Pencil-Sketch Version of My Recording Set-Up. See The Original Below.
This week’s challenge is to do a podcast to answer David Anderson’s questions about how we work as instructional designers. Here’s mine, and I explain how I created it at the end of this post.
If you’d rather listen to all of the tracks on autoplay, listen here: Podcast: How I Get Things Done as an Instructional Designer.
1. What’s your job title?
2. What software tools do you love?
3. What’s your workspace setup?
4. What is your creative or design philosophy?
5. How do you stay fresh and keep building your skills?
6. How do you avoid burnout?
7. How do you save time and boost your efficiency day to day?
8. How do you manage your workflow?
9. What books or blogs have been influential to you?
10. What kinds of tasks do you love to do? What gets you excited to sit down at your desk?
11. What do you like to do least? How do you keep yourself motivated to do that stuff?
The Process
My Recording Set-Up
This is how I did it:
- Wrote down some thoughts the day before I recorded them, and probably used about 20% of that. The rest I winged.
- Used my trusty Audio-Technica AT2020 desktop USB mic to record in Audacity on iMac. If you’d like to see a photo of my setup, along with some of my favorite recording tips, they’re right here.
- Added some noise removal to get rid of ambient noise, then exported individual tracks as mp3s.
- Headed over to SoundCloud where I uploaded them as a playlist.
- Headed here to my WordPress blog to write this up. To embed these tracks I referred to the SoundCloud instructions which work well; though rather than doing a link-type post I simply pasted each of the track links into the body of a standard post.
Jackie, I loved your podcast, thank you for sharing! Great advice on different aspects of Instructional Design and eLearning.
I’m relatively new on ID (completed my master in 2012 and been working as ID for over two years now), so I appreciate your expertise. BTW, I’m reading Julie Dirksen book, Design for how people learn and I love it so far. I’ll add the Dan Raom book to my wish list.
Thanks again :)
Angela
Thanks Angela!
I’m glad you liked it. Isn’t Julie’s book the best? She takes some pretty complex information and explains it clearly and effortlessly – and makes it easy to see how you can apply it right away.
Thanks so much for your comments!
I love how you boost your efficiency! I think this is a great tip. I see efficiency as a much overlooked aspect of work that can provide the balance and perspective we all need. Focusing on a few key tasks and performing them efficiently will accomplish much more than running around trying to multitask all day long!
Thanks Ellen! It’s not exactly the norm, I guess – but it works and is quite stress-free!