[athen] recording lectures via mp3 players for use on web

[Nick Ogrizovich III]

There's a lot of interest from professors wishing to podcast, or
otherwise post mp3 versions of their lectures on the web in Vermont
all of a sudden. Good.

Being the Universal Design proponent I am, I want to encourage this. 
Of course, this approach totally leaves the deaf/hard of hearing
students out of the loop. I am curious if anyone has ever tried
running a sound file through dragon, to see if it recognized
anything? What if the speech file was from someone who trained dragon
extensively?

Some profs may even be willing to train dragon, and this would be an
interesting way to get transcripts right away. Otherwise, we would be
looking at using students to transcibe, or possibly send the files to
india. (.50 /minute +)

As for the technology side of it, it seems ipods in general are a
difficult way to do this. The newest ipods (5th gen) apparently do
not even have a line in, so many of the mics (griffin, belkin, etc)
no longer work. I looked up creative, and they have a few models that
still have a line in, but to use a mic with that, you would have to
use a powered mic. (Profs prefer a lapel mike.)

It seems the easiest way to do this would be to buy a really cheap
digital voice recorder, lapel mic, and then convert the wma or wav
files to mp3, and then post those. You would have the benefit of a
high quality sound to use for dragon attempts, too.

Anyone else ever come across this yet? I've heard from MIT the
concerns for the Deaf, but I'm hopeful that this will be remedied one
way or another. I'm curious what others have done. Or if there's a
portable mp3 player out there with a bonafide mic in that doesn't
need to be line level. (powered)

Thanks,

Nick Ogrizovich
University of Vermont

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