I just checked the webserver logs, and the first 2 podcasts have been downloaded a total of 237 times so far. Holy crap! I would have guessed maybe half a dozen times. Wow. I just did some basic math on that, and that’s over a gigabyte of podcast downloady goodness! (thank goodness for campus bandwidth ;-) ) As Adam would say: “Boing!”
And I’ve gotten some interesting feedback as well. I found the podcasting experience strangely cathartic, so I plan to make a bit of time to keep experimenting with it. I spent a few minutes over the weekend messing around with GarageBand to make the requisite Cheesy Podcast Intro. It should be Just Cheesy Enough…
Lazy binding is the smarter way to initialize variables only once, and only when needed. David LeBer just posted a couple of articles showing how lazy binding is useful in WebObjects apps.
It would be cool if David provided an RSS feed with enclosures, so students could just subscribe to that with iPodderX and have the audio pulled down when it’s released, instead of having to keep visiting a page to see if there is new audio…
Late last week, I went to the Apple Support website to send a question about a repair for my iPod remote (the cord that goes from the remote to the iPod was pulling out of its plug, and I wanted to fix it). I was expecting them to reply with something like “We have a repair program, and for $X for the part and $Y for shipping, we can fix it for you.”. Instead, I came into the office today and found an unexpected package from Apple - it was a replacement part, free of charge.
I just wanted to capture some possible compelling uses for podcasting in an educational setting.
Lectures. Imagine students being able to subscribe to an RSS feed, and have recordings of every lecture automatically stored on their hard drive or iPod or whatnot for review. This would remove the need for the dozens of recorders at the front of a large lecture hall, all getting crappy and redundant audio. Why not produce a single quality feed, and let everyone use it? (on a related note - why not share a single high quality set of notes, rather than making lectures a speed-writing test…)
Interviews with external resources - an instructor could interview a scientist, or someone practicing whatever the subject is, and add that recording to the RSS feed for the class - making it available to all students. Something like a Campus iTunes Music Store could do something similar, but everyone would have to go to it and grab the files, rather than have them quasi-pushed out to them.
Lots of other things I haven’t come up with…
It’s the second point I’m hoping to play around with - documenting some of the thinking and developments by some of the folks in the learning technology field - hopefully I’d be able to do something like an ITConversations for educational technology stuff. If it works, and doesn’t completely suck, I’d use that as an example for faculty who are interested in the concept. If it doesn’t work, or completely sucks, well - that’s a valid data point as well… The shared lecture audio is a no brainer, in my mind…
I was just messing around with some of the various options for recording a podcast, and think this solution will work quite nicely: Snapz Pro X 2.0. It is usually intended to be used as a screen recorder, but also does an excellent job of recording both system sound and microphone input. I set it to record a 1x1 screen capture movie, and discard the video track when saving. Then, the .mov file is brought into iTunes, where I convert it to MP3. (set the encoding options properly, and the Advanced menu contains a “Convert selection to MP3” option.
It’s already baked into Wordpress 1.3-alpha-4, and so will be available in the next version. I’m not quite ready to start messing with alpha software (well, not someone else’s alpha software…), but am looking forward to this… If I give podcasting a shot, I may just bite the bullet and upgrade to 1.3-alpha… Or, I may just try this mod for Wordpress 1.2.
I’ve been listening to non-commercial programming on my iPod for a few months now, being totally hooked on ITConversations. It’s extremely refreshing to have compelling, intelligent content that isn’t full of ads and BE THE 9TH CALLER AND GET TICKETS TO AVRIL LAVINE!!! and mindless DJ drivel crap.
Over the weekend, I played around with iPodderX - an RSS aggregator for these “podcasts” - holy crap, there is some awesome stuff out there! iPodderX checks a bunch of feeds, and automagically downloads the audio linked to each - sort of an on-demand radio station aggregator, without all the suck.
It’s a plugin for Keynote that provides a WebKit-powered web browser component (the same one used in Safari and OmniWeb) for use in Keynote slides. Very slick. It has some limitations at the moment, but it’s pretty amazing.
Playing quickly with the first release, and watching the demo movie he made, I had an irrational flashback to Cyberdog…
