Talking the tech talk

If you know me personally, you’ll know I’m rather a chatterbox. I don’t always mean to be, but I do talk a lot. So when I had the chance to review Blue Microphones’ Spark Digital device, it soon dawned on me that I could just as well create audio blog posts as written ones. I may as well try and commit some words to digital file.

I’ve always been more confident writing than I have speaking (chattering is nothing like the same thing as speaking clearly and authoritatively, after all). But lately I’ve been pondering podcasts for a few reasons. One is that I enjoy showing people how to use technology and that’s often done better on video with an accompanying voiceover than it is with just a written description.

Another is that I’d like to turn one of my Twitter feeds about local events into a listings and events site. A weekly podcast digest of what’s happening could be great.

Reviewing the Spark Digital microphone has got me into podcasting

The third is that I’ve been asked to be a speaker at a special event being put on in conjunction with the publishers of my about-to-be published book, 'iPad For The Older And Wiser, 3rd Edition' (I'm the co-author).

Being unused to such public-facing duties, the latter event is rather scary. But it’s important to challenge yourself every so often, and I think it will be a good thing for me to do. As I say, I may be good at chatting, but getting up in front of people and having them look at me and pay attention to what I have to say is a whole other matter. My school drama teacher reported that I was the shyest pupil she’d ever met.

Many years ago, when I was a Modern Languages student, I worked as a teaching assistant in several schools in Germany. I was scared stiff of speaking German and really struggled to find my feet when I first arrived in Munich. I had no accommodation arranged. My so-called mentor cancelled my lodgings when he returned from holiday to discover that, rather than the Oxbridge undergraduate he’d requested, his high-profile school had been allocated a timid student from a lesser institution. I met him perhaps once, two months into my 10-month stint at the tertiary college, and then only because I wandered into the Smoking Staffroom. I bet they still have one.

Thankfully, his colleagues were rather more welcoming and certainly felt they could make use of my native speaker status to benefit their students. Language teaching assistants are generally used to encourage conversation skills, taking small groups at a time and asking them to offer their opinions on a set topic or text. In the school in which I mainly worked, we were expected to source materials, plan lessons, explain tasks to the class and then run the lesson while the regular teacher looked on. It wasn’t an untrammelled success as my political and economic knowledge was no match for the adult students I encountered. But I could at least talk authoritatively about my mother tongue and about everyday life back home. It was a start.

I’m hoping that a similar process gradual increase in confidence will occur when I address the 150-or-so attendees at the U3A conference and talk to them about technology and how smartphones and tablets can fit neatly into their lives. After all, I’ve lived and breathed writing about such gadgets for more than a decade.

In the meantime, I’ve the perfect excuse to exercise my vocal chords and practice my lines. If you hear nothing more of my audiocasting endeavours, you'll know I tried and found podcasting wasn't for me.