Paper #4: The tool in Total

Part One:
Hey there folks.

I have found a fun new tool that I'd like to share with you, pretty much because I am very excited about it. It's called VoiceThread, and it's quite a unique website in terms of what it allows you to do. It allows users to post photos, or groups of photos, videos, mp3's, songs etc and then allows other users to comment on those posts in one or many of five different methods. You can use a microphone, you can type, you can call in, you can record your own audio file or you can use a webcam. You can make your threads public or private, restricting access to a certain group of your friends or family, or it applicable, students. It is extremely cool, and very hands on. Unlike sites like YouTube that also support video uploads and commenting, VoiceThread is specifically designed to support collaboration, sharing and awareness of the fact that the project you're working on is a group effort.

It was created in 2005 by two guys, Steve Muth and Ben Papell, and according to an interview conducted by a blogger who calls himself Mr. Media, the idea was very different when it first sprang to their heads. A few of my favorite highlights from that interview (which unlike your traditional radio interview was quite long) had to do with their original intentions for VoiceThread. They were not trying to make money. To that end, a very useful version of their service is available for absolutely no money. They wanted to create something that would actually be useful and fun to use, rather than something that would get them notoriety and prove a distraction for people using it. They also wanted to be of most use to educators, a characteristic that seems to be lacking in modern commercial production.

My most favorite feature of VoiceThread, though, is that it really is fun to use. The ability to doodle right on the image, as well as comment on it through text and voice makes it interactive, irreverent and very memorable.

Part Two:
I just realized that it my zeal over VoiceThread I totally forgot to mention how it has any applicability to you guys. We are pretty fortunate in that respect, though, because VoiceThread just happens to be a tool that might be quite useful to the professional or amateur historian or the teacher. The site was mostly designed with teachers in mind, actually. Steve Muth, one of the creators said in an interview about the site that the question creators must pose when they have a new idea on their hands is "Whose life does it change?" On whom will it have the most palpable and lasting effect? For VoiceThread, the answer turns out to be educators.

Even if you aren't a teacher, though, VoiceThread can be helpful. One of the most important elements of any historical analysis is examination of physical evidence, like photographs, documents, etc. With VoiceThread, not only can you put these items in a forum that makes it easy to access and store them, but you can invite peers and fellow practitioners to comment on them with ideas, critiques and interpretations. You can create a community of peers simply by uploading your content and making it available to those people. The myriad number of ways to interact with the material helps ensure that everyone will find a medium conducive to expressing their views. Even the visual format of the site supports collaboration. Comments aren't posted simply as a vertical list, but instead in a circle around the item being examined, enhancing the feel of a roundtable discussion or forum rather than a lecture hall where there is only one right answer.

To come back, VoiceThread effectively opens up the historical community to itself, helping to decrease the isolation and the occasional bookworm-ishness we are all subject to.

Part Three:
A new tool is rather useless without some sense of it's current place in the Web 2.0 world. This post will hopefully give you some kind of insight into who is using VoiceThread, what they're doing with it, what people think of it, some of it's limitations (of which, honestly, I can't find many) and then an example of a VoiceThread in action.

In terms of who has already found VoiceThread, the company seems to be very good. They have been featured in a few national newspapers, including the St. Petersburg Times in Russia earlier this year. They won an annual Webware award in 2008 for one of the 100 best apps. Their category was video uploading/sharing/editing/animation. The site has also received nothing but rave reviews from educational sites as well as business sites hoping to help their clients rev up presentations. I have to make a presentation in just a few days here, and I've hit upon the rather obvious idea to use VoiceThread to create my presentation and then just let it play itself when the time comes. I'm especially excited about this idea because VoiceThread can create so much more than a PowerPoint kind of slide reel. The site is capable of creating animations. Since it records every action that you take, you can choose to play back a series of actions in order while the thread is running underneath them as it had been. You can then watch a short movie almost of what you've done over that past however many minutes of interaction with the thread. This is going to make for a different, almost character driven presentation that will much more effectively hold my audience's attention.

Steve Muth and Ben Papell said themselves, though, that VoiceThread is far more of a hands on tool than something you can just be told about. So in the next post is a link to my very own VoiceThread on Shakespeare... please feel free to comment on it, doodle, and record laughter and questions. That is, after all, the whole point. :-)

My VoiceThread

Here it is! 

I'm still messing around with the website, but take a look. :-) 

It was a lot of fun to make. You should try it! 

