LibriVox: Acoustical Liberation and the Public Domain

Since my last post here was about the sad saga of Janux and my school's investment in closed educational resources instead of open, I wanted to post something here about one of my favorite open resources online: LibriVox audiobooks. I just added a new post over at Anatomy of an Online course how I am using LibriVox in my UnTextbook, and now I want to make some more general observations about LibriVox and the power of open educational resources. (And since that open education ecosystem is important for building connected courses in the open, I'll tag this for #ccourses too!)

But first, some background about LibriVox. Let's start with their wonderful motto: Acoustical liberation of books in the public domain. As you can see, they are part of the open education ecosystem where one good thing naturally leads to another. There are, thank goodness, literally millions of books in the public domain which have been digitized in various ways by various organizations and made freely available online. Then, find generous and enthusiastic volunteers who are eager to read those books aloud and share their recordings with others — that is how LibriVox works. People from all over the world, recording public domain materials in various languages and then sharing those recordings online. If you have never visited the LibriVox website, I think you will be amazed at what you find there: LibriVox.org.

Best of all, those LibriVox recordings are also in the public domain, which means that people can take these audio recordings and in turn create other great things: one good thing leads to another... and that then leads to yet more good things in the open education ecosystem. You will find lots of LibriVox audio at YouTube, for example, where people have synched up the audio with a video presentation of the text. Take a look at the CCProse channel, for example, and their presentation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Pretty nifty, yes?

If you are curious about how LibriVox works, check out their informative About LibriVox page, which provides a great overview (see screenshot below) with abundant links to additional information. What is really exciting is that they are creating enormous quantities of material; if you subscribe to the RSS feed for new releases, you will see new projects being completed all the time. 

Meanwhile, since I was just writing about the millions of dollars being poured into the apparently dead-end Janux project at my school, consider LibriVox's expenses: the great folks at Internet Archive host their audiofiles for free, so their operating expenses are incredibly low. And I mean incredibly low — "In early 2010 we ran a fund-raising drive to raise $20,000 for our expenses for the next few years. In July 2013 we launched a new fund-raising drive with the goal of raising $50,000 for short and long term expenses." I cannot imagine a more stark contrast with the multimillion-dollar boondoggle that is Janux.

So, if you are the kind of person who makes charitable donations, especially around this time of year, please think about supporting the Internet Archive and also LibriVox. By supporting Internet Archive, you are supporting LibriVox, and you can even specifically request that your Internet Archive go to LibriVox support. For more information, see the LibriVox Donate page. I just donated: it feels good! :-)

Long live the acoustical liberation!

Course Redesign Update: May 24... first audio links added!!!

One of the best things that has happened to public domain materials online is the LibriVox project to make audio recordings of those public domain materials available. In a great example of Internet cooperation, LibriVox and Internet Archive are working together to offer literally hundreds of public domain books in a public domain audio format! I am really excited to offer the audio format for my classes, and in every week except for one, students will have audio materials freely available.

I am also really pleased at how easy it is to include an audio link in my readings. Now that browsers can play an mp3 file without any special plug-ins or extra technology (remember how complicated that used to be 10 years ago?), I can just include a link to the LibriVox mp3 file (hosted at Internet Archive) which will then open in a new tab and start playing, which I hope will prompt my students to listen and look at the text at the same time. I personally find that to be a very satisfying way of reading... and it really will get the students to (I hope) slow down as they read and really notice details.

Just to get a sense of how that works, here is a unit where I have added LibriVox audio links to the story files: English Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs.

So, for example, here is a story page: Binnorie.

If you listen and read at the same time, you will notice that the audio is done from a different edition of Jacobs's book, so every once in a while there is a change in the wording, thus allowing us to see that Jacobs tinkered a bit with the wording of each story as the book went through its multiple editions!

Anyway, I am really pleased about this and also very curious to see how many of my students like to use the audio for some or even all of the readings in a given week. At 15,000 words each week for the total reading, that is about 100 minutes of audio, as you can see from the stories in this unit. I have no desire of any kind to lecture to my students, but if I could get them to listen to 100 minutes of spoken audio every week, I would be very happy indeed!

Tom Tit Tot: 11 min.
The Rose-Tree: 7 min.
The Old Woman and Her Pig: 5 min.
Binnorie: 6 min.
Mouse and Mouser: 3 min.
Cap O' Rushes: 9 min.
The Story of the Three Little Pigs: 6 min.
The Master and His Pupil: 5 min.
Henny-Penny: 5 min.
Molly Whuppie: 9 min.
Mr Fox: 7 min.
Johnny-Cake: 6 min.
Mr Miacca: 4 min.
The Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh: 8 min.
The Ass, The Table and the Stick: 7 min.
Fairy Ointment: 5 min.

To see the whole book, here is an embedded playlist available from Internet Archive. So cool!