mit it partners podcast conference tape1

Jane White: Good morning. My name is Jane White and I am from Client Support Services and Information Services in Technology, and I'm here today to host the track on podcasting. So I thank you for all coming and I'm going to ask each of our speakers to introduce themselves in turn and then they will basically handle themselves through the rest of the morning. I did want to mention that the entire session will be podcasted for download once we have a URL available but certainly everything's being recorded, so if you ask any pithy questions, you'll be forever available on the website. Okay, so I'm going to start off with Steven, ask Steve to introduce himself, and then we can get started. Thank you.

Steven Schultz: Sure, is one of these working? Cool, great. So, my name is Steve Schultz. I'm an incoming graduate student in the comparative media studies department and I currently work for an organization called the Public Radio Exchange which works with public radio stations and producers across the country doing digital distribution including podcasting.

Lou Graham: Good morning. I'm Lou Graham. I'm the manager of Audio Visual Services for MIT and our technicians are involved in recording on the campus and in different rooms all over.

Jonathan Reed: Hi. I'm Jonathon Reed, doing Consulting in Client Support Services.

Larry Gallagher: My name's Larry Gallagher. I'm director of MIT Video Productions and Digital Technologies within AMPS and we provide video production services and many other media related services to the institute on a charge-back basis.

Kathy Cahill: I'm Kathy Cahill. I work for ISNT in the ATIC Lab, the adaptive computing lab, and we work with students and staff who have disabilities and also regarding acceptability concerns with information technology.

Katie Vale: I'm Katie Vale from ISNT academic computing and I manage the educational technology consultants so we help faculty and teaching staff who are using technology in their teaching, including podcasting.

Stuart Colorquin: Hi, I'm Stuart Colorquin. I work under Client Support Services on ISNT. I'm the residential network coordinator and a member of the podcasting project initially for ISNT.

Steven Schultz: Cool, so Lisa asked me to give a sort of overview of podcasting. Some of you will probably know some of the things we'll talk about and hopefully everyone will learn something new and I don't know if we're going to do questions. But some of the things we cover here will be covered in more detail in sessions after that. What I thought we probably start with is just listening to some podcasts because we're talking about audio let's listen to some audio. And this is a sort of selection of a lot of the podcasts that are out there to sort of get a sense of what's going on. I just want to let you hear some of them.


[plays podcast]

Steven Schultz: So, obviously there's a wide variety of stuff that's out there. One of the exciting things about podcasting is that it's made the tools simple for a whole lot of different kinds of people to take advantage of it and distribute audio and now increasingly, video. And you see everything from people doing it in their basements and bedrooms, to the large media entities that are figuring out ways to sort of extend their brand, to educational institutions that are syndicating classroom lectures and student projects and that sort of thing. But where did it come from? So, the first half of podcasting is a long legacy of audio production. One of the people that was involved early on was Christopher Lydon, a local radio host. Some of you may remember him from The Connection or you may have heard his new radio show, Radio Open Source, which is on WGBH locally and syndicated on PRI across the country. He was, in between those two shows, doing a lot of recording of interviews on his own and publishing them on his blog when he met Adam Curry, who some of you may remember from the eighties, one of the early MTV VJs who also happens to be a big geek and sort of an entrepreneur. And the two of these guys met and Adam Curry said, "Wouldn't it be great if I could automatically get all of your interviews on my iPod whenever you come up with a new interview, instead of having to go back to your website and check for new episodes and download them?" So they got together and they said, "Let's take the success of blogging that's spreading so quickly and syndication, where you can subscribe to blog feeds, and let's add audio to it. And they got together with some people that were work on standards around this stuff, and they got behind RSS. And in much the same way that Tim was talking about making the documents on the web machine readable through open standards, RSS does a piece of that, and actually has some lineage in RDF, although it's been a sort of a long winding road. The most recent version of RSS adds audio enclosures, the idea being that you can tell your computer of your other devices how to subscribe so that you can listen to the episodes or put them on your mobile device or whatever you want to do. So it's really adding those two phenomena that were happening.

Steven Schultz: So, what is podcasting exactly? Well, it's a bunch of different things. First of all, it's a standard, which I was just talking about. It's this RSS standard with what's called enclosures, audio enclosures which is just a special tag and the RSS XML feed. It's a set of tools for doing so and there are increasingly more and more tools for creating podcasts for subscribing and for producing audio. And it's also sort of developing into a cultural phenomenon and an aesthetic that encompasses a broad variety of content, like you saw in that first sort of sampling of podcast audio.

Steven Schultz: So, the other thing I wanted to talk about very briefly here is in the fall semester I was a TA for a course 21L.015, which is Introduction to Media Studies, and we did a couple of media projects with those students, one of which was creating their own podcasts. This was a new concept to most of them, most of them hadn't done audio production before, some of them had web experience or RSS or blogging experience and they were able to translate those ideas. We told them first and foremost, have fun with the project and our goals were to have them be able to explore some of the issues around podcasting and the emerging technology. Some of them asked questions about the digital rights and electrical property, others explored sort of creative ideas and we wanted them to be able to do that but get sort of hands on experience with it. And the hands on production was sort of a key element of that. They would do every step of the process. And we also told them at the start that they would share their work publicly, which is, of course, an important thing to let them know, but it's also a critical part of what podcasting and RSS feeds are all about. It's about publishing your work out to the world. So we told them there are four basic steps to podcasting and some of the sessions later in the day will go into more detail on how to do this and I may try to do a demo of this very briefly here. The first step is to gather your audio. You can go out in the world and you can record it and you can record it on the little digital recorder or minidisk recorder or a cassette recorder and figure out how to get it into your computer. You can capture phone calls through a variety of services. I was trying to figure out how are our students are going to be able to record things to create their podcasts, and I said to myself, "Hold on. They've all got microphones in their pockets. It's their cell phones." And using different services, ODO is one example but there are other services out there that are emerging that lets you simply record your phone calls, turn them into digital audio files that you download from the website. A lot of them did interview shows, or just used that essentially as their microphone. Not as high quality of course, but it's workable. And then there are other sources like Creative Commons license podcasts, and other music out there. The term "pod safe" has come to refer to music, which legally is made available for free use in podcasts. And there are other sources there, too.

