Audible Voice of a Wise Person

Portable media players (PMPs) with digital lessons are nothing short of a miracle, overlooked by our culture, yet with the potential for profound social change.

PMPs can deliver the audible voice of a wise person, teaching the listener highly relevant and useful lessons. Until recently, anyone would have seen this as a miracle. However, something obscured this miracle – perhaps it is the way it came about.

Portable media players came into the world in 2001 as musical entertainment devices, playing audio files popularized by Apple Computer’s iPod. Four years later, users began to record narration as spoken word audio files. These files quickly came to be known as “podcasts,” a new word that fused the words “iPod” and “broadcast,” to give a new meaning. Apple tightly integrated podcasts into its delivery system (iTunes) and its portable media players (iPods). Perhaps it was this nomenclature and system of accessing and downloading that obscured the profound importance of this new experience of listening to audible voices of educators teaching.

The miraculous nature of portable media players is not limited to the basic act of listening to spoken word audio files. More importantly, the affordable cost of creating and delivering highly specific narrated lessons is equally as impressive. The cost per lesson unit to produce audio and video lessons has dropped dramatically. Pro production tools and distribution costs are a tiny fraction of what they were just a few years ago. These low costs help make it practical to produce highly specific lessons that serve a small but perhaps very needy community.

Most audio files are downloaded from the Internet at no cost to the listener. Even more spectacular is the fact that the subject matter of these freely-available spoken word audio files is far more specific than the typical talk radio program. There are millions of podcasts that focus on topics as narrow as those of specialist magazines. Chinese language instruction, News from India, Wine News and Astronomy are four examples of very popular podcasts that are incredibly specific.

It is a mystery why the power to deliver highly specific audio files was not immediately applied to educating those trapped in poverty. The technology has been primarily aimed at an audience of one rather than 40. International development agencies can deploy the miracle of available, highly relevant audio lessons to teacherless students in Sudan, underskilled agronomists in Haiti, or professorless academics in Zambia.

A one hour audio file is about 14 megabytes (MB) One Gigabyte (GB) can store about 70 hours of voice files.

Members of Western society have quickly integrated listening to audio files on portable media players into their entertainment lives. It is hardly seen as miraculous by Western standards. However, throughout history, the concept of distant teachers sending their voices to students far away would have been considered a striking case of divine intervention. Even the inventor of audio recording, Thomas Edison, might have felt that the ordinary course of nature was suspended if a child in a remote area of Zambia could hear the voice of the nation’s best teacher from a classroom in the capital, hundreds of miles away.

The audible voice of a wise person teaching from afar is truly something wonderful.