On Monday I attended a session on podcasting, part of ‘The IT Learning Programme’ (ITLP) with OUCS, so I thought I’d blog about it incase anyone was interested in attending a session in the future. Although not a practical training course the session acts as a brilliant introduction to podcasting for anyone who is interested in finding out about how podcasts can be used as an educational resource; podcasts can be used for student outreach, to present research, to distribute a lecture series or for a series of tutorials or training materials. I’d been doing some research into the uses of podcasting for libraries, thinking about how podcasting could be useful and what libraries could podcast on so this session certainly gave me more ideas to think about.
The course called Multimedia: Podcasting at Oxford FAQs took the form of a presentation about podcasting at Oxford University and a question and answer session. The presentation went through key topics such as a background to podcasts, the use of podcasting by an institution such as Oxford and the practical process of producing a podcast. The process of making a podcast was demonstrated by Steve our presenter; demonstrating the process step by step from recording sound to create an mp3 file to uploading it to a public web server and adding to a subscription system so that the mp3 could feature on a podcast portal such as http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/ or iTunesU. A significant amount of time was spent during the session being shown how to use sound editing software such as Audacity, a user friendly piece of open source cross-platform software which is fantastic because it’s free and will work on most operating systems. Even though I have used Audacity before it was nice to have a refresher and pick up some useful tips about creating a professional standard podcast using the software.
OUCS run the Introduction to Podcasting throughout the year, as podcasting at Oxford is an ever increasing area of activity and in addition other courses on-screen and audio capture are available. OUCS have even created podcasts themselves about the art of podcasting so you can refresh your skills at your own desk, find the feed here. If you are at all interested in learning about podcasting at Oxford then I recommend signing up!
A very informative post, Laura! I think podcasting might be the way forward – students are more likely to look stuff up in the internet nowadays than rely on a good old book for reference. Unfortunately, Google is their friend, which isn’t what we want. If we can provide information on the internet, then they will hopefully use the library’s webpage as a reliable source, rather than Google.