Emerging Technologies in STC

Sorry for the really long post, but since we didn’t do a media project in this class, I thought I’d share my podcasting experience from this past week. And then talk a bit about the readings.

Podcasting

My other class is science journalism, and one of our assignments was to create a podcast in conjunction with the feature story we had to write. I have a friend who has a child with autism, so she’s my human interest. I also interviewed a geneticist here at the U about his research into the genetic causes of autism. He was very personable and explained things really well in everyday language.

I recorded the interview on a digital voice recorder, but if I had an iPod, I guess I could have used that. The instructor told us to check out a Marantz (sp?) recorder from the mass comm. IT dept, but I just my Olympus DVR. I figured if I had to go back to get more info from him then I might bring the other recorder. But I didn’t need to, and I think it turned out okay anyway (except for maybe when he was drawing on the white board to explain microdeletions and microduplications. Then it sounds kind of far away).

We talked for a little over an hour, so I had a lot of audio to get through and figure out what quotes to use. Almost too much. That was probably the hardest part of it—trying to construct a story out of bits and pieces when I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to say. I had so much information I could have done either a much longer piece or one with a completely different focus. Once I found my quotes, then I had to figure out how to link them together with my bridges of audio and keep a good pacing of long and short clips. To keep track of my quotes, I put the ones I thought I would most likely use on 3x5 cards along with their time on the recording.

Our instructor uses Audacity in her work as a freelance science journalist, so that is what she had us use. And it was kind of fun. It’s really cool to take a long bit of audio and start chopping out umms, and yeahs, and breathing, and spit noises, and stuttering, and pen clicking, and all sorts of stuff that you just don’t notice in everyday conversation (except of course for the ever present “umm,” “you know,” and “like”).

This is not a quick process. It took me about 3 days worth of time to get a 6 minute podcast done and then convert it to an .mp3, but I’m sure if I ever need to do another one, it won’t take me as long.

Lessons learned:
• I have a really hard time saying chromosomes clearly.
• Thank goodness for how-to-work-in-Audacity handouts…which I would be willing to share if anyone wants to see it.
• It’s not a quick process, so I’m glad our instructor told us not to procrastinate.
• You can really clean up someone’s speech and whatnot with the delete button and by rearranging stuff.
• It’s fun and worth doing at least once so you know how to do it….especially in the world of Web 2.0.

This week's readings

I really liked the Wired article…great writing. Bob Garfield seems to be brutally honest in his opinions and has an interesting way of looking at things (e.g., “Google…just paid $1.65 billion in stock to be the cute little kitty-cat’s home.”). And his description of the old commercial broadcasting model as “a spiraling vortex of ruin” is fantastic.

But what I think is most interesting is the idea that YouTube is going to become the next boob tube. Unless you are one of the people out there creating content, you are just a passive user of it, just like TV watching. Yeah, you may choose to watch an on-demand program, but you are still just watching, not actively producing content.

I haven’t been to YouTube yet (that podcast project is to blame) so I don’t know if they have figured out a way to get advertising in yet, but I’ll be checking that out tomorrow.

Also, in the May issue of Scientific American, there is an article called Science 2.0 that sort of relates to what Weinberger is talking about regarding knowledge starting on page 216 of Everything is Miscellaneous. One of the key concepts of the article says, “Science 2.0 generally refers to new practices of scientists who post raw experimental results, nascent theories, claims of discoveries and draft papers on the web for others to see and comment on” (May 2008, Vol. 298, No. 5, pg 69).

I mostly skimmed the article, but I thought it was odd that it doesn’t mention arXiv, which is a place for researchers to post their unpublished papers (Everything is Miscellaneous, 216-219), but it does mention the PLoS On-line Edition (www.plosone.org) as a source for sharing knowledge. One person quoted says, “scientists should find a transition to Web 2.0 perfectly natural. After all, since the time of Galileo and Newton, scientists have built up their knowledge about the world by ‘crowdsourcing’ the contributions of many researchers and then refining that knowledge through open debate” (70).

While skeptical scientists worried that ideas, and therefore future earnings and prestige, may be stolen or vandalized, the article does mention and advocate everything we’ve been discussing in class this semester…open access, collaboration, wikis, and being more productive.