"CLICK AND DOUBLE-CLICK" INAUGURATE PODCASTING AT BMC

Left to Right: "Click" (Laura Blankenship), "Right-Click" (Ben Johnston) and "Double-Click" (Mike Zarro)

Move over, Car Talk guys. "Click and Double Click" is riding the wave of the audio future: podcasting. This tech-help show, created by the Educational Technology Center staff, is available on the ETC site at www.brynmawr.edu/etc/click as streaming audio or MP3 download. Fans can listen to the show at their computers, but they need not be tethered to a desk to absorb the wit and wisdom of hosts Click, Double-Click and Right-Click. They can listen at the gym, on the train, between the lab and the library — anywhere an MP3 player can go.

Click (Senior Instructional Technologist Laura Blankenship), Double-Click (Web Applications Developer Mike Zarro) and Right-Click (Language Learning Center Director Ben Johnston) offer tips about new technologies and answer listeners' questions about hardware and software in a relaxed and genial atmosphere. The inaugural show, for instance, covered questions about how to set up a Bryn Mawr e-mail account on a home computer, advice to Webmasters on how to create an icon that will appear in the address bar of users' Web browsers, and how Google works.

"We'd like to help make technology more approachable by showing people that you don't have to be an expert to use it," says Zarro. "Like everybody else, we're learning about new products as we go. That process doesn't have to be full of anxiety: we can make mistakes, and joke around with each other about them, and still have a lot of fun with technology."

Johnston says that he hopes that the show's medium as well as its content will inspire members of the campus community to use technology creatively. "We want to spread the word that podcasting and similar technologies are available at Bryn Mawr," he says.

"There are all kinds of potential applications for this technology, both academic and extracurricular," Blankenship adds. "Lectures and readings could be podcast; so could poetry slams, committee meetings or open-mike nights." Blankenship is planning a workshop on podcasting and screencasting (a similar technology that uses video) in late April.

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