In several of my recent postings to Auricle I've proposed the emergence of a 'filling station' model where networks are used to refresh highly portable devices. It seems that at least the College of Business Administration at the University of Texas is already well down this road. The University of Texas' course Digital Media for Management and Marketing states:
“The text is audio. It contains a series of mp3 files of panel discussions from conferences sponsored by ITConversations and other audio files. The topics of this course change so rapidly that no traditional textbook adequately fills the need.”
I admire the confidence and can certainly see the efficiency gain for course developers when conference panels and speakers are the primary source of the audio. I am less convinced about the efficiency gains from producing the equivalent of an audio textbook or even chapters thereof. It's one thing capturing the outputs of interactions that are taking place anyway, it might even be useful to capture streams of consciousness/brain dumps, but the efficiency gains from producing audio textbooks or polished audio presentations I'm less convinced by.
Why?
For most mortals polished usually means scripted and scripted means that text has to exist and be sequenced. If so, why not just publish the script? Unless, of course the audio is bringing an extra dimension not possible via textual narrative alone.
Like what?
Well, it may be good to hear the actual voice of a 'thought leader' (don't you just love that term:) We may want to benefit from non-verbal cues, or specific sounds may be part of the presentation, e.g. medical broadcasts (heart and lung sounds, types of babies cry).
But … and it's a big but … let's not forget that there's a significant overhead for the listener/viewer. They have to extract information from the audio/video whilst it marches ever onwards and even with pause/rewind this is a much slower process than is possible when using text.
So as we get caught up in our podcasting enthusiasm it's perhaps worthwhile asking if our podcast is actually going to make life better/easier for the user. If yes then go ahead but don't forget that an awful lot of information can be carried in humble text.
