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Podcasting on a Shoestring
Community college turns to open source and used computers for captured lectures
11/14/2007
A feisty online program director on a rock-bottom budget at a Los Angeles college is using free cast-off computers and help from an open source software startup to create podcasts of classroom lectures.Los Angeles Trade-Technical College is the oldest of nine public two-year colleges in the huge Los Angeles Community College District. Nearly half of its students work more than 30 hours a week and all students commute to the college, whose main campus is near downtown LA. For many students, English is a second language.
Linda Delzeit-McIntyre, an instructor at LATTC and its online program director, decided in 2006 to launch a pilot podcasting program. Listening, she explained, is clearly a primary skill for many LATTC students. "We're in the inner city," she said. "Many of our students speak one or more languages, but they don't read or write well in any of them. That means they have learned by listening." She said she often saw students coming to class with handheld tape recorders, which disrupted class or would run out of tape or batteries.
Also, LATTC students, many of whom are pressed for time because they have family and work obligations along with school, commonly spend time sitting in traffic or on the bus during the commute to and from school--excellent time for using an MP3 device. "The problem is time," Delzeit-McIntyre said. "[Students] are working, taking care of kids, taking care of parents. Time is critical."
Realizing that, Delzeit-McIntyre first scrounged some used low-end computers discarded when a local county courthouse upgraded. Preparing the free computers was no easy task--Delzeit-McIntyre painstakingly hauled them from a warehouse, a few at a time, in the trunk of her car. Many had bad power supplies, hard drives, or other components; were infected with viruses; or simply didn't work. Of the ones that did, she has now set up some 40 reclaimed computers on campus. The computers are mounted on classroom walls without keyboards or monitors, essentially becoming networked dedicated recording devices. Delzeit-McIntyre has added inexpensive $50 microphones, which instructors bring to class with them.
On the software side, she teamed up with Chris Dawson, CEO and president of Box Populi, a Portland, OR-based software startup that offers a simple open source software product that can turn virtually any computer, including very old or low-end ones, into dedicated podcasting appliances. The company's Podcast-in-a-Box software is released under the open source General Public Licensing, or GPL, allowing users to use and redistribute it without fees or limitations.
The software requires a computer with a network card containing LAN and Ethernet connections, an audio card, 128 MB of memory, 4 GB of disk space, a 500 MHz or greater processor, and a USB port. That relatively simply list of requirements--some of the initial Pentium computers from years ago can meet it--means that schools on a budget can recycle old computers by turning them into recording devices.
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