iPod Honeymoon

I've been distracted by Camtasia but I've still been making time to read (and listen!) to information on creating and marketing podcasts.

I have found that I don't actually have time to listen to the gazillion podcasts I zealously subscribed to when I first fell in love with my iPod. I apparently thought I lived in a William Gibson novel and could simply download all the podcasts and immediately make use of the information. But it turns out I still live in the real world where listening to an hour of audio actually takes an hour of my time! This is a good incentive to create my podcasts short and sweet!

At the last session for the Podcast Pilot we learned about Audacity and our tech team installed it for me yesterday. I haven't had a chance to play with it yet but I think I'll be forced to use it. Even though my little Belkin microphone promised CD quality audio, the recording I did Saturday for a potential tutorial was pretty rough. I picked up the sounds of my laptop harddrive, my ankle popping, papers rustling and some annoying southern accent that I can't possibly have.

In an instruction assessment meeting last week we decided to have optional pre and post tests for the podcasts. My department head offered to buy an iTunes gift card that voluntary participants would be registered for.

We are also meeting with Nursing instructors about their online program this week and I see potential there for using podcasts and assessing their use.

I'm off to D.C. on Friday for the ALA conference. I was dissapointed to see there are only two sessions about podcasting but I know my iPod will come in handy on the airplane and the metro!