The aggravating part about blog-a-days is that once you’ve said you’ll do them you feel obligated to continue even when you’ve had a long day and have nothing in particular to say. That said, what I want to talk about, the thing that occurs to me just this instant, is that I truly admire people who manage to live blog conferences. I got an email this week asking if I was interested in blogging CCCC, which unfortunately and quite sadly from my point of view, I will not attend this year. I thought about this email today while I sat in a session at CFTTC, a conference I was able to make by virtue of the fact that it is close enough to my house to go without staying overnight, and I scored free admission for presenting. Or, more precisely, I scored free admission for presenting at the pre-conference and for begging the right person for a name tag to come back to the regular conference.
What I realized while taking in info gained via my free name tag is that I’m not your girl if you are looking for live event blogging. I can barely keep up with my tote bag at conferences without assistance. They wear me out, and I don’t have a clue what I want to say about them until I’ve gone home and stewed in the information a bit. By the time I do know what I think, I’ve forgotten half of what was learned. Funny how it just works out that way.
Cheers to you, live bloggers. You’re the bee’s knees.
So here I am home from day 2 at the Beau Rivage convention center, and while I can’t get a clear analysis in my head yet of most of the day, what I do have on my mind is podcasting. I see more casting in my future and yours. I have the inner eye in these matters, or ear as it were.
That and I began a lobbying effort (harassment campaign, whatever) to set up an iTunes U page for my school today and discovered in the process that other people are actually thinking along the same lines.
I’ve been interested in podcasting for several years. Really, I was trying it soon after I first heard the word. I’ve worked on it here and there from time to time. I always believed it was a great thing, but it always seemed like more trouble than it was worth to keep up regularly.
Now that I have the MacBook with its built in microphone and podcasting software, it seems much easier. Not only that, but there seems to be more opportunities than ever now to distribute podcasts.
I think more video exists in your future and mine as well, but I don’t want to leave audio behind for the sake of it either. Students listen to class audio files while they are doing other things. They can’t drive and watch a class video at the same time, but they can listen to an audio lecture in the car on the way to pick up the kids from soccer practice. In the on-the-go world we live in, that difference can be the difference in success and failure.
Thus, podcasting is my word of the day.
Tomorrow, I am not going back to the technology conference. I head the other direction for pieces of a literary event along with a committee meeting for an organization. Who knows what my word of the day will be there. If I were to hazard a guess at this point, I’d say two words: Barry Hannah.
Rest in peace, Barry. Rest in peace.