Art Gelwicks's blog

The Pirates of Second Life

Looks like Second Life is experiencing some growing pains.  I wonder how long it will be before we see some significant (and highly restrictive) DRM creep it's way in-world?

Webcastacademy.com - New course in the moodle

I've added a new section to the webcastacademy.com Moodle site. There's now a wiki in the course I thought we could use as a group to flesh out what the course should include (and as an easy way for me to start identifying the lesson sections in the site.

Since this is supposed to be a collaborative effort, I'd like to identify people who are willing to help generate the content for the lessons so we can start building this out. I'm not sure who mentioned it during Sunday's call, but creating a self-study series of lessons in combination with classroom style lessons is an excellent idea for adult education in my book.

Complexity of audio recording...

In the process of traversing the learning curve for the Webcast Academy I've come to some observations not of the technical bent but of the philosophical one. My technical background allows me the latitude to tackle the more complex implementation requirements for the system setups, but I can see this being a very high price of admission for non-technical educators making the jump into this space. The classic debate of "digital natives vs. digital immigrants" personifies, to me at least, the audiences that will have a higher likelihood of success as compared to those likely to struggle.

Audio is nothing more than a series of tubes

I was finally able to successfully record both sides of a Skypecast recently, and during the trials and tribulations of configuring the system, I came up with a way to do it without the wonderful in-ear echo that you sometimes get. The configuration only takes Audacity, Skype, three Virtual Audio Cables, and four Audio Repeaters. (I say only with a bit of sarcasm.) Here's a flow showing how this "series of tubes" gets plumbed: http://www.gliffy.com/publish/1100863/L I'll try and explain in detail how this works in my next post. For now, think about the virtual audio cables as rea

Comments from last night's meeting

Aside from some of the normal technical issues we run into running so many collaborative web apps at one time I think last night was a good first Wednesday night session.  Some of the things we came out with:

  • Always start your Skypecasts with visitors muted by default
  • Everyone should take time to get familiar with their friendly neighborhood sound card settings
  • We're going to set up a Moodle space under webcastacademy.com to help with the process of getting through the course requirements in a logical and organized manner
  • Hosting a show is much easier when you have a partner acting as your "engineer"
  • Susan did a great job!

My notes from the Oct. 29th meeting

I’m listening to the recording of the meeting and taking notes as I go through of the sudden outbursts I would normally share with people in a meeting. Luckily you only get subjected to the sudden bursts of typing, nothing more.

Certification

I like the idea but we would need to make sure that if people are going to use the certification as part of their professional development there needs to be a way to demonstrate the value of the certificate contents and what it took to earn them. A thought is to create a screencast presentation (5 minutes, no more) of the content of the certification that can be used to explain to anyone what the cert. means and what it took to get it. We could work on that as a group and make it part of the final class project.

Suggestions on recording screencasts

Any suggestions/recommendations on software for recording screencasts for playback by users through a web site? I'm not looking for real time playback, but rather for training of adult ed students on technical processes.

Adding a little tunage to your recordings

If you're like me and like to add a little musical action to your recordings, I'd suggest clicking over to splicemusic.com to create your own sampled MP3 files. I'll post one as soon as it's ready...but not before it's time.

And now for something completely different...

My introduction for the Webcast Academy. Made using Audacity Portable.

Download MP3 (1.58 MB) 3:27min 

Listen here - 1.58 MB 3:27min

Just a side note to all you interns so you don't struggle with this like I did. Make sure that your input format is set to Full HTML rather than Filtered HTML if you're trying to embed a Flash player in your posting. It works much, much better that way!

Syndicate content