recognised by students (or lecturers) as "learning"? Some of the administration and organisation needed to carry it out, perhaps, which tends to be undervalued by lecturers but is high up on the list of desirable study skills.

Audio (and video) feedback on written assignments (3)

Russell Stannard - confusingly, not the Open University emeritus professor of physics, but the University of Westminster lecturer in multimedia and ICT of the same name - has been having great success it seems with audio-visual screen recordings (using Camtasia) of his feedback on students' written work. It seems it enables him to be much more detailed in his comments, combining the benefits of audio feedback with the ability to point to precisely the parts of the students' work he's talking about (the example mentioned is correcting the grammar of Chinese students).
See this article in The Independent, and his own write-up of the work.