Steven Schultz: The next step is to produce it. There are a variety of tools you can use for producing it. This is just a few of them. ProTools is a high end one, Audacity is a free open source one, Adobe Audition is also fairly high end, but a little more affordable than ProTools, and GarageBand comes free with most Apples these days it's part of iLife suite. The next step is to publish it to the world and there are two parts to this. There's uploading the audio itself. In the case of the class, we used an Athena locker, which we then made available publicly for http download. And then creating your post, which you can do with a whole variety of web based tools. But this is really sort of creating the description of this audio file that you've created, both so that people can hopefully view it on the website, and subscribe to it in their readers. And in the case of the class, we used movable type, but you can use a variety of other tools too. Most blogging tools actually now support RSS enclosures, which lets you podcast. And I should say, a podcast is really just a blog RSS feed plus one small tag that says, "Here's the audio". It's very similar; it's a sort of simple tweak on the idea. And then the last step we always tell the students is that it's important to listen, it's important to listen to other people's podcasts and because they're podcasts, you can subscribe to them. So this is a sample of what the students came up with.


[Montage of students' podcasts]

Steven Schultz: So, I think I'm going to skip the demo because you can go to the other sessions and see how you put the pieces of the podcast together but a few brief observations on our experience of doing this with students. First of all, they developed the skills with basic tutorials that they can repeat at home and I gave them a website that led them through the steps of the process and a link to an Audacity tutorial, so they could download the free software. And for the most part, they figured it out. They also build on the example work of other students and we were careful to give them a lot of examples up front so they could get different inspiration for their pieces. The tools are increasingly accessible. The latest version of GarageBand explicitly has a function for building podcasts and one of our thoughts afterwards was that maybe we should provide more opportunities for group listening and feedback in the classroom. A picture of where podcasting is going: right now the numbers in terms of who's listening are still relatively low compared to radio and other major media formats. But even the fact that it's on the map, and starting to catch up with or surpassing satellite radio is significant for a technology that's emerged, really in the last year or two.

Steven Schultz: Social media, in general, which I see podcasting as part of, along with blogging, is growing very quickly. The blue line there is myspace.com. The green line is the New York Times. So you see the radical explosion of these sorts of technologies. The same sort of thing if you look at Technorati, which tracks blog posts, the number of blogs out there. Each one of those lines up there is when the number of blogs out there has doubled. And if you look, these statistics are from FeedBurner, which is an RSS service, which translates your RSS feeds and does other things for you specifically with the number of podcasts or video podcasts out there and you see similar sorts of growth. So it's growing very quickly. With that, I'll turn it over to my other panelists, and I can answer other questions afterwards, if you have them.

Kathy Cahill: Okay, so I'm the bearer of good and bad news regarding podcasting. So podcasting is quite a boon for people with disabilities. It makes information much more portable, readily available. If you are blind, for instance, listening to podcasting files is just a fantastic way to get a huge variety of information. And in the ATIC Lab, what we've done is we've done some testing with colleagues who are deaf and hard of hearing, but we've also asked some of our workers to test podcasting software for clients, such as iTunes, with screen reading software and also with keyboard-only access. So there are some issues that you should be aware of going into this. There's a handout in your folder that is on the right hand side of the pocket, and it's just called "Podcasting and Accessibility Information." So a lot of what I say is summarized in there.

Kathy Cahill: So the group of people for whom podcasts bear the most problems are people who are deaf and hard of hearing. They obviously have no access to the information if it's in audio-only format. So if you are considering producing podcasts, for instance, for your departmental website, for public information, for course information, something beyond a personal podcast, then you need to consider a transcript. And there's actually some places where you can upload your mp3 file and pay a fee and get a transcript of your podcast, your mp3 file. There's one listed on the handout, it's called Castingwords.com. It seems to charge pretty reasonable rates. I've noticed a number of podcasting websites, not as many as one would hope, that have links to text transcripts, which is actually an incredibly useful thing, and obviously makes the podcast searchable, the information in there searchable, and also just is useful if you want to go back and listen to it again. For people who may speak English as a second language, it can also be a useful way to get the information that they may have missed the first time. And then, in addition, podcasting clients software, so iTunes itself is not fully accessible with a keyboard. So if you are not a mouse user, if you use a screen reader, or even if you just use keyboard only to access the computer you will probably need to consider using some other kind of podcasting client software. One of the ones that we've tested that seems to have much better keyboard access is iPodder Juice. There's a link to it on the handout as well. So that has more keyboard shortcuts and works much better with keyboard-only access and with screen readers. Unfortunately, it seems to work better on the Windows platform. I think that there is not much as much keyboard access or screen reader access to that program on the Apple platform.

Kathy Cahill: And then the only other thing I want to say is I believe that Apple has some special Apple encoded mp4s that are only playable through iTunes. Of course, that might present a problem as far as file formats if you're using a non-iTunes podcasting client software. So that's just something to keep in mind as well, there is actually contact information for us in ATIC Lab if you have further questions for us about accessibility, or about transcripts or other things you might want to know.

Jonathan Reed: So I'm just going to talk a little bit about how you can host your podcast on your Athena website, and a couple of other things you'll need to know in order to do that. So uploading your files to Athena, I'm sure most of you already know this already. I just want to give a brief overview. On Windows you have the option of using secure FX or Filezilla on Mac you can use 'fetch' or FTP in the command line, and on Redhat Linux you can use SCP or Kerberized FTP, both of which comes with the OS. ISNT does have a website on securely transferring your files to Athena. It's listed down on the bottom there, and the computing helpdesk or Athena consulting can help you a hand with that.

