"Making Technology Accessible for
Seniors"
This was a talk I presented to the Oakmont PC Users Group on October 20, 2008. A PowerPoint slide show was included in the talk. -gp
Hello and welcome to today's OPCUG program. My name is Gary Pickering when I moved into Oakmont and I joined the Oakmont PC User Group in February of this year. My background in computers includes working as an electronic technician for large medical equipment company in Southern California and as manufacturing engineer here in Santa Rosa that makes capital equipment for large electronic companies. I have repaired computers and written software. My interests, as far as computers are concerned, are in finding ways to make our lives easier and more interesting through computer technology. This includes an interest in computer accessibility, teaching basic computer skills to seniors, robotics, converting old records to a digital format, and, of course, today's subject podcasting.
Today's program is titled "Podcasting for Seniors." I want to introduce seniors to "A New Way to Experience the Internet" by listening and watching podcasts on their computer or MP3 player. I will not be talking about how to create your own podcasts but maybe at a later date I can. Anybody who is interested in that subject please contact me after the meeting.
First, I would like to draw your attention to the guy in the bottom right corner of the slide. There's a caveman holding a stone wheel but that's really a caricature me holding a disc platter back in the late 1970s. When I was working as a electronic technician part of my job was to service the company's mainframe disc drives. They had two 100Mb drives each the size of a large washing machine. The disc platters where huge and were installed in a cleanroom next to the mainframe.
Okay, now let's talk about today to give you an idea how far we have come. Apple's iPod digital media player has a 120Gb disc drive installed on it. It would take 1,200 100Mb drives to do what a you can carry in your pocket today. In the 1970s you would have needed a train to carry all those drives. With the invention of extremely small high density drives, the Internet, and advanced battery technology, the world of podcasting has exploded. Oh, did I say "battery technology" well we are getting there; either there will be more powerful batteries or the devices will require less power. I do have one pet peeve and that is why do they make the devices so small? The last time I checked human beings weren't getting any smaller!
So what is podcasting? First, I would like to say something about the definition of podcasting. The terms podcasting, podcast, podcathcher, podiobooks, etc., are all new terms and the definitions are changing all the time. I go by the strict definition of "the distribution of specially encoded multi-media content to subscribed personal computers via the RSS 2.0 protocol." Now that I cleared that up. You are probably just starting to nod off but wait I will explain. Well, all it's saying is that this protocol makes it possible to automatically have files downloaded to your computer. To put it in another way, what I am trying to say is that many sites on the web offer audio or video clips that they will send to your computer automatically and you don't have to go looking for it. Think of it as a electronic mailbox that delivers your audio and video stuff to you. Sorry, no junk or spam allowed!
You have probably already experienced a form of podcasting on your computer. If you have been to any of news websites and clicked on their video or audio links then you have listened to a podcast. If you have gone to the YouTube website then all of these videos would be considered podcasts viewed manually. With this method you have to go to the website and click on the content that you want to hear. This is the manual way of getting a podcast. But true podcasting is a way to enjoy media content you select from the Internet and have it automatically delivered to your computer or portable device. Usually, this is in a form of a list of podcasts on your browser that you click on.
Podcast can be more than audio and video clips. These include documents, photos, news articles, blogs, lectures, music, and etc. Podcasting is apart of the new Web 2.0 and social networking.
Don't worry about this slide. I just what you be familiar with the small orange icon at the bottom-right of the slide. If you see this on a web page then it has available podcast and you can subscribe to it. Sometimes there will be a small orange icon with just the letters R-S-S in it.
Podcasts are media files that use digital feeds from the Internet. These electronic feeds transfer the files from the server to the client site and then the files are downloaded to your computer or media player. You can think of the word "podcast" to be similar in usage as "radio." Both mean the content itself or it's syndication. The big difference between broadcasting and podcasting is that podcasting is a form of "narrow-casting." If you think of a radio and how it works by sending a signal to anyone that can receive it. A podcast sends only to subscribers not to just anyone. The act of sending a podcast is called podcasting.
The word podcast comes from the acronym for "portable on demand" or pod and "cast" as in broadcasting content. The icon RSS was created by Netscape in March 1999 and used on the My Netscape portal. The term "podcasting" is largely attributed to Adam Curry a "VJ" for MTV.
A podcatcher is a application program that runs in the background and can automatically transfer new episodes to the user device. The aggregator (a fancy term for podcatcher) can be set to check regularly for new files at the feeds home site. This reduces the time and effort to find the content and play the file. An example of an podcatcher that receives and manages feeds would be Apple's iTunes. If you are using a newer version Microsoft's Internet Explorer you already have a podcatcher called "Feeds" in the browser's favorites sidebar.
This is model of publishing uses the new "push" technology where the subscriber can receive media without manually going to website sites to find content. A media list is sent to you as the subscriber and the you decides if the content will be viewed or not. If you decide to listen to the podcast then the podcast is downloaded onto the storage device that will play the file. This is usually a disc drive in the computer or a flash drive in a portable player.
Both this slide and the next are a list of other podcatcher programs that are available. You can used these but I prefer just using Internet Explorer. It's easy to use and always there on your browser. Click here for a list of Podcatcher Programs. [Use the "Back" arrow to return here.]