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Foibles of my First Pod... er, iRiverCast

Today was one of those technical gambles that actually, sort of worked! This morning, the EDUCUASE/NLII Meeting in New Orleans had a general session where the New Media Consortium provided a 5 Minutes of Fame overview of their just released Horizon Report (I was lucky to be among some great colleagues on thei Adivsory Board for this year's version).

Anyhow, Larry Johnson had asked me to do a part at the session to talk about the report's coverage of "Ubiquitous Wireless"-- and I offered the challenge of doing a remote presentation since I would not be attending the meeting in New Orleans - I offered to give Skype a go, and he was asking for a safe guard back up via BreezeLive (scratched that as I had no time to prepare), and in the end we settled on using iChatA/V between by desktop here in Arizona and Cyprien Lomas' laptop in New Orleans.

The trial run yesterday as less than a smooth start, but in the end we got everything in place. Because I do not put all my marbles in one basket, yesterday, I recorded a quick, umm-full draft version as a streaming QuickTime movie and gave Cyprien a download of the 10 Mb source. To make it more interesting and to illustrate back channels, I asked some colleagues, including Rick Effland, Anthropology faculty at Mesa Community College (his blog is featured in the NMC report) who was one of wireless pioneers, plus D'Arcy Norman and Gerry Paille up in Canada, and Pate Delaney in San Francisco, to do some on cur chatting about wireless (actually I invited most of them 15 minutes before show time).

I wanted to try and record my audio (not really a keepsake), and had fiddled a bit earlier this morning with WireTap Pro and was glad I did a quick test as the demo version has the annoying "this is a demo version" overlaid on all recordings. Lovely. So in about 4 minutes, I registered ($19) a license, and was set to go. As a backup, I sat my iRiver MP3 recorded on my desk in record mode.

At about 2 minutes to show time, Cyprien gave me the signal, a ring on my cell phone. I initiated the video chat session with him, told the text chat window folks to start jabbering (they did), and I had about two minutes I could hear my colleague Brian Lamb doing his bit on "Extended Learning" (he got gonged).

Cyprien gave me the thumbs up. I hit the record button on WireTap, and started my bit. I was not prohetic at all, and tried to share some perspective on transparency of the technology, and how it is best when it is not obvious, with an anecdote from a Spring 2001 interview I did with some of our faculty who where trail blazing with wireless.

The a/v connection actually held up fine for the whole time. I tried to get a screen capture, but was about 1 task over my multi-task limit.

It went okay, I think I zipped so fast, that I ended before 5 minutes and missed getting a gong. Then (her is the foible part). I hit the stop button on WireTap, and it prompted me with the Save As... box. In my haste, I thought it was saving as a default file name, so I clicked the button, only to realize later it was the CANCEL button, and thus flushed the good audio.

I did hear later, that the window with the text chat never made it on the big screen, which is too bad, cause the folks were bouncing back and forth (and actually continued for another 10 minutes). Oh well, I did save the chat session as a PDF

nlii05_chat.pdf

so thanks D'Arcy, Rick, Gerry, and Pat.

The iRiver recording quailty was pretty awful, but I tried to clean it up quickly in Audacity, and present it here as my first, posted "_____ cast" (well not really as I am not bothering to plop it in an RSS enclosure):

http://cogdogblog.com/alan/sounds/nlii05.mp3

Watch the pops! It hurts.

I am counting on the pros recording the audio podcasts at EDUCAUSE to do a better job -- can you get rid of my ummms and add some intelligent comments to?

Whew! It was a whirlwind. But fun.