Misery Loves Company

As a new teacher (five years now teaching video production, or ten years, if I count teaching art to senior citizens), I decided to seek out wisdom from other teachers by Googling “teacher’s blog.” Right away I found two fascinating blogs and subscribed to them:

Anonymous Teacher Blog

Hipteacher

The two teachers here spill their guts about frustrating situations they’ve encountered in recent days and how they’ve dealt with behavior problems, as well as interesting ways they’ve found to help students understand difficult subjects such as reading Shakespeare.

Sometimes I think I’m a terrible teacher because half my students stare blankly at me most of the time. I thought I was unique in being torn between wanting to be “cool” in my students’ eyes and wanting to show them how much they can miss by being “cool.” Sometimes I doubt my professionalism because I let students get under my skin.

It’s great to read these blogs and see that I am not alone in thoughts and doubts like these. From grade school to academia, it seems, being a teacher is always somewhat akin to being a zookeeper and competing with the monkeys.

Reading about the adventures of these two teachers is giving me comfort, insight and ideas. Also valuable are the comments from other teachers, who provide advice when the blogger is facing a dilemna or wondering how to feel about something that happened in class. What a wonderful new way to find a “support group.”

Corrected Links to Podcasts

I didn’t realize that linking to a podcast’s location in iTunes was a problem. Here are links to my two podcasts’ websites:

Nordic Drones

Orson Welles On the Air

Getting Down to Business

The “Podcasting Masters” book strikes me as being ironically more “down to business” than the Business Podcasting book. I appreciate the practical advice and strong opinions the “Masters” offer.

Links to Podcasts

Here are links to the two podcasts to which I subscribed last week.

Orson Welles on the Air
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=267928081

Nordic Drones
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=273570047

PodPower to the People!

This week’s readings got me fired up about the egalitarian aspects of podcasting. It really is incredible that we have this new medium in which anyone can say anything they want to an unlimited audience around the world. What a slap in the face of corporate media, who have enjoyed such a monopoly on information, opinion and entertainment for so long! It’s also wonderful that the prevailing trend in podcasting is toward an informal, honest style.

I was struck by a section of the Business Podcasting book in which the author included producing “infomercials” in his recipe for failure in podcasting. I am a person who is allergic to advertising — even the “suggestive selling” of a waiter in a restuarant makes my nose start to twitch — so I appreciate the fact that even businesses have recognized that when podcasting, they need to put away the big drill they usually use to bore into people’s brains.

In my career as a producer of corporate and organizational videos, I’ve always used and advocated a style based on documentary film, using interviews rather than scripted voice-overs and candid footage rather than staged scenes. I realize that my ultimate goal is to produce propaganda, but I feel that this style forces both me and my clients to approach the ideas or products we are promoting in a more honest and down-to-earth manner than we would in a strictly advertising style. I’m glad to see this same approach becoming widespread in business podcasting.

The list of leading podcasts in the genres chapter of “Tricks of the Podcasting Masters” book is really intriguing. I definitely want to listen some of these fun-sounding podcasts. I think I’ll have a few minutes of free time to do this, oh, maybe in late August. Yikes!

Microphone Madness

This week I tested six different sound recording/microphone setups for podcasting. Episode Two of “Adentures in Podcasting” is a six-minute comparision of recordings made with each combination of hardware. Listen in and decide for yourself which combination might work best for you.

Choosing podcasts

Whew! It was quite a chore to complete the assigment of subscribing to two podcasts. I started by going to iTunes and trying out a few podcasts from their lists of recommendations, but I was bored by most of what I heard. There was one podcast from a guy in New Jersey, just chatting about his day while sipping from a glass of whiskey, that kept me entertained for about twenty minutes. The whole episode ran over three hours, and I jumped ahead to find out how drunk he sounded by the end. He must have been sipping pretty slowly, because he still sounded pretty sober. I couldn’t imagine listening to him for several hours at a time, however, so I unsubscribed.

I soon realized that I needed to enter key words into the search window to find really interesting stuff. I succeeded quickly, with a pilot for a talk show about Swedish bagpipes. The host played some very unusual and beautiful bagpipe music and had several good conversations with Swedish pipers. He also talked with a displaced Irish Uillean piper who remarked that although there are about 12 other Irish pipers living in Sweden, they are widely scattered and almost never get to see each other. Thank goodness for the Internet, he commented, for bringing Irish bagpipers who live in Sweden together at last!

Since I talked, in my video podcast, about the probability that Orsen Welles would be podcasting if he were alive today, I had to find something on Orsen Welles. Sure enough, I found a regular podcast called “Orson Welles: On the Air,” featuring rare recordings of Orson Welles radio shows including a short lived comedy talk show. So I was right: Orson is out there today, podcasting with the best of them, from beyond the grave.

Am I supposed to post the URLs for these podcasts somewhere? I’ll have to figure out how to do that.

