Podcasting is such an amazingly adaptable tool for communication. I’m an infrequent listener to podcasts. In the past I’ve listened to Keith Olberman’s podcast for his funny political commentaries. And I’ve listened to NPR for author interviews and recently discovered that they also have podcasts of concerts! I listened to REM at the SXSW festival in Austin which was terrific since I was going to see them in Vancouver only a week later.
The library podcast that I’m listening to nowadays is the Library 2.0 Gang on Marshall Breeding’s Library & Technology Guides website. The episode I listened to really demonstrates the power of podcasting to link people all over the world. The three people who were discussing 2.0 were spread around the world in different timezones;one in the USA; another in Sweden; and a third in the Mediterranean. The audio was terrible because they were all talking on phone lines and someone was a heavy breather..ugh, but even so the content was very interesting.
I think there is definitely a place for podcasts in Sno-Isle both internally and externally for our patrons. Internally, I think the challenge is for us to lose the culture of perfection and think of these as kind of recorded conference call conversations. We could use them for all sorts of training modules and host them on the Intranet, so they could be played for staff meetings, or individual training. If we can stop worrying about them being perfect, then we’ll be able to get these going–otherwise I fear that it won’t happen. After all people are busy and perfection takes a long time, but a phone call takes a few moments. I’d say put webcams on pcs and laptops for those people likely to be called to create these internal podcasts and then develop topics and go from there.
The key to making them usable I think would be to annotate them so we’d know when information in a podcast needs to be updated, or taken down. I could go on but for now, I’ll conclude by saying that podcasting definitely has a place at Sno-Isle.
Filed under: SIL 20 for 2.0, podcasting | Tagged: podcasting
