Using Technology to Tell Stories

A place for sharing ideas and projects

VoiceThread — Collaborative Slideshows and Stories

Posted by dogtrax on April 11, 2007




I haven’t yet tried this site (but I will) called VoiceThread but it seems to be a place where you can create a mashup of audio, visual and use collaboration to do it. There is some potential here for online picture books, I think.

I don’t know if you can export the final document (is that even the right word anymore?) from the VoiceThread site or if you can embed in a place like Edublogs (prob not), however.

Here is what they say:

VoiceThread is a place to foster, capture, and then share the group conversations that surround evocative shared media. A mouthful but all true. People have always talked and shared the ideas inspired by evocative media, we all do it all the time, day in and day out, online and off. But there’s never been a particularly human interface for it on the web. Normal human conversations are overflowing with metadata, like who the speaker is, and all the known details of their history, and we humans are astute readers of and sponges for this information. But in order to reformat conversations for the web, we’ve stuck some dynamite in the middle of them, blown them up, picked up the various pieces, labeled them, and then reassembled them to try to recapture something of the original soul of a human conversation. It’s a bit like trying to recapture the experience of flight by re-assembling 98% of a crashed airplane’s parts, you can get the basic shape right, but the feeling your looking for will be elusive. So instead of trying to capture group conversations by re-assembling as many ‘parts’ as possible, we’re going to take a stab at doing the opposite, strip as much as possible away. We’re hoping that making a paper airplane and tossing it out a window will better capture the wonder of flight, than gazing at an exploded-diagram of an airplanes parts.

Let me know what you think as a possible device for telling stories.

Kevin

2 Responses to “VoiceThread — Collaborative Slideshows and Stories”

  1.   Bonnie Says:

    I just registered Kevin. This looks great. It’s something like Memory Minder. By the way, I sent that group an email about me and our work and they sent me back a registration code and let me know that they had checked out this blog and liked it very much. They also provided a beta upgrade, but when I tried loading on my computer it froze everything.
    I am playing with the original version.
    But I like this one. I sent them an email and I like the demo that opens the site.
    You are turning me into a tech lunatic!
    Bonnie

  2.   blkdrama Says:

    This site looks great. I left feedback and Ben checked out our site. Here’s his response:

    Thanks for the feedback, we appreciate it. I did check out your site and it looks great. You can create a Voicethread and then take it “To Go”, meaning you can embed it onto your site. Just make sure the Thread is public, then under the Create tab, select To Go, the embedding text is right there.
    If we can help in any way let us know and thank you again for giving us a try.

    Good luck with your site

    Ben
    Voicethread

    I just wanted to attach a couple of Voicethreads that highlight the usefulness of the tool for writers and authors specifically:

    http://voicethread.com/view.php?b=406

    http://voicethread.com/view.php?b=514

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