Podcasting, pt 3

Well, now that I've been successful in this particular exercise - establishing an account with a hosting service, recording a podcast and then publishing it - I will say it can be fraught with problems, if you want to do a bitof a decent job of it, as my previous rantries (rant + entry = rantry).

I am sure with a bit of investigation I could have eventually worked out how to do a better recording without resorting to the use of the digital voice recorder.

I also think that I could have just gone with the first recordings I did and uploaded them. However, I also think that dependant on the nature of the recording, the quality of the recording is of some importance. My recording for example is a tour of the library, something we would hope is downloaded multiple times and may be an intitial point of contact for the library and university with a student or parent, so it should sound professional.

A personal short podcast's quality might not matter so much, and dependant on the length of the podcast, a teacher's lesson may be of variable quality - just so long as the quality doesn't detract from the content.

I am quite aware of the growing use of podcasts at university to complement and augment subjects. Whether it is content recorded from a lecture for further reference to students, or to enable distance learning, or original content to be considered as pre-reading for the lecture and tutorial.

I am also quite aware of the use of podcasting in use for assessable material, after all, why would the library possess digital voice recorders? For some students, it is a great way for them to express their creativity as well as complete the assessment.

Really, it is all a win-win situation... as long as the support is there to enable staff and students to use it.

Training and equipment. Both in the recording and uploading, and in the downloading and re-play.

We have had students seeking assistance in downloading podcasts to their MP3 players at the library  because they were not adequately shown how to do that.

If a technology shy lecturer came across the initial troubles I had in my efforts, I can't see them following through or revisiting it again.

One last thing to take into account is the location of the people accessing the podcast. Quite a few of our students are in the country, where their Internet access is limited to dial-up, if at all. Many of them are unable to download large files, so keeping files small and accessible is of importance if you are not sure whether your audience is going to comprise those still on poor access to the Internet.