Thing #17: Podcasts

MILLER ANALOGIES FOR DUMMIES

Remember the Miller Analogies Test?  Were you ever kidnapped, held at gunpoint and forced to take it?  You know the test I mean.  It's full of weird fill-in-the-blank comparison questions like:

1.  A toaster is to a PopTart as a certain character from the Harry Potter series named __________ is to an owl pellet.

Or, in case your belief-system forbids you to read Harry Potter, here is an alternative Miller-style analogy for you:

2.  A toaster is to a PopTart as a __________ is to a certain unfortunate Biblical character named Jonah.

Did you ever get any of those analogies?  I always just found them amazingly irrelevant and stupid.

FLASHBACK

And yet, here I am, many years later with the following analogy popping into my head:

3.  A podcast is to a radio broadcast as a __________ is to a movie playing at the local Cineplex.

I guess what this means is that podcasts let the listener control when to listen (and allows him or her to listen in private) in the same way a certain other media format that's been around longer than podcasting allows a viewer to choose when to view a movie (and to view it in private).

Okay, fair enough.

(Answers to the above three analogies, by the way, can be found at the end of this blogpost.)

THE COMMON CRAFT SHOW

Lee and Sachi LeFever's Common Craft Show episode, "Podcasting in Plain English" this time, was a model of brevity and clarity.  As always.

BOOK-RELATED PODCASTS

I went to Podcast.com and listened to several podcasts.  The March 19th, 2009, podcast of All About Books had a very polished, NPR quality to it.  Charles Stephen and Otis Young discuss several new books, leading with War as They Knew It by Michael Rosenberg, about the rivalry between two legendary football coaches: Woody Hayes of Ohio State and the University of Michigan's Bo Schembechler.

Denver Public Library's had podcasts (audio only) of children's books.  I listened to It's Quacking Time by Martin Waddell, read by a narrator identified only as Jeff, and "Frog," a fractured fairy tale from Tales from the Brothers Grimm and Sisters Weird by Vivian Vande Velde, read by Emily.  These reminded me inescapably of library storytime readalouds.

I also listened to Episode 12 of a publisher podcast series entitled Sweet and Sassy Summer of Girls Fiction from HarperCollins.  Laura Kasischke reads a spooky passage from her young adult novel entitled Boy Heaven.  This was a slicker, more commercial production, with music and an announcer introducing the author.

ACLD COULD DO SOMETHING SIMILAR

I can see the Library making use of all three formats (expert review, readaloud, and author-read excerpt).  A few others spring to mind as well:  What about kids reviewing their favorite books?  Or kids doing the reading aloud?  What about a contest where kids submit their own original stories?

ADDING AN RSS FEED

The RSS feed I added to my Bloglines account was BigStoryTime.com, which is a series of 75 charming readalouds by five-year-olds.  The kids' voices are delightfully expressive.  The works being read are published picturebooks.

Although the podcast is not still in production (last episode was created in July of 2007), it is still available via RSS feed, and I'm sure it will take me a while to get through all 75 episodes.  (Wolf's Chicken Stew was wonderful!)

PODCASTING VIA Gcast

I use this song in my storytimes for preschoolers, Kindergarteners, and even early elementary aged kids if they're well-behaved and / or sleepy.  As a lullaby, it makes a great lead-in to naptime.

I sang this into GarageBand on my Mac while sitting in the kitchen.  If you listen closely, you can hear the cats sneezing and walking on the stove.

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ALL FOR NOW

Pretty cool.  Podcasts are fun.

Okay, well, I guess that's it for now.  I'm looking forward to Thing #18.

Don't forget to look for the answers to the Miller-style analogies below.

ANSWERS TO MILLER-STYLE ANALOGIES

1.  Hedwig     2.  whale (okay, big fish, if you want to be literal)     3.  DVD

If you didn't get any of these, I recommend reading more British fantasy and / or Bible stories in conjunction with vacationing at the beach once a year so you can fry your brain on cable.