Folks,

Last week I listened to a piece on Cloud Computing that I thought I ’d share with you. It’s from the end of a podcast episode from the BBC World News Service entitled “The World Technology Podcast.

This podcast is produced and hosted by BBC World Technology correspondent Clark Boyd and distributed in the U.S. by PRI (Public Radio International). This segment was taken from the end of podcast #224, posted on Friday, December 19, 2008. The piece talks about the concept of cloud computing in rather general terms, but it does mention Google Docs, Google’s web-based office suite, and also web-based e-mail services such as hotmail. For some additional examples, you can visit http://www.google.com/options/ where you’ll find a great list of Google’s free goodies. Some of these apps are web-based, and some require you to download and install a client application on your PC, but virtually all of the data is stored and accessed from the “cloud,” meaning that’s out there on the big Internet somewhere. Precisely where is really of no consequence; it could be on a server in the next room or half-way around the world – it really doesn’t matter!

You can subscribe to an RSS feed of the BBC World Technology podcast by going to http://www.theworld.org/rss/tech.xml. You can also subscribe to it on iTunes as follows:

Open iTunes > then, select iTunes Store > then, type “PRI’s The World: Technology Podcast” into the search box in the upper right - without the quotes, of course, and hit Return.

That’ll do it for now. Have a safe and happy holiday!

John Spencer
Technology Training Specialist
USU Brigham City Regional Campus
[email protected]
435.734.2277 x252
435.757.8395 (Cell)
435.797.1784 x252 (From USU Campus)

This video screencast is intended to give USU Brigham City facilitators a quick look at how to set up a student presentation in an IVC receive classroom, using a student-supplied laptop and a connection to the IVC system.

...a couple of late additions to the video: (1) make sure the student laptop is off when you attach the video cable, and (2) if you're in one of the rooms that uses the Tandberg 1700 desktop system, remember to unplug the audio cable from the Tandberg at the end of the presentation.

This is a short audio piece from the Future Tense podcast dealing with the future of podcasting. It was posted back in February, 2008.

In this Tech-Tuesdays segment we look at the procedures for using Wimba Podcaster in Blackboard to post audio files to your course, and then create and post audio files to an iTunes podcast.

This is an updated version of the Document Camera screencast that we posted earlier. This is pretty much the same as the earlier version, but we've deleted the procedures that addressed raising and lowering the camera arm and lights. These days we just leave the unit fully extended.

This screencast demonstrates the procedures for downloading and installing the Audacity audio editing software on your PC. (My apologies to any MAC users - there's a MAC version, but it isn't covered in this segment!). After viewing this screencast you should be able to create audio files which can then be posted to a Blackboard course, blog, wiki, and/or podcast. We'll talk about procedures for doing this in later segments.

This is the first segment in a series of posts dealing with the podcasting process. In this segment we look briefly a the four basic steps needed to set up a podcast. In future segments we'll look at each step in more detail.