The cool new tool... reviewed

A new tool is rather useless without some sense of it's current place in the Web 2.0 world. This post will hopefully give you some kind of insight into who is using VoiceThread, what they're doing with it, what people think of it, some of it's limitations (of which, honestly, I can't find many) and then an example of a VoiceThread in action. 

In terms of who has already found VoiceThread, the company seems to be very good. They have been featured in a few national newspapers, including the St. Petersburg Times in Russia earlier this year. They won an annual Webware award in 2008 for one of the 100 best apps. Their category was video uploading/sharing/editing/animation.  The site has also received nothing but rave reviews from educational sites as well as business sites hoping to help their clients rev up presentations. I have to make a presentation in just a few days here, and I've hit upon the rather obvious idea to use VoiceThread to create my presentation and then just let it play itself when the time comes. I'm especially excited about this idea because VoiceThread can create so much more than a PowerPoint kind of slide reel. The site is capable of creating animations. Since it records every action that you take, you can choose to play back a series of actions in order while the thread is running underneath them as it had been. You can then watch a short movie almost of what you've done over that past however many minutes of interaction with the thread. This is going to make for a different, almost character driven presentation that will much more effectively hold my audience's attention. 

Steve Muth and Ben Papell said themselves, though, that VoiceThread is far more of a hands on tool than something you can just be told about. So in the next post is a link to my very own VoiceThread on Shakespeare... please feel free to comment on it, doodle, and record laughter and questions. That is, after all, the whole point. :-) 

A cool new tool... and you...

I just realized that it my zeal over VoiceThread I totally forgot to mention how it has any applicability to you guys. We are pretty fortunate in that respect, though, because VoiceThread just happens to be a tool that might be quite useful to the professional or amateur historian or the teacher. The site was mostly designed with teachers in mind, actually. Steve Muth, one of the creators said in an interview about the site that the question creators must pose when they have a new idea on their hands is "Whose life does it change?" On whom will it have the most palpable and lasting effect? For VoiceThread, the answer turns out to be educators. 

Even if you aren't a teacher, though, VoiceThread can be helpful. One of the most important elements of any historical analysis is examination of physical evidence, like photographs, documents, etc. With VoiceThread, not only can you put these items in a forum that makes it easy to access and store them, but you can invite peers and fellow practitioners to comment on them with ideas, critiques and interpretations. You can create a community of peers simply by uploading your content and making it available to those people. The myriad number of ways to interact with the material helps ensure that everyone will find a medium conducive to expressing their views. Even the visual format of the site supports collaboration. Comments aren't posted simply as a vertical list, but instead in a circle around the item being examined, enhancing the feel of a roundtable discussion or forum rather than a lecture hall where there is only one right answer. 

To come back, VoiceThread effectively opens up the historical community to itself, helping to decrease the isolation and the occasional bookworm-ishness we are all subject to. 

A cool new tool... hey that rhymes...

Hey there folks. 

I have found a fun new tool that I'd like to share with you, pretty much because I am very excited about it. It's called VoiceThread, and it's quite a unique website in terms of what it allows you to do. It allows users to post photos, or groups of photos, videos, mp3's, songs etc and then allows other users to comment on those posts in one or many of five different methods. You can use a microphone, you can type, you can call in, you can record your own audio file or you can use a webcam. You can make your threads public or private, restricting access to a certain group of your friends or family, or it applicable, students. It is extremely cool, and very hands on. Unlike sites like YouTube that also support video uploads and commenting, VoiceThread is specifically designed to support collaboration, sharing and awareness of the fact that the project you're working on is a group effort. 

It was created in 2005 by two guys, Steve Muth and Ben Papell, and according to an interview conducted by a blogger who calls himself Mr. Media, the idea was very different when it first sprang to their heads. A few of my favorite highlights from that interview (which unlike your traditional radio interview was quite long) had to do with their original intentions for VoiceThread. They were not trying to make money. To that end, a very useful version of their service is available for absolutely no money. They wanted to create something that would actually be useful and fun to use, rather than something that would get them notoriety and prove a distraction for people using it. They also wanted to be of most use to educators, a characteristic that seems to be lacking in modern commercial production. 

My most favorite feature of VoiceThread, though, is that it really is fun to use. The ability to doodle right on the image, as well as comment on it through text and voice makes it interactive, irreverent and very memorable. 

Great Britain and Our Civil War!

