Thing 21

I looked through a variety of the podcasts suggested in Thing 21. I chose the University of leeds Critical Skills podcast - useful, but no pictures. It was 11 minutes long and seemed to present information for undergraduates quite well, but it also spent time saying who they were, what a padcast was etc. I can imagine some students switching off, or qust 'tuning out' and not listening to a stream of information - especially one wihthout pictures. I also looked at most of the Youtube videos. Again, some of these were far too long for the casual user. Some were funny, some were not, some tried to be funny but I was disappointed. Some of them seemed to spend time making the videos fun - lots of special effects and not much content.
I did join YouTube - sigh - another username to remember and signed up for a dancing site ...I had bee nthinking of doing this for a while, to receive new posting s of their videos, but had been put off by the thought of another usemane & password. Thing 21 gave me the impetus to register. It is a useful site showing all the 'standard moves' in rueda.
http://www.youtube.com/user/ruedastandard
I follow this dancing standard and it has been very useful - YouTube is a much better medium (and cheaper) to show dancing moves than the 'old' dvds that were produced and sold. So, my views on podcasting and youtube - can be useful, but I do think that the library/librarian has to be careful as some of the exanples looked unprofessional. I think that if something like this is to be done then it has to be done professionally - is this the correct medium to use? who is it for? Is it going to reflect well on the library? Is it funny or just 'naff'? It will be very interesting to see the university production next month. I did love the Ninja Librarian Youtube video though!