EP 31 - Notebook LM's "Do It For Me" Podcast Button: A Threat to Real Educator Voices?

In this episode, John and Jason react to the new button in Google’s Notebook LM that allows users to make an instant podcast. Will it be a threat to educators' voices and hard-working podcasters everywhere? See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com

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Links and Resources:

• NotebookLM
• Jason’s article “Better Definitions of Distance Education”
  • The AI Deep Dive Podcast based on the article.

Theme Music: Pumped by RoccoW is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial License.

Transcript

We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions or can help with any corrections!

[00:00:00] Jason: That's onlinelearningpodcast.com.

[00:00:03] John: Perfect. And that was a real human doing that.

[00:00:06] Jason: That was a real human, even though I sounded a little more. I leaned into the mic to make it sound a little more podcasty.

[00:00:12] John: Good. Well, we'll have to work on our upbeat banter between

[00:00:16] Jason: guess so.

[00:00:16] John: too.

[00:00:17] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston.

[00:00:20] Jason Johnston: Hey, John. Hey, everyone. And this is Online Learning in the Second Half, the Online Learning Podcast.

[00:00:25] John Nash: Yeah, we're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last couple of years about online education. Look, online learning's had its chance to be great, and some of it is, but a lot of it still isn't. How are we going to get there, Jason?

[00:00:40] Jason Johnston: That is a great question. How about we do a podcast and talk about it?

[00:00:45] John Nash: That's a great idea. What do you want to talk about today?

[00:00:48] Jason: Nice to see you. How's Sweden?

[00:00:50] John: Sweden is good. It's a little rainy here, but now the sun is coming out. It looks like we'll have a nice weekend here. So, it's

[00:00:57] Jason: Yeah. Good.

[00:00:59] John: So, Jason, what do you think about Google's notebook the LM and what it's doing in particular with these that we'll make from content? Yeah.

[00:01:12] Jason: was wild, we've been at this at least a couple of years talking about, at least between you and I, and then like a year and a half here in the podcast, talking about AI and some of its effects on education primarily, but also just on a lot of the creative work that you and I do in different ways.

Right. And I joked with somebody that, was fine when AI came for the graphic designers because, I'm not a graphic designer and, when it came for the writers and because I've never been that enthralled with the five paragraph essay anyways,

[00:01:45] John: yeah.

[00:01:45] Jason: the, the podcasting

[00:01:47] John: it's fine that AI put the writers and the graphic designers out of business, but this part about podcasters, that's just too far, That's right. Exactly.

[00:01:55] Jason: Notebook LM has been at it for about a year. I believe is the first time that I used it. And it had some nice features of pulling in different content and so on, but they just popped out this podcasting feature and I was blown away by how natural it sounded and then how like up and positive and excited the podcast hosts were about everything that it talked about.

John maybe we can listen to a couple of clips that we made. Here's one that I made actually out of a 2020 article that I had published around creating new definitions of distance education. And so, yeah, anyways, let's listen to a little bit and, and see what you think.

[00:02:44] John: Yeah, let's do that, because I think that'll show the banter and the give and take.

[00:02:48] Notebook 2: Totally. Technically, both are distance learning, but they're totally different experiences.

Night and day. And I think that's why you started seeing researchers like Simonson and Seeprasad trying to add more to the definition.

[00:03:01] Notebook 1: They were really emphasizing things like two way communication, in