An open letter to educational podcasters
Dear Educational Podcaster,
First, let me say I'm obviously a big fan of what you're doing. I listen to lots of podcasts regularly, both for entertainment and to keep up with professional issues. Please keep up the good work, and please take this as constructive criticism.
Producing a podcast and not providing an RSS feed wastes a lot of your effort and cuts off a lot of listeners. This is true even if you provide an iTunes subscription link. That's not enough.
Here's the thing: iTunes is huge. I get that. A lot of people are very happy purchasing music in the iTunes Music Store -- even though their much-lauded DRM-free offerings still embed personally identifying information to track users' files in case they ever get shared on the interwebs -- and a lot of people use iTunes as their podcatching software as well. And a lot of universities, my current and previous places of employment included, are signing on to the iTunes U program, which is really a cool idea.
I was looking for instructional technology podcasts the other day, and I found Teach with Tech, which looks like something I'd really be interested in and would probably listen to regularly. They have an RSS feed for the blog.... but the blog entries don't contain the podcast episodes as enclosures. They do offer a link to subscribe via iTunes, and a link to download episodes on a separate page. (I don't mean to pick on Teach with Tech, which looks like a great program. It's just the most recent example I've come across of this common problem.)
Here's the problem. Not everyone uses iTunes. Not everyone uses an iPod as their portable media player, believe it or not. And if you only offer your podcast in the iTunes Music Store, you're cutting yourself off from listeners who sync their media with other devices, because we can't use iTunes. (I have a Creative Zen, and use Juice as my podcatcher software. I use a combination of MediaMonkey and Winamp to manage my media library and sync with my Zen, since I like the way MediaMonkey does some things and Winamp does others.)
I could indeed subscribe to the program's blog via RSS in Google Reader and get notifications when they publish a new episode. And then I could click through and go to their download page and save the most recent episode, then save it to my media library and sync it to my Zen to listen to on the train later. But frankly that's too big a convenience hurdle for me to step over on a regular basis, when there are plenty of other podcasts that follow standards and work no matter what podcatcher and sync software I'm using, and automatically download episodes without my intervention. (Those podcasts also work with the iTunes's podcast directory and iTunes U, since RSS -- as a standard format -- imports easily into iTunes. It just doesn't work in the other direction.)
Lately one of my hobby horses has been what I've heard called "microcontent" and what I've tentatively taken to calling "portable content": digital objects that we can use and reuse in as many different online contexts as possible because its format allows us to easily embed it, copy it, and move it to suit our needs. As more education goes online, educators have got to be savvy about formats so that we can take advantage of this portability.
Over the next few years our students are going to be reading, viewing and listening to our online materials on a wider variety of computers, browsers, handheld devices, podcatchers, media software, and operating systems than we can envision right now. It's not enough to produce good materials. We have to produce them in formats that will work with the widest possible variety of devices and user environments. In libraries we talk a lot about "meeting the users where they are" -- this is just the latest example of that principle.
Love,
Jason
How did I get here?
(I can't type that sentence without hearing David Byrne in my head.)
Steven Chabot on Subject/Object asks how men in particular got into the library field.
In my case, it was more or less an accident, though in retrospect it seems inevitable that I ended up here. I remember when I started college at GSU, one of the first places on campus I started exploring was the library (the same library where I now work, incidentally). The OPAC was relatively new, I think: it was a series of terminals around the building with green monochrome text. I taught myself how to place holds by reading the help screens, and got scolded by the circulation staff for not going through them and filling out the paper form.
During and after college, I ended up in computer support jobs for several years. My turning point was getting a tech support job at the GSU Law Library in about 1992, my first library job. (This was a turning point in more ways than one, since I met my wife while working there.) The short version is that this led in a roundabout way to my first reference job, which was half reference work and half front-line tech support at the main GSU library. From there I moved to my reference and instruction job at Emory University's library, where I was really able to discover my path in library instruction and instructional technology. I stayed at Emory for seven years. My great co-workers at GSU and Emory over the years inspired me to get my MLIS, just in time to land my current gig.
In Steven's post he seems to be looking for answers to questions about gender in librarianship, and I'm not sure I've provided any useful data points. But I've seen this question about career paths come up once or twice before in the biblioblogobiosphere and have never gotten around to posting about it.
Seven things meme
Enthusiastic bandwagoner Amy Buckland* tagged me for this: Seven things you probably don't know about me. Her post is called "sept choses" because she's Canadian and therefore talks fancier.
I chose to reply to this version rather than the "16 things" version that's making the rounds on Facebook because it's less work.
- I lived in Bangkok, Thailand for three years with my dad, and graduated high school from the International School Bangkok. The only thing not fantastic about this was that after graduation my friends and I all moved back home, which scattered us to the four winds. I've recently reconnected with several of them on Facebook, which is very cool.
- My first computer was a Timex Sinclair with 1k of RAM. There wasn't much you could do with a computer at that point besides learn to program, so I learned a little BASIC. I remember a friend and I writing text adventure games for each other to play.
- My wife and I met thanks to my first library job. I was going back to school and moving to a half-time position and the library hired her to take over my previous job.
- I was an extra in the movie Good Morning, Vietnam. Robin Williams did a stand-up routine for all the extras dressed as soldiers on the tarmac of the air force base.
- I've been a vegetarian for ... twenty years or so? Can that be right? Damn, I'm old.
- I'm a fanatical Lou Reed fan, but I don't own Metal Machine Music.
- I could eat Mexican food every meal and not get bored.
Tagged: Nobody, everybody, you if you want. I don't like to apply pressure.
*I kid, I kid. Don't hit me, Amy.
Book Review – Cloud Computing
My review of the new book Cloud Computing by Michael Miller is up at the Tech Static. If you haven't checked out TS yet, it's a new blog focusing on technology book reviews for librarians, edited by Rachel Singer Gordon of The Nextgen Librarian's Survival Guide fame. Useful for collection development or if you're just interested in technology books.
PodCastle: In the House of the Seven Librarians
For fun on a Friday:
This week the fantasy fiction podcast Podcastle published In the House of the Seven Librarians, a fairy tale about a foundling raised in the Carnegie Library. Don't look for it to break any stereotypes about librarians being fussy women with hair buns, but... it's a fairy tale. That's not what it's for. Enjoy.
Library Mythbusters beats the Dalai Lama
For some reason, this episode of the library podcast I produced at Emory is the #1 download on Emory's iTunes U at the moment.
My co-producer Rachel Borchardt and I can't figure out why this particular episode is outdoing the Dalai Lama, Alice Walker and Salman Rushdie in downloads. It was a bit of a departure from the formula we usually used. Instead of introducing and discussing a resource (like primary sources or bibliography software) we did a top ten lists of misconceptions about the library and librarians as a sneaky way of promoting library services.
(It's not actually a video, even though that's a video player below. The Podpress player I use in my blog seems to think that all m4a files are videos.)
I thought it was a slightly goofy idea. Rachel, I am a big enough person to admit it when I'm wrong.
Also, now that it's official I want to congratulate Rachel on her new job as Research/Instruction Librarian at American University. We'll miss you in Atlanta, but AU is lucky to have you!
My Zotero book
Adventures in Library Instruction podcast
- Episode 35: The Guide on the Side w/ Meredith Farkas
- Episode 34: Discovery Layers in the Classroom
- Episode 33: Love the Cataloger; Hate the Catalog
My posts @GSU Library
I Support
Twittering
- @librarycourtney Happy to advise if you ever need it, of course.