I am quickly working up ideas for my Monday demo session on the “p-casting” word. Thinking about some of Cole’s comments desiring simplicity, I slapped my head in shock as I realize that Odea was a tool site I had known about, bookmarked, but had not really explored.
Someone else can better summarize what it does, but it is free, and certainly a Small Piece of the Loosely Joining variety. You can subscribe to podcasts, tag ’em, but more– you can record directly into a Flash tool a short audio (3 minutes), and you can even phone in a recording. I am sure there is more, and I am still at the playing level, but it seems to offer a simple interface for doing record and publish audio. You can set up different “Channels” and these can have their own RSS feed and podcast subscribe links.
I did a quick and silly recording directly in Odeo, added a silly headset image, and published in about 2 minutes:
The sound quality is good.
Is anyone doing anything beyond such silly play in Odea? What else does it do worth sharing with my faculty audience?
One thing that’s cool about this is that you can post via telephone — when I tell audiences they can podcast without a computer, that’s an attention getter.
Maybe you can open with a reprise of your cell-phone comedy routine?
If you can live with the time restrictions, then it’s somewhat interesting. We’re looking at using Odeo for blogs in support of cultural education where three minutes is plenty of time to hear a snippet of Yupik eskimo and a short audio presentation of what the word means, relationship to English, etc.
That being said, I mainly refer to Odeo as a directory because three minutes just ain’t enough.
Of course any blogger user can blog by phone for free (well, toll charges apply) and with up to 5 minutes per post with audioblogger!
The phone posting is killer … it sort of goes with what I see in my classes … ALL students have ceel phones — that is a big ALL. Imagine if you combine phone posting, SMS messages, and peer responses with this thing! I have lots of thoughts about this rolling around in my head … I’ll share when I can solidify them a bit. I used it with my students just a couple of weeks ago:
http://blogs.3c.ist.psu.edu/camplese/?p=30
Wow, Cole, this is utterly fantastic, and definitely something I will use in my demos. You achieve the same result in terms of audio discussions mostly with a blog and the free Odeo service, what one of colleges has not got going with their expensive copy of Wimba.
It seems appropriate type of activity for a 3 minute recording– anyone can turn on a microphone and blabber for 50 minutes, but you have to design and plan to do a 3 minute gig- to paraphrase “I would have recorded a shorter podcast if I had more time”.
That was the number one comment I got from my students — “3 minutes was too short, but it made us think and work harder.” That is where the good stuff happens. BTW, this was the second “Discussion Activity” we did during the semester and my TA and I noted a couple fo things, more students did the audio version, the scores were generally higher on them, and this is the one that stunned me, my TA said the audio was much easier (and faster) to grade. We are going to have them post a response to two other questions like this and perhaps have them podcast a project status review. BTW, this is an introductory freshman course.
Shorter is better, but then why not limit to two minutes or 30 seconds? In my teaching of podcasting I find the sweetspot to be around 7 minutes. Unfortunately, none of the “press the internet button and record” or “call on the phone” solutions work at that length.
Most of my students already have Blogger blogs (that being part of the demo), so I prefer 5 minutes and audioblogger for the moment– and it saves an intervening linking step since it is posted automatically.
Makes sense Chris- I had just played more recently with Odeo.
But here is what is interesting, when I went to Audioblogger to create an account, iy already existed, and was tied to Odeo, and uses the same number as Odeo == SO THEY ARE THEY SAME SERVICE!
weird , eh? Why would one then have a 3 minute limit and the other 5?
Well– that’s just bizarre! I had no idea they were connected and the discrepancy is even odder. Will have to dig some more.
Hope your podcasting presentation is/was stellar!