Jonathan Reed: Just going to briefly talk about where you can put your files. In your personal locker both your public and your www directories are, by default, readable from the web. So you can put your podcasts in subdirectories of either of those. If you have a course locker, a group locker, or a locker for your department, you can also set permissions on directories to make them readable by the web. Again, Athena consulting can give you a hand with that. If you have a group of people collaborating on a podcast, you can easily set permissions on a locker to allow multiple people to put files there. That's easy enough to do. So, one thing I want to point out is people have been concerned about password protecting their podcasts. There is no password protection by default on web.method.edu. It's not set up to do that, it's only set up to protect the certificates. The student information processing board SIPB does run a does run a server that can use password protection but we should probably point out that once somebody has downloaded the MP3 files for the podcast and they have them? They are mp3 files and they aren't password protected so they can do what they like with them. So, if you're podcasting sensitive information, a password is probably not that useful. If you just want to limit exposure and prevent anyone in the world from stumbling on your podcast then it may be useful. But then again once someone has the files they can do what they like.

Jonathan Reed: There were recently some file size limits imposed on web.method.edu. The limit on files being downloaded from off campus. That is not a net18 IP address is 50 megs. Some podcasts seem to be much larger than this, so on my next slide we will talk about some things you can do to slim down your podcasts other than, of course, dividing it into smaller pieces. Limit for on campus is 700 megs and you probably shouldn't have an audio file that big, but [laugh] you might.

Jonathan Reed: I want to remind people of the MITnet rules of use. As Steve mentioned there is podsafe audio files, which are files that can be fully distributed or are licensed vendors such as Creative Commons just make sure you have permission to distribute any material you put on your podcast. Also don't share your password with others, just a reminder of that. If you have multiple people collaborating on a podcast it's easy enough to set up a space on Athena so both people can do that. Finally, don't overload the servers if you have a really popular podcast with lots and lots of files, people will start to notice and you might need to find alternative hosting.

Jonathan Reed: Just some tips on making your files smaller. Mp3's have what is called a bit-rate. That's basically the speed at which the information is delivered to the mp3 decoder. By default, iTunes will encode at 160 kilobits per second and that's great for CD's, it's probably way more than you need for just plain speech. 128kb is perfectly good for music and that will make your files smaller. Even going down to 96kb is approximately the quality of FM radio so it's still decent passable for music, and perfectly fine for speech. There's a concept called "variable bit rate encoding," which may or may not reduce your file size. Just play around with it and see what happens. Some other things when you record your original source there is a thing called "sample frequency" by defualt listening to the sample at CD quality again you may not need that if you are just talking and not playing music. Finally, mono vs. stereo, Mono is perfectly fine for speech. You don't need stereo recording and that will cut your file size in half, as will using 8-bit recording instead of 16-bit.

Jonathan Reed: And I have just a couple of screen-shots there of the mp3 importing screen at iTunes6. You can see, by default, you can change the quality between 128, 160 and 192kbps. And if you go into the custom screen you'll see a window in the bottom right where you can play with the settings some more. If you find your files are getting to be too big, change the settings and might end up with smaller ones. Lastly, we do have a pre-release version of the Juice podcasting client on Athena for Linux machines only. It's in the Juice Locker, so add juice and then juice. It doesn't work on the Suns. If you're using it in a cluster, please use headphones.

Larry Gallagher: So MIT Video Productions has been providing video production, streaming and podcasting support, particularly production and streaming support, for many, many years. The cameras that you see in the room are operated by our staff. Craig Melanasi is up in the back remotely controlling these cameras. And we'll be encoding this into a MPEG4 and then we'll be podcasting that. When the first video iPods came out last fall, I fully expected to be disappointed by the quality of them and I was very surprised at just how good they were. So we immediately started doing some experimentation. But what we basically do is we provide event capturing services, encoding services, hosting services. We can also create a website that can support and again I'm talking mainly about video podcast, not audio podcast. In the next session we'll show you some examples of the experiments we've been conducting. There's one particular program we've been producing on an on-going basis. It's still experimental. It's called ZigZag and the distinction that I make with that particular program is that it is not a video-enhanced website. It is, in fact, a stand-alone TV program that's delivered to the desktop. So we'll be showing samples of that, and those are the types of services we can provide. We can work with your own departments to craft your own TV program delivered over the web. We can help you with scripting, we can help you with editing, we can help you with hosting. And, again, we are charged with being a self-supporting operation and we do operate on a charge-back basis. That's it.

Lou Graham: Okay, I'm Lou Graham, MIT Audio and Visual Services. Our department has been involved in supporting academic and conference meeting, conference performance events for many, many years at MIT. We do over 12,000 events in a year, a lot of them taking place in the major lecture halls. Some smaller classrooms, meeting rooms, all of the performance places you typically might be aware of. And we've begun to grow our offerings in the digital media recording as our customers are asking us for not only the technical support to do this sort of projection but also for microphones, either for panels or music recording, and then recording that to a format our client will take to use as a starting media for their own production. We are pretty well focused on the audio side. We work with Larry's crews a lot. We are working with them today as we do a lot of times in these rooms collaborating on things, but our technicians are well versed in a lot of different digital recording. Both in the MP3 both on the little portable units you'll see some of around the place today. The larger more professional grade units we've installed many of those in the major lecture halls and Kirsch auditorium 10-250 in some of the large halls so we've got built-in recording capability to take whatever audio files may be created. As John was speaking of the different file size protocols we try and give you a file size that is actually downloadable easily and supported as you begin to take the file and do whatever you wish.

