Here in Phoenix, we don’t have that old saying about “raining and pouring”, especially since it is now 143 days since any water fell from the sky.
But the podcasting flow is pretty good, with my quick and dirty recording with an iRiver, simple Audacity editing (fade in, fade out, bump levels, and take out a few “umms”), and publishing via a scotch tape and rubber band MovableType system.
It seems to make sense for many of our projects and events, since not everyone in our geographically far flung system can be there for synchronous events. Just toss the iRiver on a table and record.
So recently added to our podcast mix:
(1) We have a group trying to look creatively at Learning Space Design. On Wednesday of this week, we visited an Interior Design class at Mesa Community College. The students had completed projects doing a “Post Occupancy Evaluation” of the college’s Jazzland CyberCafe, a coffee shop and student gathering area (plus wireless and technology available) built during a remodel of the old library. Previous design students had worked on the plans for this facility. This group did photographic ethnography, surveys, and detailed observations to gather data and analyze just how the facility was used. The students gave our committee presentations and discussed their findings. We will eventually have the PowerPoints posted to our meeting notes wiki, but the 63 minute audio is posted:
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ocotillo/audio/mcc_design_students_mar06.mp3
(2) At the same meeting, we also had a cool demo of what Mesa Community College is doing with Voice/Video Over IP. All of their phones are/will be VOIP, essentially enabling them to do video conferencing with cheap web cams over the network. But the reason for this demo was to show us their surveillance cameras and software– for their security office, cameras are set up in open and public places around campus, and are connected and controlled via IP. The software they have is pretty amazing; cameras can be scripted to do pans and zooms, and the video stored is all digital. Beyond the concerns of privacy, we were told that numerous crimes had been solved (including a mugging that had happened that day). But our group was interested in the possibility of this kind of technology to possibly gather data over time that would help assess how informal learning space was being used. Their ought to be some tools to script image captures on a timed basis, and some method of estimating perhaps number of people in or moving through a space. Anyhow, the audio is a bit over 30 minutes:
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/ocotillo/audio/mcc_voip_mar06.mp3
(3) I’ve been posting 8-12 minute clips recorded from our Honors Forum Lecture Series, where 6 public lectures are given to a student and community office during the year, all within the theme of the national honor society. (This year it is “Popular Culture: Shaping and Reflecting Who We Are”). The audio is sent to our colleges in CD format, so we just wanted to provide a sampler (plus I am not excited about digitizing hours and hours of audio). This set of podcasts are listed at:
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/honors/podcast.php
(4) And woot! We just got our first Apple iTunes podcast in their system. Our Digital Story examples mentioned earlier are now directly linkable to the A-iT store via:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa
/viewPodcast?id=130033155&s=143441
Can’t wait to add this as a subscribe link to the storytelling site.
That’s enough. Clouds are building out my window.
