Monday, March 20, 2006

Listening to Podcasts

5 comments:

Karen Taylor de Caballero said...

Hello, there. I learned about your blog at the recent TESOL convention in Tampa, Florida.

I've recently begun audioblogging, but I'm still in the "how to" stages of it-- though I can appreciate the questions you raise in your latest audiobog item (re Listening to Podcasts) and will be giving those questions thought...

Meanwhile, though, I'd really like to know what tool you used to create your podcast on podcasts. I've been using Castpost, but I'm not happy with the streaming speed (or lack thereof).

Anyway, I'll be checking back one way or another. Thanks!

Michael said...

I Kat. I think you might be Kat from BAW - is that right?

I don't know Castpost. I use a number of different tools depending on purpose.

Audioblog: most of ths stuff here is done with Instant Audio (which I pay for), and the plain old telephone.

Podcast: you may have seen podomatic.com. I have a podcast site at http://michaelc.podomatic.com/ I'm pretty happy with Podomatic - lots of features and the streaming speeds are fine for me. But I also use Audacity a lot (from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) - I record directly into Audacity and upload to Podomatic or Audioblogger. Audacity is really THE essential tool. I recorded the podcast post with it and uploaded it. You can also mix multiple tracks with Audacity.

Ian said...

Michael

I've just stumbled across this site. What a terrific set of questions you're asking.

I guess what I'd like to see developed is a set of guidelines along the lines of the questions that you have asked.

That way, practitioenrs wont need to reinvent to wheel through continuous experimentation.

Don't have any answers but I feel there is great potential if we get it right.

The worse use of the technology, it seems to me, is to put lectures online in audio. This of course is easy for educational institutions. But really, who is going to listen?

I guess the length of the average song is about 2.5 minutes, and soap tv programs workl on a 6 minute cycle. Should we be learning something from these?

Ian

Michael said...

Ian R wrote:

"...what I'd like to see developed is a set of guidelines along the lines of the questions that you have asked."

Your wish may be granted Ian. I'll be involved in a New Practices project that will address many of these issues.

Ian also wrote:

"The worse use of the technology, it seems to me, is to put lectures online in audio. This of course is easy for educational institutions. But really, who is going to listen?"

I see putting lectures online as good use of technology. See this example at http://propertyservices.brightcookie.com/ps/lectures_06.htm
Students are using them - distance and f2f students for revision. And if we provided an RSS feed they could be automatically downloaded - but here I tend to agree with Ian. Students won't listen to hours of dreary content on an iPod. Podcasts need to be shorter and snappier.

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