Podcasting Therapy

Yesterday during a long commute I was staring out the bus window at a lot of ugly new condominium buildings. Rather than just brooding, as I usually do, about the low state of contemporary architecture, and getting depressed, as I often do, about the state of contemporary culture, or heck, the whole state of the world (why not?) — instead, I started composing a fantasy podcast about these subjects in my head. I started imagining all sorts of wry things I might say and various sound effects and voice impressions I might do to lampoon various subjects.

Hopefully my lips weren’t moving too much while I was doing this, but I found the mental exercise to be sort of comforting. It soothed me to realize that instead of just thinking cynical thoughts all the time, I could actually speak them out loud to the world! And that some people might actually listen! I’m not sure that I will actually do any of this, but just the idea that I can if I want to, thanks to this rather extraordinary new medium of podcasting, gave me a sense of freedom and even a little hope.

The next time I see one of those angry people talking to themselves loudly on the street, I’ll be tempted to walk up to them and say, “Hey! Did you ever think about starting a podcast?”

DOCUMENTARY INTERVIEW TECHNIQUES

This week’s reading in “Tricks of the Podcasting Masters” offers excellent advice about conducting interviews for talk-show style podcasts. Not all podcasts, however, are talk shows. The guidelines in the reading may not work as well for other formats such as documentary-style podcasts.

A documentary-style podcast usually features a narrator telling a story, intersperesed with exerpts from interviews with various people. In these programs, the audience usually does not hear a series of questions and answers between an interviewer and a guest; they only hear the interviewee’s answers.

Interviewing for this type of program requires somewhat different techniques, because the goal is not so much to have a conversation, but to generate statements from the interviewee that can stand on their own without the context of the interviewer’s question. One of the most important requirements is that interviewees begin their answers with complete sentences.

One way to achieve this is for the interveiwer to explain to the interviewee beforehand: “My questions will not be used in the finished program, only your answers, so please try to start your answers with complete sentences or re-state my questions in your answers.”

I often feel awkward asking this of an interviewee, however, so I have developed a subtler technique: I simply don’t ask any questions. Instead, I invite my interviewee to tell stories. Rather than starting with an interrogative word such as “who,” “what,” “where,” “when,” or “how,” I start with “Tell us about…,” or “Explain how you…,” or “Describe your feelings…” Phrasing my “questions” this way pretty much forces the interviewee to begin with a complete sentence and tell a self-containted story.

If, for example, you ask an interviewee, “How’s the weather out there?,” you are likely to get the answer, “Oh, it’s fine.”

On the other hand, if you ask the interviewee to “Tell us where you are and describe what the weather’s like there today,” you may get an answer like, “Well, I’m in Boulder, Colorado and it’s warm and the sky is crystal clear and it just doesn’t get much better than this.” This is the kind of sound bite you want when producing documentary-style programs.

Okay, I Get It

This week’s readings convinced me that podcasting really is an important new phenomenon, not just a fad or simply “audio on the Web.” Seeing people walking down the sidewalk with wires dangling from their ears, I always blithely assumed they were pounding their brains with rap or death metal. Now I realize that they might be learning Japanese or working their way through Moby Dick.

The spoken word certainly does offer advantages over text, as the readings point out, because of its ability to convey inflection and emotion. There is also a great deal to be said about the authenticity of conversational speech versus both text and written speech. As a video producer, I used to write a lot of narrtions and hire professional announcers for the soundtracks of my programs. In recent years, I’ve almost entirely abandoned this practice, turning instead to casual interviews for telling my stories. This requires a lot of work (especially in editing) and gives me much less control over what is said, but I find that the end products speak to audiences in much more convincing, exciting ways than most written narrations.

Although I’m certainly excited about the possibilities of video podcasting, I can see that audio podcasting is probably the most versatile form, simply because it allows for multitasking. You can’t (or certainly shouldn’t) read or watch a video while driving a car, but there’s no reason why you can’t listen to the radio or a podcast. For boring tasks where people can work “on autopilot,” listening to spoken words is actually a great way to stay alert and energized.

I remember working as a filing clerk in a bank in Manhattan many years ago. If it hadn’t been for the ability to listen to Pacifica Radio on a headset, I probably would have dozed off, no matter how much coffee I consumed. I listened, fascinated and muttering under my breath, to live broadcasts of the Iran/Contra hearings and the confirmation of Judge Bork, while I sorted and filed thousands of little yellow pieces of paper that had no meaning to me whatsoever.

Perhaps one of the biggest arguments for the effectiveness of podcasting is its ease of production. It may take longer for people to listen to a podcast than to read the same words, but for most people it’s a heck of a lot quicker to say something than to sit down and write it. As one of the writers pointed out, corporations can simply use the telephone to gather media and shoot it right out onto the Internet in a matter of minutes: a huge savings in time and cost over, say, producing a newsletter or even an email blast.

I do worry a little, however, about the accuracy of information contained in podcasts. People are not only more casual in their style of communicating when speaking; they can also be very casual or even careless with their facts. I think we all have a tendancy toward broad generalization when speaking spontaneously and certainly favor colorful anecdotes over solid arguments. Recently, while researching a paper on media law, I transcribed parts of two podcasts into my notes and was struck by several innacuracies and careless statements that I doubt the speakers would have made if they had been writing on the same subjects.