Flashes of Panic

Through an online connection, I heard about an alumna of my (undergraduate) college who is a grad student at Harvard. She’s recently been dealing with a medical condition which makes it difficult to read. This can be a problem for a grad student. For a while, other grad students in her program were reading to her, and she was also having her Mac read text to her.

This is where things get interesting.

Within a day of her mentioning this, two different people suggested that it should be pretty simple to organize distributed recording of the readings. One took charge and set up an infrastructure which automated the process. Readings get posted to a list, where interested readers can browse the list and sign up to read chapters or papers. Once they’ve made a recording and saved an MP3 (instructions provided, of course,) they can upload to the site, where everything is organized as a podcast. A local friend subscribed the student’s iTunes to the podcast, and voila, her readings are automatically downloaded and available for “reading” shortly after posting.

Now, that’s cool by itself, in a sort of techie way, but it’s still not the best part of the story.

It’s positively competitive to sign up for readings. There are enough people who think this is a great idea and are willing to spend an hour or so reading that when a new list of articles goes up, it’s “claimed” within a few hours. If you don’t jump, you don’t get to read.

I’ve done one, so far. I was alarmed, listening back, to discover that I was using the same tone of voice I use when reading to my nieces. (Then I stopped, because I don’t like listening to my own recorded voice.)

Now Playing: The Innocent from Fly Me Courageous by Drivin ‘N’ Cryin

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