Podcasting at OHIONET

This week has been a crazy one. Last week was even crazier, as I was traveling back and forth and missing flights and all the rest of it.

Flight times
It turns out, Continental is getting serious about the check in 30 minutes prior to departure. I like to arrive with just enough time to leisurely walk through security and up to my gate, just as they are calling my row...
I missed both flights this way, even though I had a good 25 minutes from eCheck-in, before departure. So, word of warning: they're cracking down and making us all wait ...but in the name of setting customer expectations, check out the cool wait times feature for security screening. This is cool--I wish they would post some information about this AT the actual airport security gates.

Podcasting with Walking Paper
But security gates notwithstanding, what I really wanted to talk about was Podcasting. Alane and I got to sit in on Aaron Schmidt's presentation last week for OHIONET. He cleverly described it as TiVo for radio. And just when we all start to think that this stuff is mainstream, everyone knows it, I'll give you a quick run-down of some of the questions asked:

*Is this like Napster?
*What's the difference between iTunes, iPod and Podcast?
*Do I need to load iPod software on all the campus computers?

Now this is not to make anyone feel bad, here. But it brought into sharp focus for me, the fact that not everyone swims in the technology waters and can just *absorb* from their surroundings. The information is out there for the taking, sure, and it's not really a matter of building another portal, another blog, another somewhere for people to go to find up-to-date information easily pre-digested.

Afraid to play?
To me, it's more about the approach to learning. It seemed that a good many people in the room were afraid to play. Afraid to get things wrong. Afraid to make a mistake, afraid to look silly by exposing their ignorance...but I tell you, you're not going to break your computer and you're not going to embarass yourself by trying things like podcasts or blogs or myspace--any more than you will be by NOT trying them! So, I will now faithfully repeat Aaron Schmidt's foolproof plan for podcasting:

Recipe for Podcast
1. Get a Blog
2. Do RSS 2.0 on Feedburner
3. Record MP3
4. Upload MP3
5. Write post with MP3 enclosure--link to MP3 file

And that's it! He also mentioned Podcasting 101 as a good resource. I also used Odeo, which is browser-based, when I was first skulking around with it.

So all of us, we need to Get to Playing!