Academic Aesthetic

 

 Academic Aesthetic 153 [4:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (658)

This episode is a call for help! (No, not THAT call for help …)

As I announced on Pownce, this will be my third consecutive year as a presenter at MICCA. In the past I’ve used wikis as my “handouts,” but I’m not sure I should create a new one from scratch if there’s already a definitive one out there that’s ready for use.

So my question to you is this: What are some of the better podcasting wikis out there, and should I use one of those for my presentation or make my own? I’m leaning away from reinventing the wheel, but I won’t mind building one from the ground up if the wikis that exist don’t meet my needs.

Let me know what you think.

 

 Academic Aesthetic 151: Old New Media [2:37m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (445)

This is my first podcast recorded MOSTLY using Apple’s Photo Booth, a program that can record still pictures or video.  It was never actually intended for podcast creation, as I found out the hard way.  As much as I loved playing with the software, half the clips I recorded had no audio whatsoever.  This phenomenon was totally random, so towards the end I was resorting to recording short bursts and then immediately checking to see how it turned out.

Photo Booth may be a fun toy, but from now on I think I’ll be using other software for my podcasting needs.

Oh, and today’s episode has me rambling on about how people are using Twitter and its clones in lieu of recording podcasts and posting blogs.  I don’t think this is a bad thing, since any message that can be summarized in 140 characters should be presented that way – short, sweet, and to the point.

However not every idea can be made so brief, as evidenced here.

I think Twitter is a good thing because  that means that we can expect blog entries to be reserved for more complex ideas, while posts that show off a new website or tell us what you had to eat can be reserved for another feed entirely.

 

 Academic Aesthetic 150 [4:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (732)

So, here I am two weeks into the new year and I’ve yet to get started on my new year’s resolution. I thought I was getting ahead of the game by writing up some podcast scripts after Christmas, but now they seem kind of dated and, well, I can’t find them.

Oh, well.

All things considered I have been quite busy. Those who follow my Twitter and Pownce accounts may have noticed I post almost nothing on the weekends – and with the exception of my planning days were I’m constantly in front of my computer to fill out all sorts of paperwork, a lack of postings means I have a lot on my plate.

But enough of that before this turns into an “Oh, I have too much to do, I shouldn’t even be recording this right now!” podcast.

What?

It’s too late for that?

Feh. Moving on, I’m really liking Pownce. For those of you not in the know, Pownce is very much like Twitter in that it’s a micro-blog format. Both are designed to share small messages, links, and so on with others. Pownce goes further in regards to media sharing and organizing your friend lists. You can actually put, say, all of your friends who are art teachers into one group, math teachers in another, science teachers in another, family in another, and so on, and send links and messages only to those groups that would be interested in that subject.

I’m sure my sister, for example, doesn’t really care about the highlights of last week’s faculty meeting. This way, she wouldn’t see it.

Now Twitter’s still in the running. The tools for embedding Twitter into web pages seem more robust than the ones for Pownce, and if you’re a text messaging fanatic Twitter will win hands down.

But for how I use it, I like Pownce a lot more. I loved it when I first got an invite to sign up, and I was reminded of how much I liked it a couple weekends ago when a huge chunk of the edublogosphere tried it out for a day at Steve Dembo’s request.

Alas, the following week most of them were all back on Twitter. A social network can have all the features in the world, but it’s still nothing without a critical mass of members. Twitter has that, and except for an all-too-brief moment, Pownce doesn’t.

There are solutions, of course. Apps and websites that post to multiple networks, services that will pull RSS feeds into Twitter, but I’m not happy with the apps and I’ve already gotten complaints about my Pounce messages being cut short when they’re cross posted to Twitter.

I’m still holding out for more people to make the switch to Pownce, but I know that, just like last time, before long I’m going to end up staying where more of my network is rather than continue talking to an (almost) empty space. Social networks are sticky that way.