On Wednesday I was asked to present a breakout session for my unit's all staff meeting on podcasting and iTunes U. I did the typical thing, but very quickly as I only had 20 minutes. Again, I should have recorded it, but I blew it again. One of the things I discussed was the choice of supporting Audacity on podium machines for faculty podcasting during class. Yes, there are better tools to create podcasts with, but Audacity is a cross platform solution. One of the things that struck me were the comments by one person after the session that there were so many better solutions on the Mac. I told him I understood, but he insisted that we were cheating faculty by pushing Audacity. I hate to say it, but I sort of agree ... unfortunately, the reality of our situation is that only about 75 of the hundreds of podiums on our campus have Macs in them. Maybe in the next couple of years I can rely on more Macs and push some of the best software out there ... between GarageBand and ProfCast there is so much we could be doing. All of our Macs do have GarageBand installed.
I imagine over time we'll develop more instructional material to support all these tools. We are collecting a list of all the software pre-installed on the podium Macs and PCs and will begin creating instructions on how to use them all. Until then, we'll train on Audacity because it can serve the masses.
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