Larry Gallagher: One thing that distinguishes us from the offerings that is available through AMPS is we do not offer any hosting capabilities but we do look to provide you the highest quality audio file possible for your event. And I encourage you to collaborate with the people over at AMPS if you do have files you want to get hosted or perhaps create a way to host it yourself. One of the things we have been doing more and more of is a little out of the podcast side of things, but we can work with this as we've recently begun experimenting with some digital multi-track audio recording, high quality audio recording. We own a 24-channel digital recorder, and we have two or three staff members who are very proficient in the use of ProTools for audio recording. So those are offerings we can give to you. We are also operating on a cost recovery charge-back model for the Institute as well.

Katie Vale: Hi, I'm Katie Vale from ISNT academic computing. I'm kind of following up what Jon Reed was talking about in terms of what services ISNT can offer in support of podcasting. And while Jon talked about some of the consulting help that's available and some of the guidelines. I want to talk about some of the facilities we have available for people that are interested in podcasting. The primary one that we have is our Macintosh cluster. It's the new Media center. It's located right next door to Stata in building 26. It's 26139 and this is a room of 12 Macintoshes that have multimedia software installed. So you can use it for audio editing, for video editing, for scanning of photos, editing of photos, and pretty much the whole multimedia thing. It is really a do-it-yourself type of cluster so it's not staffed by consultants but help is available you know via email. But one of the features we've recently added to the room is what we're calling our Podcasting Station. Although all of these machines have this capability we have set one machine aside with a big poster over it that has step by step instructions on how to edit and publish your podcast. So you can bring your file, whether you are bringing it from your iPod, a recorder, or a CD what-have-you. You can edit it on the Mac in there and move it over to your Athena account. All the Macs in the room use open ASF, so you can store directly on your Athena account and then follow the steps that are listed to go ahead and publish it using RSS and the good things you'll be learning about later today in this podcast track. In addition to just the audio podcasting. you can also use it to edit video podcasting. We have the whole run the gamut from beginner application from garage bands or iMovie up to things like FinalCut Pro or even a copy of ProTools if you really want to get into it. Where we really differ from AMPS and Audio-Visual is that we are as we said a completely do it yourself facility, and it's open to student, faculty and staff. Currently it's probably used most by students who are doing course related projects. But it is a regular cluster that is open 24 hours a day, and you are welcome to come and use it for any multimedia productions that you might want to do. Now, in addition to the Athena consulting help that John mentioned, the group that I manage with academic computing is called the "Educational Technology Consultants" and we're also available by appointment to help you with any media based projects. So we have a specialist in simulation and visualization and Mac software, we have another specialist in geographic information systems and spatial data. Also someone who works on Stellar and can help you tie your podcast into a Stellar site if you have one for teaching or a for project that you are managing. We are happy to help out, and you can find out about our services on the ISNT web pages. And I'll turn it over to Stuart.

Stuart Colorquin: So I just have one slide for you and I'm going to talk about a web page and a couple of mailing lists and it's easier for you to see than for me to read them all out to you. I just want to briefly talk to you about the web page that ISNT, actually the DCAD group that Lisa Mayer and her group set up, for podcasting around MIT. The page is mostly meant as a collection point for information at the moment. There are a few of the podcasts that are available throughout the Institute, and in our webspace, on that page. There are links to some of the campus recourses available. Most of them you have heard about or will hear about today. There is AMPS, A/V services, the new media center is listed there, and the other item on the page at the moment is the Podcast Graphic Identity Slate. That's just a way of tying your video podcast and showing its reference to MIT. or showing your affiliation to MIT. The two mailing lists there, Podcast Pilot and Podcasting News, I just want to briefly mention that Podcast Pilot is where you can send your questions, comments or suggestions about ISNT should do or is doing about podcasting at MIT. And Podcasting News is a collection of people from all around the Institute who are interested in or have something to do with podcasting in their particular group, particular department or area. If you want to join that mailing group, on the left hand column on the web page is a link to do so, to join podcasting news you can hear about news that other people have found. Or you can share your experiences with the entire community.

Jane White: We have about two minutes left and I wanted to open the floor for questions. Either general questions or any directed to our specific panelists.


[Inaudible]

Jane White: Let me repeat the question so everyone can hear. It was about whether there is a need for a release form for anyone who is features in a podcast. And do we yet have a standard release form for such a purpose?

Larry Gallagher: Yes, to both we do have standard release forms for when we videotape things for MIT-world for example. The speakers are requested to sign the release. In this case, because this was going to be podcast, there are times where things are just going to be recorded for archival purposes, that we will, in fact, clearly video tape Q&A sessions. The question you just asked. But because this is being podcast the camera did not swing around and take a shot of you. Technically in order for us to have podcast this event we'd have to get a release form from each of you in the audience if we were to shoot you. We have to watch out for those things.


[inaudible question]

Larry Gallagher: We have them. I'd be happy to send it to you but, to that point, we ought to be having that information transferred over to your website so people can access that. And just yesterday I was just meeting with MIT lawyers about just these things.

Jane White: Are there any other questions?


Man in audience: Is there any information on the usage of the podcast machine in the new media center?

Katie Vale: We haven't several Course21 classes. We had a class actually in theater arts and dance that's been doing video podcasting, it's a class on choreography, and teaching students on how you dance for the camera or how you film a dance performance. And then they are collaborating with other dancers and choreographers in other cities. So they are making video podcasts to publish in order to get feedback from other choreographers around the world.

Jane White: Final question? Okay. It's 11 o'clock, our next session starts at 11:15. Let me just open this up to thank the panelists for their time this morning.


[Applause]


[Pause]

Jane White: Everyone, and welcome to the second session of the podcast track titled "Sharing Experiences: MIT and Podcasting". We have five panelists with us today, and they each have experience in different parts of the Institute. So I'll ask again each of them to introduce themselves to you, and then we can have questions at the end of the session.

