I REMEMBER WATCHING Conn O Muineachain (at left) use his handheld audio recorder when chatting with people during Limerick OpenCoffee and then trying to figure out how we might teach third level students how to do the same thing. It's not just training people how to chat up someone in an interesting way. It's about recording key information about how people open up and share. More than anything else, I cherish OpenCoffee meet-ups for their collaborative potential. I'm thinking about collaboration at the handheld level now because it's a subject I'm discussing at the ICT in Education Conference in Tipperary Institute this month and at DIT's e-learning week next month. It's too big of a leap to ask third level students to begin recording meaningful audio or video clips directly so I start with key frames and captions from existing work. That leads to conceptualising cover art (like on albums, CDs and MP3 tracks) and finally into a workflow that culminates in recording a short audio snippet similar to what Conn O Muineachain used to do a few summers ago. It's time to start making and sharing these collaborative audio snippets again, perhaps attaching them as Audioboo clips to the bottom of my blog posts.
Audioboo.fm -- "Back Garden Boo
Direct link to http://www.insideview.ie/files/back_garden_boo.mp3
