Report of Podcasting, Music, and Audio

 “A podcast is an ongoing digital audio program that releases regular ‘episodes’ that listeners subscribe to via a feed.” (P. 199) It could be either streamed directly in real time on computer or downloaded automatically as soon as it was released if it was subscribed by listeners who have preset relative operations on a ‘Podcatcher’ such as iTunes or Juice Receiver. In China, people who are interested in podcasting almost use a free online audio sharing platform named ‘Himalayan’ to post their completed podcasting and subscribe what they want to listen as well.

  Compare to the traditional ways for context presenting purpose such as paper writing or infographics, podcasting dose more effective on accepting information needed and acquire knowledge conveniently which means people can access to this vocal processing easily without any temporal or special constrains as long as they have a smartphone or computer which is connected to the internet. Of course, they should know how to use relative ‘podcatchers’ first, and it’s not a big deal by following the comprehensive tips provided by dedicated platforms.

  For educational purpose, “podcasting could be highly effective in promoting collaborative, socially constructivist learning environments where students build and share knowledge and opinion.” (P.186) Podcasting performs perfectly on asking students to identify a problem and to find a way of answering it. And students can also develop a wide variety of skills in the process of planning, creating and publishing a podcast to answer a problem such as technical skills about how to record, edit and distribute digital audio, project management skills, social skills, communication skills, intellectual skills. In a word, podcast could practice students’ different relative skills in collaborative troubleshooting. So how to plan, create, put various coherent, focused digital audios together into an entire podcast and publish it is fairly important.

  At first, teachers should conceptualize podcasts needed and develop a format for podcasts that students would do later. For example, teachers should explain students concisely and help them understand what’s the main focus of the predictable podcast, what are the essential targets, which kind of indicated audience and decide the format of podcasts such as hosted panel discussions or class report according to the real teaching demands.

  Then students should work on their podcasts by following what teachers demanded promptly. Before they started their podcasting projects, they should work out a detailed working sheet include context or interview plan first. Then, they should choose a suitable and quite location where is more easily to control the ambient noise to host a high quality recording. They also need voice recording equipment with a fairly large recording capacity or memory, headphones that allow them to listen for irritating background noises that might need to be edited out, microphones that will be adequate for making purpose and a computer with audio editing software like garage band, adobe audition or audacity. Of course, they need a platform to publish their achieved podcasts.

  Thanks for the rapid development of computer technology, it’s easier for students to use audio editing software for essential manipulations. Students can highlight and edit certain sections, amplify quieter bits, insert silences, add effects, fade in or out, and accomplish many other feats of digital modification to their recording. By the way, it’s better for students to edit from a copy on the computer, save work regularly during the editing process, create a backup of what they have recorded and keep the original file somewhere safe so they can edit materials again if something unforeseen happens like software snafus.

  Different from America, Chinese people can download the music without payment for listening or non-commercial purpose because of the particular condition in China, so teachers won’t worry about the issues of copyright or privacy for educational usage. But it’s necessary to extend thanks to the original author at the end of the podcast.

Reflection of Social Network

  Depending on my own usage experience of social networks, I think the service providers should pay more attention to the spam flooding and widespread advertisements.

  Although some browsers like chrome provide advertising filtering functions, it couldn’t shield all the advertising information when you are using social networks for communication. And some social networks may won’t allow users to shield some advertising information for business purpose, so it’s a common phenomenon that the useless information is filled with the most pages in all the social networks when users refresh the page of friends’ status. It will make users feel frustrated because they have to spend much more time to look through the information and messages what they need.

  In China, more and more people are interested in Wechat Business because they can get profit on advertising merchandise from some manufacturers by updating relative status. For example, one of my sister in law always updates commercial status for selling merchandise, so I have to shield her on Wechat to avoid the fazing of useless advertisements. But the problem is that I can’t receive any messages from her include normal status updates. What a pity.

Report of Social Networks

  “Social network is any site or service that allows people to connect with each other, to inform others about events and activities, and to share news, photos, videos and items of interest.” (P.171) In my opinion, social networks such as Facebook, microblogs, and the circle of friends in Wechat are platforms that could be used for personal presentation of normal lives and interest sharing and communication.

  As we all know, Facebook is the most popular and useful social network around the world that people can post their status and look thought other friends’ status, make new friends according to their interests or hobbies, check the notification of newest update and use other plug-in modules for particular purpose to make life colorfully. Unfortunately, the State council of China prohibits the usage of Facebook based on the consideration of country’s security, so many similar social networks such as microblogs and the circle of friends in Wechat are established by different Internet companies in China. Absolutely, they are all visibly ‘community’ focused.

  In order to make people find matched friends conveniently and communicate with friends authentically, social network service providers always need people provide their feature profiles such as name, birthday, gender, hometown, a brief description of interests, hobbies and political views. The more information people give out about themselves, the more likely they are to find people they know, connect with others, and generally have a rich and personalized experience on the network. Of course, people need to agree with the usage protocol which include privacy policy first to enjoy the entire service of social networks.

  Social networks encourage people to give away information about themselves through mechanisms such as profiles and status updates so that their friends can know what are they doing recently and join in their lives to make it more vivid. People can communicate with their friends directly by embedded procedures on social network, and they can also push praise, forward or comment on their friends’ status individually in the dedicated discussion forum which is visible for all the friends of a person who shared his or her status. It’s really interesting that people can make an encounter if they posted the similar status in the same place from the social networks. But sometimes it will be a problem when you share one of your friends’ status in your own social network inadvertently without his or her permission, because he or she may don’t want others know their real-time status. So how to explain to your friend if his father knows what he is doing without his permission by looking through your network? It must be embarrassed.

  The same embarrassed issue appears in educational network that most students don’t want to share their real-time status with their parents, relatives or teachers because the fear of revelation of their own secrets which could only be shared with peers although they can use the fundamental functions expertly and are similar to other features of educational networks like Ning already. They usually have two different accounts on their social network and educational network to solve this big deal.

  Most adults can easily concentrate on doing something in a complex environment full of temptations, but it’s really hard for nonage students to do that. They may be misled by negative information such as illegal advertisements and distracted by various temptations when teachers make them focused on performing a collaborate activity on social network. And the most important issue that current social networks perform not so good on protecting students’ privacy, many parents cannot persuade themselves to allow their children to use social network for educational purpose actually according to some happened disadvantaged instance.

  So I think it’s not so good to implement social network on nonage students’ education,

It still does more harm than goodness at present.