Larry Gallagher: My name is Larry Gallagher, Director of MIT Video Productions and Digital Technologies.

Walter Lewin: I'm Walter Lewin. I teach physics.

Sandy Mallalieu: Sandy Mallalieu. I'm the Production Manager for MIT OpenCourseWare.

Victor Park: I'm Victor Park with the Publishing Services Bureau. I'm a designer and adviser.

Scott Shunk: I'm Scott Shunk and I'm the Program Director of the Visualizing Cultures Project.

Larry Gallagher: So we're just going to quickly talk about some of the experiments that we've been doing this past spring semester. Walter Lewin was one of the faculty members who collaborated in these experiments. The thing I was most excited about in terms of podcasting is the subscription feature of podcasting. And a website that we created this fall in support of orientation actually is a great way of illustrating the difference between just having a typical website and podcastable content. This past fall we created this very media rich website in support of MIT's orientation. What we did was we started on day one of students arriving of Class of 2009, and then we continued to each day add more content. We also opened up the website to student groups who wanted to send us photos about what they were up to. And so each day we uploaded content. The Dean's office sent out a single email to the parents of the incoming class to tell them about this website, and we received some very positive feedback as a result. But, one of the issues (this is some of the feedback we received) was when the parents first received the email, they may have gone to the website and that may have been the only time they visited it. Had we done this with video podcasting, what we could have done is to have had the parents subscribe to the site, and then every day when we uploaded additional content, that content would have been automatically downloaded into their iTunes interface. So what we wanted to do this past Spring is to experiment with ways in which we might use this technology for outreach. What we decided to do was to create a video magazine of sorts, a video podcast magazine, which we call ZigZag. And we've been publishing ZigZag every two weeks since the beginning of the semester. Yesterday we published our sixth episode, which we'll take a quick peek at. But the purpose, of course, I guess our target audience, was MIT alum, family and friends of MIT, potential students, and also the general public. But our goal was to provide a rich overview of MIT life and culture. And, of course, it's meant for an individual viewing experience. You can, in fact, synchronize it to your video iPod, but we feel like the best way of viewing it is to view it, of course, on your desktop. So we'll take a quick look at a couple minutes of episode six.


[video highlight, very short]

Larry Gallagher: So this episode, because it's a pre-commencement episode and it was just published yesterday, contains a lot of stories. It features stories about students at MIT. I just wanted to show you a couple things that is really interesting about the interface. One is that each of the segments in the podcast is broken up into segments, so you can actually go to the segment of your choice. I'll just quickly cut to 2007.


[Video highlight, very short]

Larry Gallagher: So the other thing that's nice about the site is that if you want to learn more about any of the stories, you have all of these hotlinks up in the descriptor here. We've also added a blog, it was just added this week. The site continues to evolve. We've already received a single comment, but this will grow. I don't know if any of you have been checking out HawkCam but there's a very extensive blog connected to HawkCam, which is very educational. And then the other thing that this site features that we also have here, of course, archives from past episodes. So the way this is set up is that it immediately launches into what's called QuickStart, it's a QuickTime movie that's playing, but my preferred way of viewing the episodes is to actually do so via iTunes. So quickly, this last episode again what's nice about the way these are produced, we can be timely in terms of addressing important issues at MIT this week. But each of the pieces has a certain amount of shelf life. And what we feel is that the accumulation of stories over time will help create the rich tapestry that is MIT. So the last episode was shortly after, I'll just watch it from the iTunes interface. What we've done, we've been trying out different hosts. This woman is Marsha Bolton, she actually works in the President's Office. She's very talented. She works in finance but, as many people at MIT, she has many other talents. The other person that hosted last night's episode, yesterday's episode, is Matt McGann and he works in the Admission's Office.


[video highlight, very short]

Larry Gallagher: I should have stopped the other before I went into iTunes.


[video highlight, very short]

Larry Gallagher: So this episode six, featured stories about students, because it's our pre-commencement issue. This issue was just right after the Energy Research Council report was issued, and this issue, this episode features stories about research on energy that's going on at MIT. Episode four actually features a story that was produced by a student group. So we hope to continue to experiment with this. It's been very well received. We have data on how many people are downloading this content, and we're going to continue to compile that. We're also receiving input from other groups at the Institute regarding what the content might look like on a week to week basis.

Larry Gallagher: So these are the quick objectives, I'm going to move through these so we can get onto the other part of our podcasting experiment this past fall, and that was to catch lectures, problem set tutorials, and homework tutorials. We actually captured the whole semester's worth of 604, in his classroom with this technology, Professor Chris Terman. We also captured Professor Tomas Lozano-Perez also in this room. Professor Walter Lewin was willing to resurrect his problem help sessions that's he's been doing for years. We also did some homework tutorials. Samples of all of this work can be found on our podcast portfolio website. So the podcasts as we would record them and post them were made available from the physics' website, and they were very well received by the students. I will leave PowerPoint once again, and show a quick sample and turn it over to Walter.


[video highlight, very short]

Larry Gallagher: So Walter is MIT's most prolific video lecturer. Walter actually has 100 lectures being served, as we speak, from MIT websites. And, Walter, would you like to share some of your experiences?

