Stream audio texts or guided notes to impacted readers using Ampache.
Stream audio texts or guided notes to impacted readers using Ampache.
Ampache is an outstanding audio streaming server/technology that has potential to serve all kinds of minds. Although developed “for the love of music,” Ampache has a place in education. For example, Ampache provides an opportunity for the population I work with, gifted thinkers facing difficult reading challenges, to access developmentally and academically appropriate content that would be either inaccessible or demeaningly leveled. Most I’ve received feedback from prefer listening at their own pace to both Kurzweil and a human reader.
Let your imagination run with it: combined with a tool like audacity, guide students as they work through homework; provide students working on fluency and expression to record material for others to decode or with which to practice making inferences.
Too abstract? This link takes you to a demo: use the username hackers and the password untie.
I start from TKL’s LAMP stack; they’ve just released a new revision (based on Lucid) - their next will be based on whatever the codename for the new LTS is.
TKL makes it easy to install to bare metal or to a virtual machine.
During the simple TKL configuration, do make a note of your root password and your MySQL root user password, you’ll need them. You’ll need to generate two more passwords later: one for the ampache database user and one for the ampache admin account.
We do the rest with SSH, not shellinabox. Why? Took us about a year of working with TKLPatch before it hit us: copy and paste.
We go the long way around, but should not anymore; this can be done in two commands concatenated, iirc:
cd /var/www
wget http://gitorious.org/ampache/ampache/archive-tarball/master[nightly build]tar xvzf ./master
mv ampache-ampache/ ampache/
Oh: chown -R ww-data /var/www/ampache/
Configuration of the db has to be taken care of (in fact this is not the case if you’re using the alpha build - I provide steps in case one decides to go with the version in the repos or stable 3.5.4. Use myPHPadmin (built into the distro, port 12322), drop into a MySQL shell, or execute direct from the command line. This is the gist:
CREATE USER 'ampache'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY '***';GRANT USAGE ON * . * TO ‘ampache’@’%’ IDENTIFIED BY ’***’ WITH MAX_QUERIES_PER_HOUR 0 MAX_CONNECTIONS_PER_HOUR 0 MAX_UPDATES_PER_HOUR 0 MAX_USER_CONNECTIONS 0 ;FLUSH PRIVILEGES; [?]
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON `ampache` . * TO 'ampache'@'%'
The rest of the configuration is taken care of via web interface. Point a browser to http://<ipaddr>/ampache. Fill in the db info and set a password for the admin user (database config looks unnecessary with this (really really impressive) alpha version - including nevertheless).
Change at least one php parameters.
nano /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini and double the memory_limit parameter to 64M. Can’t find it? Search in nano with ctrl-w (that is to say, “where?”).
Assigning the admin account password is the final step.
Next, check out documentation at ampache.org to stock your catalogs. The documentation is comprehensive.
Boggled by the instructions? A prebuilt and preconfigured appliance is available here.
Up until today, students have been reading nonfiction in ISM (info systems management) (Minsky, Stallman, Catherdral and the Bazaar, etc.).
Today students chose from the following fiction for independent reading (reading responses due daily, regardless of amount of content-related HW).
Using Calibre’s front end, (and pdfedit as necessary), text will be refactored to suit each students’ individual learning styles. Contrast, ratio of text to white space, typeface, kerning, line height are all factors for the students I serve.
Audio of each text will be available via our Ampache instance, even if we have to record it ourselves with Audacity.
It’s worth noting that one student is refusing to put down Stallman in favor of fiction.
