Zoom H2 microphone

I have been in the business of producing calculus podcasts for a while. Now we experimented reproducing a mathematical talk as a podcast. Together with Emil Volcheck and Tony Shaska I organized a special session at the Joint Meeting of the AMS and MAA that took place in Washington, DC this January. Emil had a Zoom H2 portable audiorecorder that we used to record Peter Buser’s talk. Together with Buser we then recreated the slideshow, and matched that with the recorded audio. The result is available at http://gallery.me.com/mika.seppala#100437.

As Peter and I were doing the reproduction, Peter observed that he could well have done his 20-minute talk in 10 minutes. Today I tested Peter’s claim. Yesterday I produced podcasts on partial fraction decomposition, a method of calculus to integrate rational functions. Today I explained the content of the podcasts using just blackboard. The blackboard presentation took almost three times as long as the podcasts produced yesterday. One third of the difference can be explained by the time it takes to write formulae on a blackboard, one-third with the auxiliary remarks and jokes, which are not really necessary. So a typical 56-hour course (14 weeks, 4 hours a week) corresponds perhaps to 19 hours of podcasts. Students can then play these podcasts as many times as needed to learn the materials.

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