the new plan

It's coming back together, or maybe more together. I'm feeling like I'm getting a hold of the reins and not careening wildly towards a cliff. I am planning to use a blog as the central point of delivery, as some podcasters do to provide a transcript. The does a number of things for me:

• It provides a central point of delivery that I can begin to use now. I give up very little that I would have gotten from my own website and I gain overall development time and don't have to wait to provide access to text, pics, and podcasts.
• It's easy to replicate. I didn't realize it before, but I have a stake in demonstrating a framework for non-technical instructors to consider.
• Interaction w/ learners is built in as comment posting.
• The blog seems to be a good fit with the podcast as a new media. True, they are both merely refinements of existing technologies, but they commonly used by digital natives for recreation. I'm enamored of the idea of taking learning to where the learners is at (sic). For those fogeys like myself, it can serve as an introduction to these new (standard) information delivery mechanisms.
• I will have to contend w/ the blog format of most recent posting appearing first. It seems that the worst case will be to repost in reverse order, but I'm not even sure that's necessary. Putting lessons on separate pages could ease this, if it's even an issue.

I like it. I have monkeyed with templates until I came up with something close enough to my branding though very basic. I'm looking forward to getting some lesson content up there this weekend.

link test

If you don't have iTunes, get it here & install it. (You'll want a fairly modern version to utilize "chapters". If you aren't at v7.02, you might as well upgrade. What the heck - it's free.)

Then you can check out a podcast, on your computer or downlad it to an iPod,

Base format crisis

So I've been sweating bullets since the prototype. It's obvious that the format at the center of this project has to carry the weight of holding this whole thing together. The podcasts can reinforce and enhance that, but not represent the body of the presented material. As I've been exploring podcasts, I came upon this guy, Matt I presume, who does "Matt's Today In History." He has a blog, but he also has podcasts & RSS feeds. The sound is quite good and he has the voice of a radio man; not all announcer-y or NPR stilted. I'm envious. It seems like a pretty nice way to go about it. But he doesn't use pictures. (He also hosts his RSS at a place called hipcast.com, which costs $$, but is interesting nonetheless.)
The blog is appealing because it makes the html publishing so much easier. While that may be a bit of a plus for me, I am trying to frame a model that may be used, in a piecemeal or ala carte manner, by much less technical instructors. I'll put a few graphics in this and see how it looks.

Hmmmh. Well, I can drag them around and WYSIWIG them better than I thought. If I were going to use a podcast that wasn't at the Apple Store, I guess I would just link it from hipcast.com or just a web server somewhere. Unless...

Nah, I can't use the graphic upload function to sneak my podcast up here - I get an error. I can't log into my csumb accts on either home or myspace, so I'll have to try that later, much to my chagrin.