No. 37 — Writing for ears👂 Listening before reading 🦷 Bluetooth and vikings
Specific, supportive voice
My name is Linda. I write a bi-weekly newsletter about computer science, childhood and culture - and there are 9 615 of you listening. If you enjoy this issue, please share it with anyone you think may find it useful.
Hi, hi.
I turned 36 last month and was very much feeling this David Hockney quote: “I don’t go out and see as much as as I used to. I don’t feel the desperate need for it. I have to work things out myself, as it were. When you’re very young, you wish to be in the middle of a lot of activity because it’s stimulating to you. You are adding to it and taking out of it. But there’s a point in life where you don’t need that crowd to do it. You have enough in your head to sort out.”
So, for number 37, sorting things in my head. I finished a big writing project and felt good for a moment after pressing send. I’ve also been thinking what it means to learn through listening, so decided to write a few reflections on an audiobook version of Hello Ruby we finished earlier in the year.
Last fall my Finnish publisher Otava suggested making an audio version of the four books on Ruby. The bind-up was already a big push, so this must be easy, I thought. Fast-forward, it was not. Together with my mom and my editor, we spent several months trying to figure out what the product should even feel like.
First, there is not that much children’s non-fiction available on audiobook services, yet alone activity books. A lot of what exists is biographies, which are great, but didn’t really help think about what this book should feel like. Bedtime Math is the one great exception.
Second, a big part of the Hello Ruby stories happen in the drawings and illustrations. What happens when those are removed?
And third, should computer science - a highly text driven field - even be taught with voice?
Writing the script required rethinking almost every aspect of the book. In my own childhood young kids had the physical book while listening to the audio cassettes - there was a sound signifying when to flip the page. Nowadays this is not always a given - children, like adults, listen to books while they are sitting in the backseat of a car, brushing their teeth or waiting for someone to pick them up at a soccer practice.
To minimize the complexity of the project, we made some rules:
Specific, supportive voice. Giving instructions with voice is not easy - the listener should be able to follow along all the time. Knowing when one activity or story starts and another one ends, is not always intuitive. With voice only one can’t get an overall view of the activity beforehand or easily repeat instructions - but the narration can be stopped, the narrator can create a sense of dialogue with the kid and there is a lot more room for encouragement (“Great job”, "You’ve learned so much!”) compared to written text. As for the storybook, we ended up adding making the text a bit more verbose and descriptive, picking up details that otherwise would only be present in the illustrations. I would imagine this kind of specific, situated copy-editing will need to be done for other picture books too, if audiobooks continue their success.
No lecturing. The Hello Ruby activities at the end of book celebrate open-ended questions, imagination, exploration and multiple correct answers. The audio driven activities needed to do the same. Exercises should encourage movement, drawing and talking to other people, not only concentrated listening. This meant rethinking almost every single activity - of the 51, we ended up reworking 15. An interesting future content creation challenge is to think what types of activities work best with voice alone - my favorites were activity categories like draw what you hear, which one doesn’t belong, clap your hands, shout out the answer, interview grownup, listen carefully which one doesn’t belong..
Reading code comes before writing code, states a 2004 research paper by Lister et al. My intuition is that listening to code could come even before reading code. It won’t obviously replace the need to read and write code, but provide a different access point. Some children can learn by listening at a higher vocabulary level and much faster than by reading themselves. And audiobooks allow children to be exposed to the ideas of computer science earlier than they would have if they were having to wait to read themselves (and much faster than most parents can read to them at bedtime!)
If you speak Finnish, the audioversion of Mahtava Tietokoneseikkailu is available on Storytel, Supla, Bookbeat and most other audiobook services. It is also available on Celia, our national national library for accessible literature and publishing. I would love to hear especially from educators how you might use something like this!
Since I don’t have any idea if the audio version of the book will ever see the day of light in other languages, here’s a few of my favorite activities as LIY (listen it yourself!) versions:
The Computer Science in One Minute Episode 19 is an early attempt at voice only activities. Play it with voice only, and try to guess which ones of the sounds are by a computer!
Here’s a list of statements. Listen closely. Which ones are humans good at? Which ones are computers? Why? I’m good at imagining things. I know the color of grandma’s eyes. I can jump on one leg without practicing. I am good at comforting others. I can tell what the weather is like in New York from the other side of the world. I can flip awesome pancakes. I know every possible move ever played in chess. I can finish a book in seconds. I can calculate what 679 898323 243 + 74920284 is in less than a second.
Move like Ruby, Snow Leopard and Penguin while playing music. Come up with a set of rules for the movements that utilise the ideas of sequence, selection and repetition.
Linked List
In computer science, a linked list is a linear collection of data elements whose order is not given by their physical placement in memory. But here it is a selection of things I’ve been reading lately.
One of my favorite audio publishing experiments is Jack Cheng’s See You on the Bookshelf, which I recommend to grownups interested in the process of publishing. Chompers and Grimm, Grimmer, Grimmest were on my list of things to listen especially for kids. Make Radio by This American Life was gold.
Where did Bluetooth technology get its name? “Bluetooth is named after the Danish King Harald 'Bluetooth' Gormsson, who had a dead tooth. The Bluetooth logo uses Viking runes representing the H and B of his name. He united the 10thC Danish tribes, which is why his name got used for a unifying tech.” (via samim)
Thinking of doing a (grownup) summer reading bingo. Any recommendations of not to miss books? Which reminds me, I should update my reading list.
Classroom
I’m hoping to surface and share stories from all of you and I’d love to see your creations! Here are a few teachers using Ruby in creative, fun and inspiring ways:
You can find the activity here. Or if you’ve made your own versions, send my way!
I absolutely love seeing educators make their own versions of my materials. The teacher journal was intended as a tool of documentation. I think we need more beautiful things in the world of computing.
It’s been forever since I last got drawings from children! Really hoping classroom visits will be possible once more.
Hello again.
Making Audiobooks can be interesting, I know the books you talk about with a page sound when its time to move to the next page,. Those books are more of the Audio Read along Books for children.
there's Books that are more interactive like you say, Say the word out loud, Draw in X space what you think you heard or what looks like a Computer keyboard, Or something.
The Third type of book In Audio is another interaction type of book where you might have a PEN or even an OBJECT to allow the child or person to move over a certain place on the page and you either hear correct or a story or even where to go now..
This all makes sense but remember those things we all mentioned above is only for people who can see. Which is most of us.
So you could also do another version for the Impaired person or child.
It will certainly get you thinking.
Thanks again for a brief read again. always enjoy.