My beginnings as sound engineer

After a few months of interruption, I am committed to getting back to this blog.
I'd like to start this year by sharing a little discovery that I made recently and that I am planning on using in class soon. Part of creating a modern classroom experience, as I have already argued on this blog before, involves developping increasingly student-centered teaching. This inevitably requires a lot of class participation and sharing by students of their results with others.

I have run into a recurring problem which I'm sure others have encountered. Most classrooms are still basically equipped mostly for one person to speak. There is one microphone and one microphone only, and one's best choice is often to simply ask students to talk louder. I'm not a great believer in walking around with the microphone to interview students à la TV show, this really takes too long and it looks silly (and might even be intimidating to students). Having an assistant pass along the microphone is not much better. But microphones are really necessary if one is to hear (and  most importantly, if other students are to hear) what others have to say in big classrooms which invariably have very sub-standard acoustic qualities.

I don't really see myself going to my Dean arguing that all students should be given a microphone, or that somehow the rooms should be equipped with a high tech sound system that can amplify the voice of whoever is speaking (I'm assuming such a thing exists but I could be wrong and I'm sure it'd be expensive). This is bound to become more and more of a problem and could prove a durable obstacle to making classrooms more interactive (I am talking of classrooms of 25 or more). Moreover, it will have the predictable effect that after a while students will self-select and only those with the loudest or more piercing voices will elect to talk.


In the spirit of using what is rather than reinventing the wheel, I did have a flash, which is that students at least these days all come to class with a laptop. Now, most of these laptops, I figure, have two things: 1/ an audio recording capability, and often an incorporated microphone of the recording sort (although whether it can be more than that is precisely the question) and, 2/ an audio producing capability (ie: integrated speakers). My intuition then was that there must be a way to link the two so that the input becomes output and, in a word, one turns every laptop into a personal amplifying microphone. Convinced that this must somehow be possible I googled a bit, only to find that there was very little on the topic, and what there was was quite negative. Some seemed to suggest that one would have to use the recording function, but I that sounded contrived. Anyhow, after looking around a bit, I'm very happy to say that I have found the solution and that it is dead simple:

• Your students need to have one of these small external laptop microphones that can be bought for about 5$. As far as I can tell, my system will not work with embedded webcam microphones.
• Connect the microphone to the microphone entry on the laptop (the one that has a little microphone next to it and is generally red or pink)
• Go in the volume settings of their computer (I'm talking PC here, but it can't be that different with Macs), go to properties and make sure that the "microphone" box is ticked
• Go back to the sound controls and increase the volume of the microphone (it is typically muted)
• Your computer has just turned into a microphone!

This is so simple, I am surprised it is not used much more often, even in conferences where we increasingly go around with laptops. Talk about crowdsourcing and saving money...