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Practitioners group 2 transcript

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Ok well this is pod cast practitioner group 2, this is Mike Green from The School of Oriental and African Studies in London here.  We’ve just been discussing these list of questions on the pod casting SIG and over the next few minutes we’re just going to summarise what we discussed.  So the first question we discussed was how did we get, how have we got to where we are now in terms of pod casting?

 

 

Hi I’m Andy Edinburgh University ADENA we, market drivers might be one of the influential factors that have brought about this phenomenon in universities simply because everyone’s got an iPod or an MP3 player .  Technology’s moved on it’s easier to record and share things easier and then there’s  obviously services on the internet now like U Tube and various other things where you can post these so that’s what I’d like to say.

 

 

Derek France from University of Chester.  My driver was trying to improve the student experience so I felt pod casting was almost ubiquitous.  Lets make use of it and see if the students do appreciate it.

 

 

My name’s Jacqui from Leeds Met University.  Just leading on from Derek’s comment there we were looking at student, the expectations and we had a number of drivers in how we got to where we are.  Some of those were institutionally driven and some others we thought were student driven, although I’m not convinced about the student expectations that they have for the pod casts.

 

 

The second question we discussed was ‘the lessons we’ve learnt in terms of where we are now and what knowledge we can share and things we’d do differently’.

 

 

Steve Woodward, University of Glamorgan.  One of my interests is getting staff engaged and taking on things like pod casting so I’m interested in making it as easy as possible for staff to get pod casts up and available for students.  So we’re looking at a variety of tools and software devices that can make that in turn into an easier process for staff.

 

 

We did say that some software is available at Audio City.  I recommended a piece of software called SwiftCrack which is freely available, just look it up on Google. It’s a very easy to use interface one button press, ‘stop’, to play ‘record’, and then it converts into an MP3 file on the fly plus also has a nice little ‘flash’ button which you can then imbed into a VLE quite easy to use tool.  Obviously there’s other tools out there as well that you could use for some more professional sort of recordings.

 

 

As a group we had some discussion about the desire to always edit the pod cast prior to it being released and that was a common theme there was also some resistance to change from staff in actually adopting pod casting and getting them up to speed with the new skills that might be required, taking them out of their comfort zone.  

 

 

Alex Spiers, John Moores.  I do feel with any type of technology not just specifically pod casting if we make the tool as easy as possible to use then we are more likely to get some of the staff involved and engaged in using it.

 

 

Ok, and then we also discussed what issues we’re facing currently and what we think the future issues will be.  Two of the key things in terms of issues now are we think staff development, in terms of training staff up, showing them the merits of pod casting, making it as easy as possible for everyone to be able to pod cast if they want to and also IT constraints, in terms of what our particular networks for example will allow us to do now, what software we have available to us and how easy that is to use.

 

 

I think a lot of the constraints are ‘in-house’ constraints that could be solved by going ‘out-house’.  So for example if you can’t put them on your own servers then you can easily embed these pod casts into a blog and store it on someone else’s server.  What I’m finding at Bradford is that more and more lecturers are finding solutions out of house because there are too many barriers within the institution and I am actively encouraging them.

 

 

At John Moores we’re actually waiting for our network technology to actually get up to speed and err we’re waiting for the introduction of IE7 which will be coming in in September and that will allow students who access our network to actively subscribe to pod casts that we have loaded onto the VLE.

 

 

One of the other issues that John Moores’ has been having is the technologies are moving faster, the upgrades are interfaced with the new technologies.  Once they’ve been put in the new softwares are out that we need to upgrade again but they won’t get put in for another 12 months.

 

 

A couple of the future issues that we discussed as a group were particularly the intellectual property right and the copy right of distribution and that could be open to abuse if pod casting was released more widely.  We also looked at the future adoption of technologies, you know what’s today’s technology, there are emerging technologies out there that may replace the ones that we are currently looking at.  Storage and infrastructure, these are large file sizes and resources both financial and human.

 

 

And then finally we discussed the role of this SIG and how we think we can work together and how we can go forward. And well one of the key ones we think is the sharing of best practice in terms of what we’ve done, what we’ve tried, how we can help each other work together, and also keeping each other informed and also looking at new trends so we are all keeping up to date with developments in the pod casting world and so on.  Sorry, I’ll just say a couple of final things, in terms of, yeah, so sharing ideas and developments and well really fostering a sense of community and learning from others and how we can basically, yeah,  go forward with best practice.

 

 

 

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