OK, here we go -- my first attempt at a mini-lecture podcast composed with Camtasia and PowerPoint!
It's not pretty... for one thing, it's not scripted, so at times I sound like a blithering idiot. As well, the lighting on the webcam video is poor, and I didn't even bother to shave. But this gives you a sense of the sort of thing I'm driving at with these mini-lectures. It's a skosh over 17 minutes, so it could be tighter (I'd like these all to be 15 minutes or less), but it's close.
A note on uploading: I'm doing it at home tonight (wireless connection, cable modem), and (a) it's taking forever to upload, and (b) it's sucking the internet connection, so my wife's online work on her laptop with some course management software is really slow and sluggish. I'll need to see if things are faster or slower on campus, but usually my home network is a lot faster than the campus network. This might not bode well, at least under current campus network bandwidth conditions. How rough will this be when students are back on campus in full force?
Anyway, enjoy, and I'd be happy to receive any feedback you care to share.
Just finished listening to your pdocast. Overall, for a rough attempt, I feel it came off rather well, at least it gave me a better understanding of what "Rhetorical Situations" are trying to convey being just a technological goob. For this first attempt, I give it a 7 maybe 7.25 out of 10, and look forward to future posts.
ReplyDeleteNot bad, Steve! You've got a problem there with backlighting on your webcam in your home office, though. Audio sounded pretty decent; I'm assuming you just used the Macbook's built-in mic?
ReplyDeletePS, I think you'll find uploading much better on campus over the summer. Cable modems are asymmetric, meaning they allocate a disproportionate amount of the bandwidth to downloading, not uploading. On campus, that is not the case.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Shawn. Yeah, I figured backlighting was a problem -- I just did it at home at the dining room table, with a big window behind me... that's easily fixed. I just used the built-in mic and webcam, and yeah, it seemed OK. I need to figure out the zooming-in on screen details function, though.
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