Walter Lewin: Well, you said it all, I think. I have done what we call "help sessions," help the students with their homework. I have done that roughly for a period of 15 years, starting 1980 roughly up to 1997. And that meant that in the fall when 801 is an on-term course, 550, 600 students, that in the fall I would help the students with their problem sets for 801, and not do the problems but push them in the right direction and challenge them a little bit. These programs were one hour long, and they started every hour on the hour. A major handicap for me was that therefore they could not last any longer than 57 minutes and 30 seconds because the rewind took two minutes and 30 seconds. And that was more than you think a major burden on me to make sure that I would stay in there, but I managed to do that. And then in the spring, if the lecturer was interested, I would do exactly the same for 802 for electricity and magnetism. So, again, I would take the homework, which was due that week, and I would look at these problems, in general give them an introduction to remind them of the problems of the theory behind it. Then I would work them through some of the problems and bring them over a few hills and leave them behind and let them do the rest, of course. So what it meant was that in those years a student could watch me anytime starting every hour on the hour. They would have to watch the whole program before they could see the same thing again. So they could not look at the same problem five times in a row very quickly. They would have to wait. And, of course, they would have to do it in their dormitories where we had MIT cable TV. And then the physics department did away with these help sessions. They thought they were too expensive, so in 1997 they were abandoned. And then it was Larry who asked me last year whether I was willing, as a guinea pig, to do something at his expense as a podcast. And in the podcast, it's exactly the same thing, it's the same format except that the big difference is that I don't care now about the 57 minutes and 30 seconds. Some of my podcast were 42 minutes, others were an hour and five minutes. So now the students have the advantage that they can watch me not only any time but they can watch me anywhere and they can watch me as often as they want to. They can go over one particular problem if they want to six or seven times, which is what they did. And so all of this fits into the idea that MIT is gradually turning into a nursery school whereby we present the students with a format that becomes very difficult to fail the course. You have to work on that to fail the course. And these podcasts were in line with that approach. Whether I'm behind that idea is a different story, of course. But the podcast were very productive and they were very well received by the students. I asked them to send me some feedback and I sent some of them on to Larry, and they were very, very encouraging. So that's basically what I was doing, to help them with the problems. Oh, there was something else that Larry thought of, something very clever, and that is that we would only do every other week, because if they really wanted it very badly they would start complaining mainly that they wanted every week. And, of course, students the way they are at MIT, if you did it every other week, they want it every week, and if you do only three out of five problems, they want four out of five problems. And if you finally decide ok I will do four out of five problems, they bitterly complain because they want all five out of five problems, which is in part with the nursery school idea. That's all I have to add.

Larry Gallagher: So, in conclusion, what we learned from this is that in fact this technology is very popular. We actually did an online survey. We received feedback. Less than 10% of the students were actually watching these on their iPods. In fact, 802 teal 801 couldn't very well just been streamed and not podcast at all when you consider that most, when you consider that those courses are taken by MIT freshmen. MIT freshmen live on campus, they have access to high bandwidth, and they could have consumed them that way. But other students who live across the river, who find themselves in the redline and all, they, in fact, like the idea. But even with the freshmen, the whole thing about podcasting is that you're able to consume the content the way you want, when you want, how you want. And just to give you a couple of other samples of feedback, what they liked the fact that they were able to, again as Walter pointed out, get to sections. They were able to replay sections that they particularly liked, and this again is from some students talking about... One thing we also learned is that you don't want to compromise the quality of the video by just creating a podcastable size file. You could create that and offer it. In ZigZag we are, in fact, going to be offering six different formats, including very high quality, very high resolution formats. So the file you just saw is in fact a higher quality than the one that you would synchronize to your video iPod, but we're also providing that as well. And then finally, even though this was an experiment, and we told all the faculty members it was, the students very quickly developed some unreasonable expectations regarding how quickly this content would be put up.

Walter Lewin: This proves my point, by the way.

Larry Gallagher: Okay. Let me get that up for you. Yes, I'll be happy to do that.

Victor Park: So is this on? The notion of you can view the podcasts, we listen to the podcast where and wherever you want. I like to talk about more about who is it from. Sort of identifying the source, the origin, of the podcast. So while Larry's putting up the website I want to show you today, like I mentioned before I'm with the publishing services bureau, and we're responsible for maintaining and developing the MIT logo guidelines. So you're looking at the Graphic Identities Site, which was launched 2002. And this is one of the most recent pages that we developed for the podcast slate. Now, I just wanted to share with you, we've been for seven years we've been advising the MIT community on how to use the MIT logo on various publications and websites. Now, since I think it made sense to now create a template page, a video slate template page, to help you also brand your podcast, because the same as the other communication vehicles that are out there, a podcast should be branded. We're very deeply concerned about sort of orphan videos floating around without any identity, so we encourage you to just like when you publish your own publications or website, we advise you to use the logo in an appropriate way. Now, you can see that there are three different flavors on this web page. There's black and the MIT red and white, and just to give you some of the specifications, 720x480 is sort of the dimension for the slate. So what you're doing is providing the intro and closing slate for your video podcast. And there's some information about some areas that you should avoid. Within 720x480, you should consider putting all your graphics and text within 640x440. Now, these slates are in a TIFF format for you to download, and they're in two different resolutions. One is in 72ppi and the other is in 300ppi. The 72 is sort of the standard resolution that you can use to download to your intro and closing slate. 300 is for more bigger resolution. That's something that if you're into animation, you can use the larger resolution to play with your animations. So zoom in and zoom out is sort of the typical act. I should also mention this page, we had some great helps from AMPs to put this website together.

Victor Park: Now you also have the option to create your own intro and closing slate. Now this is just a very generic template that we offer here, but you are free to use your creativity to come up with your own intro and closing slate. But the rule of thumb is that when you create your own slate, you should always design, resemble your website. So for example, if your website uses a particular color, that's recommended, so you should use the same color theme throughout for your intro and closing. If you click on some of the thumbnails, it will show you examples of the layouts, how you can incorporate the MIT logo, and your department logo. One of the big challenges we face today is the co-branding issue. Now just about every department in MIT has their own logo. And a lot of the questions have been getting is how do you incorporate our department logo with the MIT logo. So we have some recommended samples for that as well, so if you go and click on some of these thumbnail images, it will give you some quick examples of how the layout should be. As a phase two, we are trying to incorporate the audio portion of the branding. That's something we're working on right now. So that will be in the mp3 file which you can download for your audio podcast. So if you have any questions, feel free to browse the website. The URL is web.mit.edu/graphicidentity. If you go to the download section of this website you can find this template page for your slate. There's also a "contact us" page there and you can submit any questions you like and we'll be happy to assist you in any sort of branding issues. Thank you.

