Jane Bethel

Paper title: Podcasting Power

Abstract:
The power of podcasting can come from its characteristics as key points of specific topics , as audio explanatory material, and as an easy-to-use experience. More characteristics describe podcasts as a learning aide offered at the user’s point of need, appropriate for the average human being’s attention span, and as a reinforcement of knowledge learned through the dimension of conversation. Pure podcasts still do exist, but much broadcasting today adds the video element. This paper is geared to mainly a discussion of academic-centered audio-only podcasts.
Successful libraries of the future will incorporate participatory network service such as hosting educational podcasts or providing the tools to make them. Podcasts along with other library 2.0 services will keep patrons using the library and serve established user-centered patrons already listening to podcasts of their own personal choosing. The power of personal choice is satisfying and remains viable because it is the people’s choice.
The effectiveness and usefulness of educational or informational podcasts need to be measured for qualitative analysis in order to know if the production effort is worth the time and money, no matter how short or simple. Just because you make a podcast does not mean that the people will come to hear it. It must be powerful enough to fill the needs of the information seeker. Always evaluate by survey and/or through user interviews.

Definition:
My paper will take a peak at the history of podcasting, its natural symbiosis with video or still images, stay focused on informational or educational podcast themes for library involvement in patrons’ lives, and validate simple yet effective teaching components. Podcasting is just one part of the library 2.0 experience and the greater web 2.0 experience. Libraries who incorporate participatory services send a message to the user that the library invites participatory conversations. Conversational pieces are brought to you by participating and socially networked libraries.

So I’m becoming infected. Infected with the MacBook transportability, reading/writing more online. Infected with the Web 2.0 tools. Infected with understanding the personal perks for people like me. Infected with making my social world more enjoyable because I have the power to select a social realm of my own design.

The portability of a laptop lets me multitask. Do my homework and watch David Letterman, see/hear musical groups good enough to get invited to New York city. All college students have an opinion about popular musical groups and if I become familiar with these groups, it provides me with conversation starters. I work with 7 college students and I like to have a personal relationship with them besides the business relationship I have being their boss.

My student workers starting posting to my cleaned-up work blog this week at the end of their shifts. Yeah! Celebrate! My work blog was born in October, last year, but I found it cumbersome and less intuitive than wordpress to setup and manage. Receiving some guidance in this class about setting up a wordpress account was a big bonus. I could transfer setup and management skills to the “other” publishing system. Students come to work for an hour or two a day. I might see 5 workers throughout any workday. Trying to delegate work, remember a work assignment’s stopping point, or transfer lines of communication when we do not all work together all the time was a big time eater. The blog lets us tell one another where the workflow is, what bumps have been encountered, and a hint, some shop talk, of what it is that ‘another person’ does. It is working. Celebrate!
I am paying attention to the social networks I have dived into. I’m really paying attention and not just paying “continuous partial attention” (Roush 2005). I noticed on a wordpress’s page the “Write your tag” feature with a list of tags in alphabetical order until: travel, video, health. Who can tell me why this is so? These tags are sometimes like those in subject catagories at the Library of Congress and sometimes in a category us ’social creatures’ use all the time, like “random”. Gotta love it! Yup, I’m catching the fever, becoming infected with Web 2.0. I thought I should know about these tools for professional sake but wouldn’t find them of much value at my personal level.  I was wrong.