Uploading Podcasts

For this week, your reading load should be relatively light, as we've reached the point in the semester where I imagine that you are focusing pretty intensely on your Big Project (and if you're not, you probably should be!). As we approach Thanksgiving, we will be spending one final week (or ten days) working on learning a new technology, in this case, podcasts. There are obviously a number of options for posting audio and video online. Most smart phones contain tools that can allow you to post directly to YouTube at the click of a button. That said,video files can take a lot of bandwidth and may be difficult to upload quickly. You may also face situations where you'd rather post audio only. In this scenario, the ability to post a podcast can be helpful.

As you'll notice, one of the articles I've included is a Prof Hacker post I wrote a year or two ago when I first started teaching online. In order to retain a little more control over my podcasts, I decided to use the method described in the post, recording the podcast using Audacity and then converting it to an MP3 using the LAME MP3 encoder (for whatever reason, podcast recording devices can't convert or save files as MP3s). You may experience some trial and error using the LAME MP3 encoder, so please be patient with that.

Once you have your MP3 file, you can upload it for free to the Internet Archive, the free, non-profit site where I have been posting our podcasts all semester. This is relatively easy, although as you upload, the uploader will ask a few questions (some of them including what types of rights you'd like to assert over the video).

For now, you can engage with this material on your blog in whatever way you see fit, but for the final project, I'd like you to record either a podcast presentation or a YouTube video of your presentation. If you do a podcast, I'll have both your Prezi and your podcast open and you can direct me about when I need to click to the next stop on the path that you have created. If it's a YouTube video, you can present the material in whatever way you see fit.

I don't recommend procrastinating on either the Prezi or the podcast, so please don't try to put these together at the last minute.

Social Media Privacy Lecture

Here is my podcast for the Facebook and privacy discussion. One thing I'd like to highlight is the distinction between different kinds of privacy. When we talk about that term we often slip between notions of "social privacy" (the right to keep friends from knowing our business) and "institutional privacy" (the right to keep businesses from knowing our business. It's also worth thinking about the NSA scandal and the issue of government organizations knowing private personal information.

As you review these readings, consider some of the more recent controversies and how they might be changing how we think about the issue of privacy. Here is the lecture:

Updated Facebook Data Use

Just a couple of readings that might be of interest in relationship to Facebook's data mining practices. The first focuses on something that may appear banal: the ability of Facebook to literally "map" football fandom down to the county level. They were able to discern which football teams were most popular in which counties.

The second shows how Facebook shares data about political affiliation. This data is often considered more private or personal, but it can be used for a variety of purposes, including direct advertising and other forms of tracking (such as drawing correlations between consumer tastes and political preferences).

Facebook and Cyberbullying

Finally catching up after dealing with some personal matters the last couple of weeks. You should, at this point, be working on your research projects and should be planning the Prezi that will accompany it.

The questions about Facebook privacy and cyberbullying have been an ongoing theme this semester, and I have been especially interested in the practices of either liking or not liking anything for a specific duration (one week or whatever). I'm unsure what effects these experiments have, but they speak to some of our wider desires to have more control over the social media that we use. When you write your post, pick 1-2 articles and respond to any of the questions you see fit.

Next week, we will talk about recording and sharing podcasts. As part of your final project, I would like you to record and share a podcast or video to accompany your Prezi. If you do an audio podcast, you can tell me when to click through to the next "slide." On YouTube, you can come up with your own method for progressing through the slides. I will discuss next week how to make a YouTube video "unlisted," and will provide you some instructions for recording podcasts, although I haven't looked for private hosting sources, so I'm unsure whether that option is available.