Sandy Mallalieu: Again, as I said earlier, I work for open course for a production manager. Actually it's interesting, we have a number of audio and video files on our site. We have almost about 1000 hours of audio and video. We actually had a contest for the voice of open courseware among our staff to create an intro to all our mp3 recordings, so we're definitely all learning from each other as we all connect and talk about best practices. What I'd like to talk to you about today are some of the reasons why open courseware has become interested in podcasting. Partly it is because of users. We are receiving a number of emails requesting that because we have a 1000 plus hours of audio and video, could you start some podcasts? At the same time, we're also looking at different ways to draw people into our site. What kinds of mediums can we use? We're running a few pilots now on that front. One is with Google Video, and another I'll show you today. We're with AMPs and Visualizing Cultures and MIT World undertaking a pilot with iTunes with Apple, right now. I can actually probably just show you what we have developed. Also we have partnered with Susan LaSante and the MIT home page Team. See if I can get into here. What we've been doing is looking for means that we could actually publish not an entire set of courses or an entire course on iTunes, or any other medium, because we already have our site. It's how can we distribute so that users can very easily access on different mediums the video and audio that we have. And what we've developed, you can see, is just for internal pilot uses. An MIT page, main page, that reflects some more style of organization to the MIT website. So when people go between the two different experiences, it would be fairly similar. In terms of open coursework, we've been focusing on faculty lectures. And so, so far, we've posted on here four different courses. One video course and three full audio courses. And what's nice, we've been able to leverage some of the identity that we've imparted to our site at the OpenCourseWare level, as well as the course level. If you look these courses for example, on the open courseware site, it's the same image as our home page image, which is nice. So I've been trying to tie things together. If you go into an individual course, you can see that the description from our site is actually presented at the top, and we try and add some content that would draw people into the actual course site on OCW, saying that beyond what we've got here we also have other course materials like problem sets and lecture notes. And we try and provide standard sets of links on the right to the actual course on OCW, for example. And then also our main course list and so forth onto our newsletter and things. And then we present each of the individual audio or video lectures. In the second session at two-o'clock this afternoon, I'll talk a little bit more about some of the technical details we go into producing all of these things. Something that's been huge for us, is really trying to identify a format that we can leverage across applications, so that we don't have to keep re-purposing, as I'm sure you've experienced or have experienced in the past, having to keep going back. There's time, there's money, resources. So what we've been able to do is work with AMPs and what they've produced for us, mostly on our site are RealMedia files. We're actually transferring in house those Real Media files, at a 220k rate to mp4, so that we can pull them into both into Google Video and into iTunes. So things are very re-purposable. We enter metadata once and things like that. So we're trying a number of different pilots and we'll see where we all land this year. I think Scott wants to show more of his Visualizing Cultures.


[background noise]

Scott Shunk: As I will echo to a large degree what Sandy has just said, visualizing cultures is a course that is available on OpenCourseWear. We've all been working, Susan LaSante, Larry and a number of others. To this pilot with Apple for the iTunes site, and as Sandy just said I think what probably many of you are also facing, that we at Visualizing Cultures have seen, is that, Visualizing Cultures, as the name indicates, is focused very much on using visuals for teaching history. I work with Professors John Dauer and Shigeru Miyagawa on developing this course content. That largely has to do with images and visual assets, but video has become an enormous compliment to those assets as a teaching tool. What we have found is that we were using linear media, almost immediately as a teaching adjunct to the non-linear material that we had in the visual assets. So we e had a lot of content that we have built, both interactive media and the linear media, to help explore what we do at Visualizing Cultures again, by looking at the circle narrative through images. What we didn't want to end up doing was re-purposing all of that content across multiple mediums. What the iTunes pilot has done for us has really allowed us to focus some of those assets, and I will...

Scott Shunk: I'm going to go back and just show you some of what we have done. What Sandy has shown you this is the pilot of what we're doing with Apple under Arts and Humanities. One of the re-visualizing cultures is one of the two content offerings at this moment, and we've broken the content down by the units we offer, again on OpenCourseWare. But we have six units available, some additional content that's coming, and then under each of the units; this is Black Ships and Samurai, one of the six pilots, one of the six offerings on OpenCourseWare, now. We have just a number of images, a number of videos we allow folks to access. And, again, that's going to start to download. But what one of the other things I was going to show you, what we've done on OpenCourseWare that already exists and what we're trying to understand more, is how we handle, as Sandy said, the multiple formats of video media.

Scott Shunk: So this is, I apologize, this is our OpenCourseWare page, where you then move into the Visualizing Cultures content from the OpenCourseWare section of it; if anyone has heard, there was a little bit of controversy we sparked with some of the imagery we were using as part of the propaganda. At any rate, this is what our site looks like on OpenCourseWare, and we have piece called VCTV, where we built our own browser, our own viewer rather. This is the type of content we want to make available now for podcasting, and we are making available for podcasting, because we want to get this out and we love the portability of podcasting. Folks, we are working with teachers around the country as we implement a curriculum around some of this content, and the students are using this more and more. Its also helpful for anyone that does pitches, you don't have to lug your laptop to a restaurant at all times, so I can actually demo with a video iPod now, which has been great. But, anyways, this is some of the type of content we have made available through the offering.


[Video clip voice: Welcome to Blackships and Samurai. I'm John Dower, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; I'd like to tell you a little bit about how this wonderful project came into being. One of the things we wrestle with... as...]

