Tama’s eLearning Blog

I recently received my 60Gb 5G Video iPod which I’ll be using to test out the three new 5G microphone accessories as they’re released (I’ve pre-ordered the xtrememac Micromemo — which should ship late July — and I’m keeping an eye out for the soon-to-be-released TuneTalk and iTalkPro). I’m fascinated to see how these microphones will allow the iPod to actually be used as a decent quality podcast recording device and with any luck they’ll be a nice simple solution for students recording interviews, voice-overs and other audio of their own creation.

However, since there’s at least a month before the first ipod video microphones hit the market, I thought I’d have a look at a how a recorded lecture would look on the iPod’s video screen. I really didn’t expect it to be terribly useful because even though they’re a great idea, the screen it still pretty small. Of course, it’s bigger than many mobile phone screens and I was actually very impressed by the quality of the images on the iPod video screen.

In order to have a play with a recorded video lecture, I downloaded one of the Lectopia-generated quicktime movie files of one of my lectures for Hong Kong last semester and exported it to iPod video format. While an odd sight to see (for me, at least), the resulting image on the iPod screen was actually quite watchable. Here’s a look:

I also tried outputting the video via the AV connector kit (which, I should add, is not bundled with the iPod but rather a separate purchase) and, as you would imagine, the stretched image pixelated a little but was still fairly watchable:

While I don’t think the talking head lectures are really the most pedagogically useful lectures, I think that the quality of these images would allow screen captured or screencast lectures to actually appear in a readable enough format if people respect good powerpoint slide use and have no more than five or six lines of text on each screen.

Now I’m waiting for those microphones to do some quality comparissons …