Friday 6 March 2015

Week 8 Thinking Digitally embedding a soundcloud file

This week we did a show and tell and as people are still working behind the scenes on their artefacts I won't share them at this stage.

As a group we were trying to problem solve so I'll share one of the presenting challenges and some thoughts on ways forward.

One candidate had created a list of words with hyperlinks on her website, so that when you clicked on each hyperlink you were taken to her personal/professional soundcloud account from which you would then click on a soundfile.

However she wanted people, with one click, to be able to hear the soundfile straight from the website.

One way to approach this could be to embed the soundfile, still hosted on soundcloud, into her website so that with one click a browser would immediately open the sound file. To do this she would put in some html code in the back end of the website.  It sounds complicated, however as you can see from this screencast video which I've embedded into this blog showing you how to do just that, it's really just a matter of copying a piece of code which is created for you from soundcloud to your website/blog.


We also talked about her creating an organisational soundcloud account rather than a personal one and then actually encouraging others to create their own soundclouds, on a similar topic, with a common tag. She could advertise this on her website to encourage people to look for the tag, with a disclaimer that it's not content you have created.

Her next challenge is how to transcribe the content for people who want to read the stories, not hear them.  There is freeware available which does convert speech to text.  She might engage volunteers to undertake this role and she is also thinking about using a text dictation tool as well as recording sound.

Hope you have a good weekend