Topics in Digital Storytelling – Podcasts
I’m pleased to announce that the podcast audio gallery is now available on the table at the top of the stairs to the second floor of the Creative Arts Building.
I’m working to get an iPad for the project because I think it’ll just be easier for people to manipulate. But it has the almost-classic experience through the iPod Touch, a discontinued device.
Invite friends to experience the projects.
We’ll add more as we go through the term, and I’ll invite you to agree to be included – or not.
Audio Postcard Assignment (Soundscape 1) – Due Date Postponed to February 12.
Need the assignment? Find the link to Season 3 in the right sidebar of the course site ->
In our remaining minutes in Monday’s class, I was unable to quickly locate where I had embedded the SAMPLE AUDIO POSTCARD I wanted to share as you began to lock in on your approach. I found it on the actual assignment page – doh!
To make it easy for us, here’s the sample:
What to Notice?
I figured I should also share my own example of an Audio Postcard, so here it is – with a sample brief blog post AND my own self-score:
Brief Blog Post on the Project
In Fall 2022, my wife and I visited our daughter in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Not far from the AirBnB was one of the many pocket park green spaces in the city, a park dedicated to the many Armenians who immigrated to Argentina in the late 1800s and, especially, in the early 20th century, as they fled the Armenian genocide. My audio postcard is a report from La Plaza Inmigrantes de Armenia, Buenos Aires, Argentina. I used a voice recorder app on my Pixel 5 phone to record the soundscape, with school children, street noises, and other soundmarks from the park. Later, I pulled in the Creative Commons-licensed tango music, edited the sounds of the park, and added my narration. I’m pretty pleased with the project, but I also know that I had to stretch things out too far to get to the minimum length.
Here’s my own critique that focuses on the Specifications for the Project:
Overal Point Tally: 4500 POINTS (or 4000 Points?)
This project illustrates some of the tensions one might encounter in an audio project that anchored by not enough audio. As I did not capture enough audio for the soundscape project, I was forced into some funny business: Open with long, Argentina-themed tango music; use all 15 seconds for Intro; stretch the Outro well beyond the 15-second limit. The project squeaks over the line at 2:17, but it comes at a 500-point penalty. If we ding me on the Intro, it’s another 500-point penalty.
Thursday was fun – until we hit the snag of “no ePortfolio embed functionality” for the students!
It’s taken me a hot minute, but I think I have the workaround. I’ll spare you the gory details about my efforts. Instead, I’ll share the path forward. It’s not hard, thankfully!
STEP ONE
STEP TWO
STEP THREE – The Hard Part (if there’s one!)
We need to change the opening and closing HTML elements to Shortcode format. It’s easy!
That’s it!
I tested this Shortcode approach on a UNEPortfolios site using a student-level access, and it worked just fine. It should work for you.
Big Deal Today – Learning about Peers & Critiques of Podcasts!!
Quick Rundown for Thursday (a checklist of sorts!)
Note: In the future, we will not use class time for uploading, embedding, and drafting framing statements for our work. It will be part of the expectation. The good thing about all this is that we’ll have more time for the fun part – listening, engaging, critiquing.
If this were a newspaper, a headline like this post’s title would be a “dog bites man” story. It’s not news.
In the context of a class, of course it is news because it means some shuffling has to happen. (We all love that!)
Cripps called an audible in an email sent Thursday morning, following the announcement that the college was closed until 10. Here’s what he wrote:
CMM 225 will be cancelled today.
Obviously, this cancellation further delays our work on the Interview 1 project. BUT it does not delay other elements of the course. What to do for Monday:
If you’ve not used ePortfolio before, I expect you’ll spend about 90-120 minutes doing what I’ve outlined above. If you’ve been using ePortfolio and are comfortable with it, I think you cut that time in half – or more.
As we saw on Day 1, each of us will share much of our work via the ePortfolio. But it’s a little more complicated than that. We need to access 3 other platforms: BrightSpace (for grades); Google Drive (to retrieve and upload audio associated with podcasts); and Transistor (to put Podcasts in a streaming server).
Easy, as we all know how to find that bit.
Cripps has created and shared two Folders with you. One has Podcast Resource files and is shared with all students in the class. The other is for YOU to UPLOAD project files and is shared only with you.
I’ll walk us through the upload process as we start to have projects – 1/22 and 1/25.
Look for an email from Transistor.fm and follow the instructions. Here’s my little guide to getting set up and putting your Podcasts into Transistor.
ePortfolios all run on WordPress (xyz.uneportfolio.org). You’ll be uploading homework into that space, principally as blog posts. We’ll use a Category (CMM 225) to help us group that work.
If you’ve not used ePortfolio before, find the email sent the morning of 1/22 and follow activation/login instructions. That’s a good start for you – for now.
As with other tools, I’ll help walk us through some of the early bits here. Most students are ePortfolio veterans, so there’s a lot of peer-to-peer support available. UNE’s SASC and the DigiSpace is a good additional resource.
I’m really excited to discover the podcasts you’ll make this term, and I hope you really have fun exercising your creativity, developing some audio editing techniques, and telling interesting and provocative audio stories.
This is not a “technical skills” course. We will learn and practice some fairly straightforward techniques using audio editing software. And you’ll get comfortable with those techniques over the first few podcasts. But our real focus is on your audio storytelling within the medium of the podcast.
We’ll do some reading and talking about some of the issues we’ll engage in the term. And we’ll have a good bit of in-class time for audio editing. At the same time, we will need to do a good bit of “homework,” defined as audio capture, audio editing, and, well, writing.