On January 11, 2008, Barbara R. Snyder, President of Case Western Reserve University gave her first address to the City Club of Cleveland: The Mission of the Modern Research University.

To learn more, you may read the transcript of her talk, or listen to the audio provided by the City Club of Cleveland.

Editing audio in Audacity

Yesterday Jeremy Smith and I gave a presentation to faculty entitled, " Using blogs and web pages to raise your professional profile." This was the final presentation in this year's UCITE summer seminar series on technology and information. For the convenience of those who couldn't attend, we recorded the presentation so that you can listen to the podcast at your convenience. I tried to clean up the audio a bit, but the quality varies. It may be hard to hear some of the questions, but you should be able to follow most of it.

You may also wish to review the slides and handout from my presentation and the slides from Jeremy's presentation. It probably won't surprise you to see that neither of us used PowerPoint. My presentation was done in Flash, while Jeremy's was done in HTML and javascript.

How the podcast was created

For those who want to learn a bit more about podcasting, here are the steps I took to create the podcast.

1. Attach microphone to iPod, set iPod on table, press record. I used Belkin's TuneTalk™ Stereo for iPod®.
2. Give presentation
3. Press stop, remove microphone from iPod, return to office.
4. Plug iPod into computer and upload voice memo to iTunes.
5. Copy audio file from iTunes to podcasts folder on computer.
6. Open file in Audacity.
7. Listen to recording, adjusting volume and noise reduction as appropriate. Remove most unnecessary ums. (I had no idea how often I said "um" until I listened to this. Eeek!)
8. Export file in .mp3 format.
9. Import .mp3 file into iTunes.
10. Listen to random parts of the file in iTunes to make sure it doesn't sound too horrible.
11. With the file selected, choose "Get Info" from the iTunes file menu.
12. Select the "Info" tab and add any necessary information such as the name of the podcast, the artist, etc. You can also add artwork using the "artwork" tab. Click O.K.
13. Drag a copy of the newly edited .mp3 file back to your podcast folder.
14. Upload this version of the file to your blog using the upload file feature (what you would use to upload an image or .pdf file)
15. If this is your first podcast, go to the templates page of your blog and open the file named rss20.xml. <$MTEntryEnclosures$> should appear immediately following <item> in the file. If it is not already there, just paste it in, then save and rebuild the file.
16. Create a new entry with a link to the .mp3 file. Once the entry has been saved users will be able to download or listen to the file from your site, through iTunes, or through other means.

That's pretty much all there is to it. Just remember to only include 1 podcastable item (audio, video or pdf) per entry. This method works reasonably well for small events. For larger or higher profile events, you can hire MediaVision to record the event with higher quality recording equipment, and pass microphones around to the audience during the question and answer period. For discussions or interviews between 2-3 people, you can use the sound studio in the Freedman Center. The Freedman Center also has audio and video equipment you can borrow for use outside the center.

P.S. As it happened, I had already subscribed to this blog in iTunes. Thus, after this posting was published, the .mp3 file was automatically downloaded to my iTunes podcast directory from which I could copy it back over to my iPod in it's final format. If I make additional podcasts from this blog, they'll all be stored together.