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| Path: Main Street > Resources/Library > Research Articles > Feature Article |
Podcasts and audio presentations: posting your audio and video content on the web
By Gillian Kerr, RealWorld Systems
The information in this article is current as of February 9, 2006.During the last couple of years I have played with several audio presentation programs, trying to find a simple way to post teaching materials on the web. One example was ‘Giving effective presentations’, a 23 minute audio PowerPoint presentation which was originally recorded in 2004 for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, based on a seminar I gave to CIAR’s New Investigators Network. It covers the following topics:
- Finding out what your audience wants to hear
- The changing role of live presentations
- Defining the objectives of your presentation
- Defining the audience
- Developing your own style
- Customizing your presentation to various audiences – academic, policy and general public
- Using graphics wisely
- Getting comfortable with mistakes
The presentation is now posted on Ourmedia, a free and (supposedly) permanent archive of online content. Ourmedia is the distribution end of the Internet Archive, which seeks to put the entire web, including ephemeral content and old versions of web pages, on a public archive… forever. Ourmedia takes it another step by inviting the public to upload video, audio and text content directly to the archive, thereby avoiding hosting and bandwidth costs. It’s not just an archive - it’s a publisher.
I posted this presentation on Ourmedia for two reasons – to see whether audio slide presentations can be easily transferred to a video format (answer: not easily enough), and to store it in a stable location so I don’t have to keep transferring the file each time I move to a new web host. Unfortunately, Ourmedia doesn’t seem to assign persistent URLs or Digital Object Identifiers to their content. That means that it will be very difficult to track down artifacts when the URLs change, as they certainly will. Ourmedia is still very clunky, and often doesn’t work. Many users are describing it as an ‘alpha’ rather than a ‘beta’ service.
I have also posted the presentation to Google Video and it's available here. The slides look horrible - almost too blurry to read - and the interface for uploading media is pretty bad. However, the video loads much more quickly in Google than it does in Ourmedia, and Google offers the capacity to post transcripts. Google Video is competing with Ourmedia by offering free permanent hosting, and it also offers the ability to charge fees for watching videos. It’s intended to be a distribution vehicle for paid content as well as free content.
And Google Video makes it easy to post videos on your site by cutting and pasting some code, like this:
So how can nonprofits use this new technology?
Several ways.
First, nonprofits can save money on distributing video or audio content to their communities. Bandwidth and storage costs are expensive, especially if hundreds of people are downloading big files. You can create files and load them on Google or Ourmedia without worrying about how to integrate them into your web sites, or how to pay for unexpected downloading costs if any of them become popular. All you have to do is post the URL on your own web site so that people can find them easily.
Second, you can use them to ‘podcast’.
Podcasting sounds as though it’s related to iPods, but it just means the online distribution of audio files using RSS syndication. You can subscribe to news updates that automatically download audio files onto your computer or MP3 player. It has become popular among iPod users - thus ‘podcasting’ – but you can use any computer to download files. The combination of RSS and audio files creates an entirely new feature – downloadable radio programs that you can listen to whenever you like.
Wikipedia, the community-based encyclopedia, is a great source of information on podcasts. (Wikipedia has been getting a lot of bad press recently because the lack of formal editorial control allows some entries to be posted that are biased or inaccurate. However, I’m using it more and more often for a quick and up to date summary of current issues.)
Following are a few good links that explain how educators are using podcasts, as well as Podbasket, a new service that “allows you to create a podcast simply by entering some basic information about each audio file, including its URL.”
Education Podcast Network -- The Landmark Project
"The Education Podcast Network is an effort to bring together into one place, the wide range of podcast programming that may be helpful to teachers looking for content to teach with and about, and to explore issues of teaching and learning in the 21st century." http://www.epnweb.org/Education Podcast Directory
" Our podcasts provide you with news and updates on the listings in the first UK-based podcast directory for educators. We feature selected educational podcasts in different subject areas that can be used to support learning by children and young people. We also include selected podcasts created and produced by schools to illustrate the developments in educational podcasting. Podcast Feed URL: http://www.recap.ltd.uk/podcasts.rss "
http://www.podcastingn ews.com/forum/link_6.htmlearninginhand.com - Podcasting in Education
"Podcasting is a way to automatically download and synchronize digital audio files from the internet to iPods, Palm OS handhelds, Pocket PCs, or other devices that play digital audio files. These audio files are usually in MP3 format and can be recorded and distributed by anyone. Podcasts are free of charge, though you may need to purchase some software to make the download and synchronization process work seamlessly. There are podcasts recorded by educators for educators. There are also podcasts recorded specifically for students. And best yet—there are podcasts made by students!"
http://learninginhand.com/podcasting/I am planning to test podcasting in my own blog, and will report on the results in a future article. In the meantime, I'd love to hear about what agencies are doing in this area.
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Gillian Kerr, Ph.D., C.Psych.
President, RealWorld Systems
gkerr at realworldsystems.net
Read my weblog at http://blog.realworldsystems.net
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