The history of the Civil War is one that most Americans can pretty much get in a basic sketch. The South had multiple reasons for secession and formation of the Confederacy, most notable among them being the lifestyle and the income afforded by that "peculiar institution" of slavery. The North, wanting to do away with slavery but more importantly to preserve the Union of the States intact, took up arms and the War began. Most Americans also know that the war had a few twists and turns, a few close calls and very frightening "as ifs." Somewhere in the middle, the tide finally turned towards the favor of the North, Jefferson Davis' Confederacy was defeated and the rest is history. But there was a third party involved in the American Civil War: The British. The English government, still sore over losing the United States as a colony less than 100 years ago remained interested in regaining whatever influence and revenue possible for them. So, when the Confederate government approached them asking for naval, economic and materiale assistance against the North, it was a hard time for the spies and diplomats of the North to dissuade the British from entering the war on the side of the slave-holders. We came very close to that eventuality. It was only Lincoln's skilled diplomacy and some very lucky wins for the Union that kept us from being a slave nation to this day. Interesting fact, huh? 

The argument up until me...

The argument about the effect of the atomic bomb on American culture in the early years of the Cold War is something that has been extensively written on. I think one of the reasons for that is that the effects are so far-reaching and so obvious that they should be simple to dissect. But they aren't. The atomic bomb affected us in every way we could imagine, and some that we haven't imagined yet, necessitating a continual production of literature and research on the topic. There is a political pool of research, culminating in work like that of Spencer Weart and Allan Winkler. These two men have taken very different views of the possibilities of the atom. Weart's book, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images takes a negative view, looking at nuclear secrecy and visual representations of the bomb and nuclear energy as dangerous things. Allan Winkler takes the opposite view, looking at peaceful applications of the atom and nuclear energy. Each one of these authors makes valid points, and there is no reason that both of them can't be seriously considered. That would be the root of the problem, though. There is no one answer, no right path to pursue when questioning the effect of the atomic bomb. Elaine Tyler May has gone in yet another direction by connecting the bomb to an increase in the sexualization and objectification of American women in her book Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era.  She has one illustration that was published in a nuclear safety handbook illustrating the three deadly types of radiation given off by a nuclear blast. They are alpha, beta and gamma and in the illustration, they all appear as drunken prom queens with the name of their radiation type printed on wilted sashes across their chests. Her book also connects effectively with the intense standardization we see in gender roles in this period; at least the gender roles that were distributed through propagandist media sources. John Hersey' s book Hiroshima is also an excellent place to look for the elements of guilt and the Japanese perspective on the bomb. 

Back to nuclear history ...

So. In comparing the book and the movie versions of Nevil Shute's On The Beach, I realized that I was making some pretty interesting implications about American culture in general and the way we deal with conflict. If we say that conflict results in several cultural symptoms like presentation of a united front and psychosocial standardization, then the American past becomes unbelievably checkered with mini-wars. The Cold War was only cold in the sense that it didn't involve smoking gun barrels. The distribution of propaganda, as we can see through the changes made to Shute's novel in the movie version, absolutely insisted on a closed cultural front presented to anyone watching from the outside. This mini-war, this cultural war, was just as damaging to healthy national growth as any hot war would have been, but in ways that are harder to pinpoint as bad. It would be an interesting line of research to see how these mini-wars have carried through our culture. I think we might find that we still act as though we're in one. 

Mighty Mo!

Ok, ladies and gents. Here is one of my all-time favorite history stories, and it just so happens that it happened to me. I was in Hawaii presenting a paper I wrote at a history conference in Waikiki. I got to the island a little early and stayed a little after my presentation to do some sightseeing, namely to the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor and the USS Missouri. The USS Missouri was by far the more fun (if not the more affecting) of the two. Our tour guide had brought us around the whole ship in fine style, making jokes, making us all comfortable and generally having a really wonderful time. We finally arrived at le piece de resistance, a gold medallion set into the deck that marked the exact spot where the Emperor of Japan signed the surrender after the Second World War. So here we are, reveling in the history, having our first moment of silence and solemnity in an hour and a half of touring and we all hear this voice. A tiny, screechy voice with a heavy New York accent saying, "Excuse me, mister tour guide, why is there a TV in the captain's room? I am absolutely sure they didn't have THOSE things back in 1945! This boat isn't even right!" I turned around slowly, on behalf of my whole tour group. Our guide was a little too dumbfounded to respond. "Actually, miss," I started, "the TV was probably added in the 1980's when Reagan had the ship refitted as part of his 600-ship navy plan. It was added. It wasn't here originally. So...yeah." She just stood there staring at me. And the approval of my tour group, and my tour guide was palpable. Good times aboard shit, mateys. :-)