Podcamp Perth07 - notes

This was an unconference held over 27 - 28 October 2007 in Central TAFE, Perth. I attended on Saturday 27th only, along with Nikki Haseldine, Julia Gross, Lutie Sheridan, Trevor Bennett, Rivka Niesten, and Mike Nodding from ECU. There were also a few other ECU lecturers and students.

The first session I attended was Podcasting in education, led by Tama Leaver (UWA) and Sue Waters (Challenger TAFE). It concentrated both on using podcasting as a method of delivery instead of common teaching methods, but also how to use podcasting and techology to engage students in a practical way. Tama uses blogs to supplement (replace?) face to face seminars. Examples of students' work were a play and a radio show. Tama made the point that the quality of work was good, as the students knew the work would be viewed by their colleagues. Tama uses Lectopia and Audacity whereas Sue uses her video iPod with recorder, and uses Belkin Tunetalk, Windows Moviemaker, Facebook, her PDA (using high quality sound 44100 Hz or multiple of 11,025), Skype and a quality recording. Sue advised us to think carefully before creating a podcast as it takes a lot of time - the podcast may already exist. However, if you are going to do it, then do it without too much worry! She used her presentation to show (with audio) what students thought and knew of podcasting. Not all young students were expert users! She also advised not to stray from the default settings nor buy expensive equipment unless knowledgeable about podcasting. She uses podomatic as a home for her podcasts. Think about background noise when recording, and be interesting.

I then attended the 'podcasting production campfire' led by Kerry Johnston. She uses Moodle and records podcasts, interviews, records events and meetings using relatively simple equipment. Her tips to working with a micorphone are to work close with volume down to decrease reflected sound, to speak up, to imagine you are speaking to a real person, to pad your space with cushions, egg cartons, foam rubber, to put the mike stand on some foam rubber to muffle sound, to use a speaker phone with a mike, to use a pop filter, or to use iRiver for recording.

I then attended the 'rant' session where we discussed the problems of training people at differnet levels and how to sell the technology to late adopters by equating it to webpage feeds.

I then attended a hands on session on podcasting using Garageband.

My final session was 'The social network in your pocket' by Nick Cowie. Here Nick stated that 50% of all mobile phones being sold now are internet compatible. By 2010, traditional internet usage is predicted to be dwarfed by mobile phone internet usage. He used some 'typical users' to describe various patterns of use of the internet and digital media. He said that users are now familiar with Facebook, MySpace, crikey.com, iPhones, Javascript and RIA, RSS bloglines, podcasts, Twitter (in US and Oz), Jaiku (in UK and Europe), mobilicio.us, wapedia, wink. Disadvantanges of mobile devices include the screen size and input methods, various OSs, Javascript and RIA, data cost and speed. He suggested that twitter feeds could be used for closed reserve, with users using SMS to get details of items, although we need permission from the student to send SMS messages. he also discussed the learnscope site, redcoal software for SMS which works through email and also keeps a copy of the message. Nick suggested that open APIs and mobile specific views are required for proper use.