Have Blog. Will Type For Charity.

Joanna and I are going to participate in Blogathon 2006 to raise money for rebuilding the small coastal town of Pearlington, Mississippi.

As anyone who has followed this blog knows, Pearlington was not merely devastated in Hurricane Katrina; it was decimated. I've done some volunteer work in Pearlington through University Baptist Church and The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Mississippi. I can attest first hand to how much the people of Pearlington have struggled this year and how much they are still struggling.

I will attest next Saturday, July 29 when we blog every thirty minutes for 24-hours straight for Pearlington.

Money donated through this blogathon will go to University Baptist Church in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. It will be used to purchase building materials for people in Pearlington who lost their homes in Katrina.

Please help us spread the word, and if you are able, don't forget to click on the PayPal link at the Pearlington blog to leave a much appreciated donation.

Playing with Odeo

I've just discovered Odeo Studio, and I've taken that discovery as an opportunity to jump right in and do that pod thing everybody is so crazy about.

Podcasts, Access, Quality

I've been teaching online classes for the past few years that were really hybrids. They met on campus five or six times per semester, and the rest was online. Now we are converting those classes to fully online. This has all of our online instructors scrambling to make the online instruction a little more sophisticated. Currently, I'm experimenting with adding audio clips, and I have a few thoughts/questions.

(1) Should I be worried about whether I have students on dial-up who will have trouble accessing the audio files?

(2) Where can I get a better microphone than the piece of junk I got at Radio Shack without spending a whole lot of money?

(3) If I want to imbed some audio clips into PowerPoint presentations, how can I end up with a file that isn't impossibly large for posting online?

(4) Is it better for mini-lecture audio clips to be scripted and polished, or am I okay to just wing it and hope for the "natural" sound?