So my friend, Greg, put together a wiki for some high school history class and that got me thinking about my blog and podcasting….

Hmmm…. checked out your wiki… what sort of “control” have you set up for contributors as far as them being actual students in the class… just curious. I didn’t click on the “join” link, i guess if I had I could probably answer my own question, but then that would defeat the purpose of dialogue. Right? Anyway, I did click on the topic links on the left and I surmise that you created a “page” for each heading in the course for them to contribute their understanding of the topic. I’d be curious about how the students actually would use it. We created a wiki (or two) over the past two terms at Pepperdine, but quite frankly I was so up to my eyeballs just trying to keep up (which I failed in miserably… ) that I never really contributed to the effort. For whatever reason, I’ve greatly enjoyed the solo blogging thing much more, especially after I got a better handle on how to add graphic elements.

Over the past couple of months it’s dawned on me, however, that I really don’t read anyone else’s blog (except maybe the random entry or two that Michelle puts up, or when you post something). For the most part my interaction with the cyber-info-chain seems to be via podcasts (internet audio synced to my MP3 player and computer). I love to write and create but I just don’t seem to make time for reading. Pretty much any time I’m not teaching or writing myself, however, I have some podcast playing, mostly tech info kinds of stuff. Anyway, I showed a twenty-something savvy Pepperdine friend, Holly (who used to have her own blog on livejournal…. “diorific_one”), one of my BLOGs and she was “Woe, way too much writing…” which is what I get from a lot of the younger set, where their idea of a BLOG is a goofy picture and a caption (a la MySpace) and not really a magazine/newspaper-sized article. So all of this was making me wonder whether I should shift to taking my stuff and creating a podcast. Funny thing is, as long as my stuff might seem as far as writing is concerned, it’s probably not even five-minutes in terms of reading it (that’s always frustrating that it can take hours or even days for me to put something together, the writing and pictures, and the “consumer” can go through it in a matter of minutes or in some cases seconds… ack!).

I remember telling Holly about this and at the same time wondering if just audio-podcasting was “so last year.” But then, having produced my own homebrew videos for years, I know that I’m too much of a perfectionist and it’d take me forever to release anything. I mean, I still have DV video from four years ago, taken during the masters program that I’ve never edited or released and I have tons of stuff taken over the last year with the doctorate program that’s never even been played, much less edited. But then, while I was sharing this with Holly I said something about wishing that there was some easy way to do the audio part of a podcast, but have some kind of visual support, like the pictures and graphics that I already put into my blogs. I really do like having something that’s more than just words on the screen. Well, surprise, surprise, Apple just released an update of it’s “media suite” (iLife ’06) and in it they’ve made if possible to do “enhanced” podcasting right inside their mixing/music program, garageband. So, I’m picking up a family copy (for the siblings and I) on Sunday and we’ll see if this project sees the light of day. Alas, the resulting podcast will only play in iTunes or on an iPod so there’s some restrictions on its universality, but I’m hoping that there might be a way to take an enhanced podcast and rip down to MP3 format for those who aren’t using iTunes or an iPod.

One more thing, before this becomes too much of an Apple commercial, they’ve also upgraded their digital photo packages, iPhoto, so that one can put together a virtual photo album and post a link and someone else, using an RSS aware Internet browser (like FireFox), can have automatic updates of the album without using email or without the person “posting” the pictures having to create a website, etc. It’s even more automatic if the person posting the pictures and the viewer both have a copy iPhoto running on their computer. Also, former Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki is pushing another app that runs on Windows and Mac, Filmloop, that’ll put the “album” on your desktop with even more automatic updating between the person posting pictures and the viewer. I’d really like to find a much better way to post my tons of photos. I spent weeks working on the pics from the doctorate tech camp from over a year ago and I’m still not done tweaking them (I want to add a slideshow made from the collection…. ). So, stay tuned…. [editor’s note: I closed my Pepperdine pix site and began moving all of my pix to my flickr account… that’s where the link goes to now….jbb june 4, 2007]Good thing I’m taking a break from Pepperdine so that I can catch up on works stuff.. ha ha, right. JBB