Podcasts

Towards the end of learning more about podcasts, I made my own (a simple overview of wikis), which may be downloaded here (mp3, 5 megs). I used Audacity, which was very straightforward to work with, although I'm far from mastering it. One issue I had was that every time I stopped and restarted recording the software automatically generated a new track, so by the end, with my constant restarting of recording after losing my train of thought, I had about 20 seperate tracks that I would have preferred to all be on one line. Otherwise it went relatively smoothly; it helped I suppose that I wasn't shooting for any fancy effects, but recording my speech, adding a music track (Circle by Jon Hopkins, that is), playing with track volumes, cutting and moving segments, and exporting to an Mp3 were at least as easy to accomplish as with GarageBand. Compared to GB Audacity simply seems to use a less aesthetic interface, though I think that GB can probably go further in directions involving the fusion of graphics with the audio.

The editing process was interesting in that it forced me to examine my speech carefully. I found that I apparently have lost the habit of filling speech space with UM or ERRR or LIKE fillers, and simply...leave space while my thought train catches up. I edited out a few of those spaces, but like most issues of self-consciousness (another being that I felt I failed to add much enthusiasm to my speech) I doubt most other people would notice the first listen through. This quality of podcasting to make one face up to one's speech-giving qualities and habits is something that I think should very much endear it to the english teacher or any teacher trying to help their students with presentation skills. Podcasting becomes a task of quality content creation and presentation combined with a powerful element of self-critique during the editing process.