For this week’s assignment I tried to push out of my comfort zone a little. I’m one of those folks that struggles to hear themselves over a recording, but I challenged myself to make a podcast-style, recorded version of my original ‘What’s In Your Bag?’ assignment. I ran into challenges.
The script came easy enough. I looked into common podcast structures and the narrative was more or less unchanged in substance from the layout of my first assignment, but I made it more conversational and less rigid than my written assignment. I tend to skew towards some formalities, language, and sentence structures that do not sound appropriate when having a conversation. That was fun and I tried to emulate some of the podcasts I have heard.
The recording was a challenge. As mentioned in both my written article and podcast, I have a school district issued laptop. When I went to record on the weekend, I found out that ‘privacy & security’ settings were locked down to avoid audio and video recording. I should have known though; last year I hosted a Zoom meeting for parents new to the school I’m at, only to find out that the ‘Share My Screen’ option wasn’t permitted on my device.
The other challenge became about platforms. I never did stumble upon a (free) podcast software, application, or website that was simple for my first attempt. After some failed attempts, I resigned myself to recording over Zoom.
This attempt, however amateur, made me consider a couple of things. First, just how much written text is different from oral, even when saying the same narrative. The process of imagining a version of a written article in a more conversational tone put into perspective how communication is affected by the medium. The message can remain consistent, but the vehicle in which is presented necessitates change. On one hand, very few would want to listen to me read aloud many of the essays, articles, and papers I’ve written due to their formality. On the other hand, written articles that were verbatim transcripts of my conversations could look unpolished. Perhaps it’s simply a case of ‘the right tool for the right job’.
As I re-listened to my “podcast”, I also felt the absence of some of editing and processing that goes into making a good podcast – introductory music that fades in and out, background sound effects to add depth to the listener’s experience, and low quality sound. There are all sorts of platforms that those of us in education use on a frequent basis to communicate information and educate, (emails, LMS, hard copies, lectures, and, yes podcasts). Moving forward I’d like to find an app or software that would help present the podcast more professionally; the one I present here feels more like a ‘proof of concept’, the basic idea of a podcast, but one that needs to be fully fleshed out.