When Clair and I sat down this last summer to redesign our website, we decided to seek out "best practices" of web design among our regional and national peers. This led us to adopt "Web 2.0" features, which we started implementing over the summer even before our new design was fully built out ... or, frankly, fully conceived.
We began with podcasts on our Idea Center and Faculty Stories pages, but we quickly saw possibilities for video. Although the Center has produced many videos for faculty to post on Blackboard, to date we've only posted one vodcast at our site, and that was a clip from the opening ceremonies in January of 2007. We have plans for more, but we're working out how to keep them from being resource hogs. The ever resourceful Jerry Favata has nearly perfected the mp4 compression, so watch for future events in video as well as audio.
Audio editing has been straightforward, and here we had early help from Michael Leamy, the College's Distance Education Coordinator. For simple audio captures and editing, we use Audacity 1.3.3 beta, and we do our mp3 conversion with the Lame encoder. (To download these, go here for Audacity and here for the Lame encoder.) The wonderful thing about Audacity is not simply that it is free, but that it is platform agnostic, and frankly with the 1.3.3 beta release professional quality editing is easy. For more complicated podcasts, we capture in AIFF and then, once again, import the files into Audacity for editing and conversion.
More "2.0" features -- which is to say interactivity and networking -- are in the works. We only just recently installed a Meebo widget for our "Contact Us" page, so that faculty and librarians can instant message us during set office hours, and of course this blog is brand new. We're hoping that by incorporating unidirectional virtual events (that is, podcasts and vodcasts) as well as interactive and networking features (e.g., IMing and blogging) into our web design we can create a Digital Center for Teaching and Learning.
Cheers,
Sean
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