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.

Secondary monitor

I heard the question about using a secondary monitor on a Windows machine. I run two 17” monitors and wouldn’t be caught without them anymore. I replaced the existing video card in my machine with an Nvidia card with two monitor ports and then just hooked up the two monitors and walked through the installation software. The bonus is that the card provided a significant performance increase in using Second Life.

Managing the courses for certification

What if we created a Moodle space that worked in conjunction with the Webcast Academy space? The Moodle course could handle registration, course progression, and grading with recordings and other postings being done on the Academy web site as assignments.

The psychology of recorded speaking

There’s a huge mental dynamic difference between conversational presentation and formal presentation. When we’re creating a recording we have a habit of slipping into the formal speaking mode. How to overcome this? The way I’ve taught people to get over this in the past (when doing public speaking or train-the-trainer sessions) is a two step process. First, practice recording and playing back your own speech so you get used to the concept of how you sound to others. Second, and this is the more challenging, is to write as you speak rather than speak as you write.

It’s a very common situation to begin speaking in the formal mode as we would write an official presentation. Unfortunately that winds up sounding as if it’s being read and loses the listener. It also makes it easier for the perfectionist mindset to creep in and find the mistakes and errors. If you are speaking to edit the recording later always remember that if you get flustered or lost, be silent. It’s much easier to edit out gaps in the sound than it is to catch all the “umms” and “ahhs”.

Here’s a trick I share with people from my old radio days. When I first started doing a radio show I found myself in the same uncomfortable situation of stilted speech and uncomfortable wanderings off topic. Once I realized what I was doing I started speaking to the audio engineer rather than the microphone. He had no idea, but it gave me a point to focus on and flow as if it were a conversation. Take a picture of someone you know, whether it be personally or professionally and have it within your line of sight when you’re recording and “speak” to the person. Let your mind have the conversation and you’ll be amazed how much easier things go. This also works well with Second Life where you “speak” to the avatars of your audience.

Station Breaks

I’m curious if there’s any sense, pro or con, as to recording a single station break and dropping it in multiple times during editing.

That's all for now...but thanks for the dARTh reference.