Today I want to do two things. First, I want to share the postmortem form for the first project so you have an idea of what kinds of questions I will ask you to consider as you finish the first project. Second, I want to introduce Project 4, the Podcast Project, so you/we can begin thinking about what topics you might work on (and begin looking for criteria).
Project One Postmortem
- In three sentences, tell me about your project (what is it trying to say/do?)
- How would you, in two or three sentences, explain to someone what Ong has to say about literacy?
- How would you, in two or three sentences, explain to someone what Ulmer has to say about electracy?
- What do you perceive as a connection between Ong and Ulmer? How did you attempt to highlight this connection in your web site?
- What tools did you use to make your project? Tell me about your workflow process
- What went right? What is your favorite part of the project?
- What went wrong? What could have worked out better?
Project Expectations
I will ask you to work in groups of 2-3 to create a Podcast series of three episodes on a common subject or theme (understood loosely). Each episode should be around 10 minutes. I have casually titled the project “Fly Your Nerd Flag High” in hopes that you will geek out over a particular activity or topic (we’re all nerdy about something, right?). Toward the end of class today, I will ask you to tweet out a pitch idea for a Podcast, and we will spend some time favoriting and retweeting pitches.
The podcast should have some theme music (must be original composition or copyleft/CreativeCommons).
You will publish your podcast episodes on iTunes and create a tumblr page and twitter account to promote the project.
Podcast Resources
I’ll be up front with you: this is my first attempt to teach a podcast project, and so I will ask for a bit of patience (and any help!) collecting resources for this project. In fact, I am going to start by having you do a little bit of work for me. I want you to spend the next 15 minutes in class searching for materials related to podcasts: post links to these materials on our class twitter feed (use the #enc3416 hastag). What is a podcast? What do I need to do one? What are some exemplary podcasts? How can I set up a studio space at home? Can I record a podcast using Google Chat?
We should be able to see resources posted here in live time:
I will add them all to a delicious feed on podcast resources that will be available here.
Some starter resources:
- Teachers’ Guide on the Use of Podcasting (2012)
- Apple’s instructions for publishing a podcast and their podcasting FAQ
- Auphonic’s “How to Podcast for Free” article (2013)
- Adam Wilcox’s How to Podcast with Tumblr tutorial
- Mashable’s list of 70 Resources for Podcasts (2007)
- Audacity (free audio editing software)
- HongKiat.com’s guide to setting up and basic editing
Some sample podcasts:
- Slate’s list of the top 25 Podcasting episodes of all-time
- Flimspotting
- KairosCast
- Not Your Mama’s Gamer
- Slate’s Hang Up and Listen
- Fangraphs baseball
- DiceTower
- BBC’s “In Our Time”
- My Brother, My Brother, and Me
Eventually we will want to listen to enough podcasts to get a sense of their genre conventions and arrangements. But for right now, we want to think about ideas for topics and format. What I hope you see is that a podcast is neither a completely scripted reading nor an entirely spontaneous conversation: it is a kind of planned spontaneity.
