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. :-)