Vulbus Incognita Magazine

This is an interesting free app for creating short audio broadcasts, like a mobile audio Twitter feed. Nice way to get students listening and speaking.

Hmmmmm.......

I have been using text to speech almost exclusively for reading articles on the web, newspapers, and courese reading for a course in Leadership I am taking at Case Western Reserve University. I love the e-readers ( Read and Write Gold; Kindle, and Audio books)  because I can jack up the speed and read with my ears as fast as non dyslexics who are fluent readers read with their eyes. We need to understand the 'cost' of eye reading to dyslexic students even when they "graduate" from OG or Wilson: the burden of phonological processing is too high in terms of fatigue. If we don't make the technology more available and acceptable in schools we will deny intelligent students with print challenges the opportunity to study in college, graduate or professional schools. 

I still read paper books.  Right now I am reading  A light in August by Faulkner. It is on my night stand and it is a wonderful if slow experience for me. For some, print will never 'fall away' and allow for effortless decoding and pholonological recoding.--Lou  

Excerpt:

"Understanding how reading on paper is different from reading on screens requires some explanation of how the brain interprets written language. We often think of reading as a cerebral activity concerned with the abstract—with thoughts and ideas, tone and themes, metaphors and motifs. As far as our brains are concerned, however, text is a tangible part of the physical world we inhabit. In fact, the brain essentially regards letters as physical objects because it does not really have another way of understanding them. As Wolf explains in her book Proust and the Squid, we are not born with brain circuits dedicated to reading. After all, we did not invent writing until relatively recently in our evolutionary history, around the fourth millennium B.C. So the human brain improvises a brand-new circuit for reading by weaving together various regions of neural tissue devoted to other abilities, such as spoken language, motor coordination and vision..."

I made a forcast back in the 1980's that bionic music (based on brain interfaced to instruments) would allow for the the composition and performance of music

Nothing is as borring as a standard QR code but sometimes we really need to use them. Why not use the free service and make something like this - It would make a big difference, don't you think?

Click for more info.