PoducateMe: Practical Solutions for Podcasting in Education
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about our project being singled out for an Excellence Award by the National Association
of Colleges and Employers (NACE).
Despite our best efforts to build awareness of the project, we were chagrined to read an
October 2006 Miami Student article about CareerChat, in which a student was quoted as
saying, “I didn’t know anything about the CareerChat until I saw that Career Services got
the award, but it sounds like something that could be useful if they can promote it more.”
As if that wasn’t bad enough, another student said, “It definitely would be really great and
convenient to learn these techniques from home instead of going to the Career Services
office.”
Clearly, we still have a lot of work to do.
Experimenting With Format
After you get a few shows recorded, you’ll discover newer and better ways of doing
things. We started experimenting with a new format for CareerChat in the summer of
2007. Basically, what we’re doing now is recording an interview with one microphone (for
our guest). Then, we import the audio of our guest’s answers to our questions into
Audacity and insert transitional material between the answers.
For example, an interviewer will ask a guest, “What is appropriate attire for an interview?”
In Audacity, we’ll remove the interviewer’s question and replace it with a brief, transitional
sound effect and/or sound byte, followed by an introduction to the answer.
The sound effect we use is that of a radio being tuned, and the sound bytes we use are
generally lines from movies that are relevant to the topic. The introduction may be
something such as, “Students often wonder how to dress for an interview. Professor
Luccioni advises students to choose wisely when it comes to selecting and purchasing
interview attire.” Here, we’ve crafted an introduction that relates to something Professor
Luccioni is about to discuss—the selection and purchase of interview attire.
We feel that our new format is more engaging and offers more of a journalistic style.
Benefits on the production side include:
Since the interviewer’s voice is being replaced later, anyone can conduct the
interview. This makes scheduling much easier to coordinate.
Only one microphone is needed for the interview
Because there is only one mic being used, the person doing the recording can
concentrate more on levels and sound quality without having to worry about
properly blending two sound sources. This is especially helpful for Skype calls
and situations in which the person doing the recording is also conducting the
interview.
Check out an episode of CareerChat that employs the new format at
