Removing Audio From A Video — Compliments Of Jake Ludington
Jake Ludington is my media muse. Here’s his simple explanation of how to remove audio from a video.
What’s In Your Podcasting Toolbox?
I have to admit, in my podcasting efforts I find something that works and stick with it. Like Audacity. Or Behringer microphones. There usually just isn’t time to keep experimenting with new stuff in the hopes that it might be more wonderful.
But that was then, and this is now. I ran across the Podcasting Toolbox, and it’s a wonderful compliation of everything you’d ever need to be a happy little podcaster. Except people to talk to. And an audience.
Here’s a quick peek into the top shelf:
How To Create a Podcast - About.com’s step-by-step tutorial for podcast beginners.
iLounge Guide to Podcast Creation - another guide for creating your own podcast for absolute beginners.
Podcasting Legal Guide - find about legal issues relevant to podcasting in this Creative Commons guide.
Pickstation - A Digg for podcasts and music.
Collectik - “Mixtapes for podcasts”: find, share and organize podcasts.
Podbean - Free podcast hosting and publishing.
Castpost - Free hosting for audio and video clips.
HeyCast - A tool to create video podcasts. Essentially, HeyCast creates RSS feeds from any existing video files on the web. It doesn’t provide hosting or sharing features.
Blubrry - A podcast network that lets you create a podcast and browse the podcasts of others.
So that’s a roundabout way of saying I won’t be doing lots of posting tonight. Or tomorrow.
Dealing With Learners At Different Levels
Pretty much every time you design any kind of learning experience, you ask “what level are the learners at?” In the most popular models of Adult Learning, the goal is to move people from where they are now to some higher point on the competency ladder. In a perfect world, you’d be only teaching beginners — or middle level — or highly experienced learners.
But we’re not in a perfect world. Most training takes place with whoever arrives in the room. (You need a pulse and a checkbook — and if the check clears, we can probably get the pulse requirement waived.) So as a learning designer, it’s a real challenge to create learning experiences that support both the “babies” and the “oldtimers” at the same time.
I’m working with a client right now where that’s the case. And our executive sponsor would like to see us offer three levels of learning in each session. It’s a challenge. Do we group people together by years on the job? Do we create a mixed group, and hope the high-timers won’t just tell war stories? Do we make everyone be bored 2/3 of the time?
If I had a great answer, I’d sleep soundly tonight. But I’ll be tossing and turning, making trade-offs in my head about producing effective training that is directed to virtually every possible skill level. (When I took my flight training, the guys learning how to fly the 767 were in a completely different group than those of us in the Cessnas.) There were written prerequisites (called “licenses” and “ratings”) that kept me out of the group driving those multi-ton monsters.
What do you do? Got any amazing answers you might share with someone not yet in the “I know everything” group?