My Failed Podcasting Experiment

If you click on the title, you will hear my brief podcast on how Walter Ong's concept of "secondary orality" - the orality that comes after text literacy, or with text literacy. I am in the classic learning-by-doing mode. First I used Blogger's Audio-Blogging tool and phoned in a blog. (See the post below.)

For this podcast, I used Audacity to create a recording, and iTunes (on my iBook)to reduce the size of the resulting mp3. Next I uploaded my mp3 file to ELGG, the very interesting learning landscape and eportfolio site, and used the resulting url to link to this blog, in the title.

In order to be able to do this, my learning path has been through reading educational technology blogs (take a look at my Blogroll, below on the right) and learning about podcasts. I sampled some, and then began searching the web to find out how to create one myself. The result, here, came from this searching and reading and trying and cursing, and searching some more and the bright idea (if I do say so myself)of using my ELGG account to host my mp3. I never did figure out how to do enclosures, and I wasn't sure which software might work for me.

So I have more to learn;->

... And I've been editing and re-editing my link to my mp3 file because my initial link corrupted.


... Still Trying

Trying Out Audio-Blogging!

Using http://audioblogger.com/ I phoned in this, what should I call it, audioblog, podcast, whatever, with a very few thoughts on Ong's "secondary orality" - of which this is an example!

Searching Through Metadata

What I find really, really exciting about the web is the way it allows me to access material. When I'm writing, I sometimes find myself at a loss for a quote that I want to add. If it is in my collection of books, sometimes I can find it, especially if I remember who the author is. But sometimes I just remember a phrase, and not the source. Quotation marks around that phrase and Google allow me to find it easily.

David Weinberger, author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined, about the web culture, (and a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society) has speculated on the direction of these possibilities. First he points out how we have historically attempted to categorize books:

We've been managing book metadata basically the same way since Callimachus cataloged the 400,000 scrolls in the Alexandrian Library at the turn of the third century BC. Callimachus listed the library's contents on scrolls, Medieval librarians used ledgers, and we use card catalogs, now mostly electronic. But until information started moving online, the basic strategy has been the same: Arrange the books one way on the shelves, physically separate the metadata from them, and arrange the metadata in convenient ways.

In the Boston Globe article this quote is drawn from, he looks at the impact of the web on how we organize our information about books and other information - our metadata:

The real challenge to traditional publishing today comes not from the digitizing of books, then, but from the very nature of the Web itself. Using metadata to assemble ideas and content from multiple sources, online readers become not passive recipients of bound ideas but active librarians, reviewers, anthologists, editors, commentators, even (re)publishers. Perhaps that's what truly scares publishers and authors about Google Print.

Yet what makes me worried is how few people are actually capable of searching in a more sophisticated way. Even the basic technique of adding quotation marks around a name or phrase when you search is not well known.

tags
searching
metadata

How We're Using the Internet: Survey Results

Some info gleaned from the Toronto Star - in an article by Tyler Hamiton

"While Internet use has a measurable displacement effect — with some time that might have been spent watching television, listening to the radio or reading magazines and newspapers instead devoted to the Internet — our data support the general conclusion that, for most users, the Internet serves more as a supplement to traditional media than a replacement," the study concluded.

"Internet users, it would seem, are simply more media-oriented than are non-users."

The results are based on a survey of 3,014 Canadians at least 18 years old who answered questions in a telephone interview in May and June of last year. The margin of error is 1.8 per cent, 19 times out of 20.

The study is the first to come out of the Canadian Internet Project, an ongoing research initiative led by a consortium of universities and supported with provincial, federal and private-sector funding.

Here is a chart, also from the Toronto Star, under the link "Survey Results", comparing users with non-users.



Get the Executive Summary pdf from the Canadian Internet Project website.

tags
Internet Use
Canadian survey
Web Use

What Do You Want to Do?

People share on the web. It's an attractive aspect of the culture. Phil Bradley has a useful web site. His
"I want to..." Page is especially helpful:

"I want to..." is a page of utilities, such as social utilities, social bookmarking and various other software packages that let you do things. (Added 27/10/05)

Definitely worth Furling and/or bookmarking.