What If I Could Create a Podcast about Deconstruction in Minutes?
With Google’s Experimental NotebookLM, You Can!
It’s been an overwhelming week in the teaching with generative AI world, and as I gaze with glazed eyes at my overflowing Outlook calendar, it seems impossible that it’s only Tuesday. No, using generative AI is not “saving” me time—it’s just allowing me to be unrealistically productive (is it time to have that conversation about universal basic income already?).
This week’s new toy is Google’s NotebookLM, and I am gobsmacked. Can it create a podcast from your course syllabus? Yes, it can. I used it in my Literary Analysis class today to create a podcast that explains deconstruction using nothing more than a link to a textbook chapter that I co-wrote with ChatGPT 3.5. So meta … er, Google.
Watch this brief video to see what I did.
While the podcast currently only downloads as a WAV file, it took mere seconds to convert it to an Mp3 file and upload it to the media library in the Critical Worlds textbook, where you can listen to it. I played a bit of it in the video above (here’s the YouTube link) so you can see how it works.
NotebookLM is still in beta, but it has some impressive and fun features. It can create a study guide, a summary, or other ancillary materials. I used the “Briefing Doc” feature to create an outline for a presentation with Gamma.app that I can embed in the textbook or download as a PowerPoint for an in person class. Here’s a screenshot of one slide:
If this all seems a bit overwhelming, I really get it. But if you still haven’t tried AI because you’re worried that it’s too “tech,” I want to remind you: I am a 50-ish community college English professor. I didn’t know what Python was until about three weeks ago. And while everything I wrote above might feel like a lot of jargon, none of it is hard, and you don’t have to be “good at tech” to use AI tools effectively. A Slack report published in June 2024 noted the following:
Among desk workers who use AI tools, 81% say it’s improving their productivity.
More than two-thirds of desk workers have never used AI at work,
Gen Z men are 25% more likely to have tried AI tools compared to Gen Z women.
41% of women believe gen AI will hinder their job mobility, compared with 29% of men
Candidly, I am concerned with the findings that generative AI tool use seems to be dividing along gender lines even for Gen Z. As a woman who is not in tech but who is heavily into generative AI, I feel a sense of duty to encourage my Gen Z women students to learn to use these tools.
Anyway, I hope you try out these new tools and have as much fun as my students and I did. Happy prompting! (Now if I can stop freaking out about that astrophysics YouTuber who had ChatGPT o1 write the code that took him ten months in just a few minutes…)