Scott Shunk: As you can see, that's just downloading... we're just hitting a buffering issue. We offer about 150 segments that vary in length between one minute to four minutes and that's again some of the technical things we wrestle with... do we want to present entire animation sequences or do we want to show small segments. This is a collaboration we did with Steven Sondheim; he did the lobby exhibit at Studio 54 on Broadway - this is an animation... it was entrance giving the back story of what happened during the Pacific overtures musical but anyway, this type of thing we're making available more and more as a component of Visualizing Cultures and we find that podcasting and using the iPod is an amazing resource that people are really asking for. And the portability we find to be very exciting.

Jane White: Okay, any questions for any of our panelists or general questions? We're finishing up a little early so there's plenty of time if you have things you're curious about, or if any of our panelists has anything else they'd like to say. Oh, thank you. Hi.


[Inaudible]

Larry Gallagher: What we have, right on the website... That you can actually contribute story ideas that way. If this thing becomes sustainable and receives funding, we're going to create an advisory group where different people can suggest stories; again, we encourage contributions from student groups. We did in fact... one of the earlier episodes featured a piece about the sport cast group that was actually recording athletic events and making them available in HD, actually, via the MIT cable system. One thing I wanted to point out about the video magazine is, in fact, it's produced remarkably by a single individual. Jeff Silva, actually does most of the shooting, lighting, editing and the tools also allow Jeff to post this, to do the encoding and post the content to our servers, and this afternoon Jeff's going to talk about the technology he uses to do that.

Jane White: Other questions?

Woman in audience: I'd like a clarification about the labor issues, I notice you have general footage of graduations and things like that. Do you need to get...?

Larry Gallagher: Good question. In fact, I put that question... One of the things we're going to be doing a week from Friday is a podcast, and that case we are going to be including reaction shots of the families. And in that case the lawyers tell us, no, it's a public event, but something like this, where it's... Actually, I really don't know the distinction is between that being a public event and this not being a public event, but in that case they told us we didn't have to worry about it. But in terms of students, when we do a lot of lecture capture. We capture and deliver course materials in support of the Singapore-MIT alliance where we do our best to get high quality capture of the interactions between student and student on both sides. In that case we do, in fact, because is a select group and it's a semester-long program, we do, in fact, get folks to sign releases. But one of the things that you'll see ongoing is that well be shooting students walking through MIT's corridors. Are we technically allowed to do that? Could we in fact find ourselves in trouble? We've never had an issue with it, but in terms of things like Commencement, it is considered a public event.

Sandy Mallalieu: Too, for OpenCourseWare, we have a Creative Commons license that we publish all of our material under and we partner with Larry's team to capture a lot of lecture videos. And we use postings all around the classrooms and we're very diligent about collecting all the signatures needed from students and guest speakers, and that's been working well. I know MIT World have revised some the agreements that they've been making with their speakers to be able to podcast those as well.

Jane White: Yes, another question?

Woman in audience 2: I have two questions: one is is there some way keywords... become searchable? And my second question has to do with people's experiences primarily with audio podcasts, f somebody could speak to that.

Larry Gallagher: Jeff, do you want to talk about Podzinger and our participation in that?

Jeff Silva: Sure, we're experimenting with a company that's publishing... if you take video and audio content basically through this group called Podzinger and they'll run it through their system and make everything searchable to the word. So you can search for the word "robot" on our... and it will come up with five or six videos that have direct relation to that and actually you can click on the text and it plays back the video right at that location. This is a really exciting technology that will be huge in the coming months. It's like Google but for audio.

Sandy Mallalieu: And in addition, this afternoon in the session that Jeff and I are running, we'll go through some of the things that he's doing, and the tools were using OpenCourseWare to add simple metadata and rights and all those kinds of info. And we do a lot of audio on our side as well as video and that's what we are definitely planning to add to our podcasting. Most definitely. We've put the voice of OCW at the beginning of each of the audio casts so that everything is properly branded. I think we're all trying to stay in sync with how we do things and share best practices. So if you use AMPs services, you've been informed by the experiences we've all had. So they're a terrific central location to go to.

Woman in audience 3: [inaudible]

Sandy Mallalieu: We have people, who've been taking some of our audio that's already an mp3 on our site and putting it on their iPods and using it. We get feedback from people all over the world. Their kids are using it for high school or they're listening on the way to work. We have users who are taking our content and transforming it themselves, in terms of audio and putting it on their iPods. And they're sending us some of the files back if we want to post them. We're having a great response from people on all fronts. For a while it was mainly audio focused. Now we're getting feedback on both fronts pretty equally, that people are transforming what we already post. So it's been pretty positive.

Larry Gallagher: Purdue University has been offering podcasts of the core curriculum for some time and the students love it. It actually evolved out of a home-grown system they had where students would go to the library and listen to audio cassettes. So this is leap years ahead of that. But they've also requested video, and interestingly enough, when you think about MIT content, if you have a rich liberal arts curriculum, you can see listening to an audio podcast of a humanities lecture would be far different than listening to an audio of what Walter did or the courses that are taught in here. But students still request audio only because, again, of the portability. They can listen to it while working out in the gym. And even though it's audio only, they say listening to the audio again brings out the visuals they saw when they attended the class.

Sandy Mallalieu: When we present lecture notes, people are listening to the audio, and actually or even when we have the video they're watching the lecture notes go by. Not necessarily in sync but they control it at their own pace. So we have a lot of MIT students doing that.

Scott Shunk: Visualizing Cultures is also going to offer audio only version of everything we have in video form.

Jane White: It's 12 o'clock now and I want to thank you all for coming, and invite you to our next session after lunch, on creating RSS feeds, and let's thank our panel again.


[Applause]

Transcription by CastingWords