::fibreculture:: WebCT, Open Source and Beyond

[Julian Knowles]

Hi Tama,

Now here is some serious context! Thank you for taking the time. Often 
on lists we adopt a kind of shorthand method of communication which 
leads us to further questions... its all good.

By the way I did converse with an Audacity developer who picked up my 
post via my friend's RSS feed!! We had a 'robust' exchange but he very 
graciously accepted my criticisms, agreeing that it probably wasn't 
suitable for the teaching of digital audio production. I should say, he 
agreed it "didn't meet my needs".... Whether he thought I was 'high 
maintenance' or not is another story. Ha!

Actually I should add that the students I was teaching were in their 
first semester of a degree program in Sound, Composition and Music 
Production. Although it was semester one in first year, many of them 
had some prior experience with production software and I wanted to move 
quite swiftly with them.  Different student groups will progress with 
the software at different speeds.


> For our major research/assessment piece in the course, students are
> being asked to create a podcast that demonstrates an innovative
> approach to syndicated digital audio.  I've got at most two 2hour lab
> sessions for teaching students everything they need to record, edit
> and upload their audio.  Audacity is relatively streamlined and pretty
> straightforward to use, so it's an easy one to teach and an easy one
> for students to grasp quickly.  It records, edits, has some basic
> effects and filters, and exports to most formats.  From the ideas
> students have voiced about their podcasts, these are all the tools
> they need!

I can see it working in this context (2 x 2 hour labs). Actually one 
thing I forgot to mention was its apparent in ability to talk to a 
variety of external sound hardware (support for CoreAudio in OSX is 
flaky).  But you only hit this when you go 'professional' and start 
using external audio interfaces... This caused a major headache for us 
at one point when I was trying to get then to record from a stereo mic 
set-up, through mic pre-amps and an audio interface, straight into 
Audacity.

Go the mini-jack in and you're fine....

>> From a philosophical perspective, one of the things I wanted students
> to explore was the ease of grassroots digital media productive for
> non-professionals with non-professional (or, at least, non-commercial)
> tools wherever possible.  That's why we use Blogger even though it has
> very clear limitations (only ATOM feeds, no categories, no native
> tagging, etc.).  If we combine Blogger, the free ATOM to RSS2.0 feed
> generator Feedburner, the free hosting at OurMedia.org, a home PC or
> Mac with even a crappy $25 mic, Audacity (and possibly a
> podcasting-specific open source tool like Pod Producer
> <http://radix.com.mx/podproducer/>, then we have all the technology
> needed to produce a podcast and the only paid parts are the hardware
> (and the OS if you want to get picky).

hey, you forgot to mention the $20,000 worth of software cracks in 
their somewhere... - an essential part of any 'grassroots' student 
set-up!!!

You mentioned 'software laden' uni computer labs.... We can't compete 
with the truckloads of software on students' home computers... When you 
operate legally, it's an unfair competition!!

regards

julian