Interview with John Smith on Learning and Communities of Practice

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John Smith is the community liaison for CPSquare, a community of practice about communities of practice. The group brings people together from around the world through online, telephone and face to face meetings to share their knowledge and learn together about how communities of practice can best function and learn in any field.

The following is a summary with key excerpts from a recent interview we did together. Discussion included John’s thoughts on group learning and new technologies and those are what I’ve focused on here. You can click the "excerpt" link next to any of the summary points to hear John in his own words.

Click here to go to the interview or continue below for discussion of technical struggles I had with this interview, specifically using the Gizmo Project VOIP system.

After performing my second audio interview over the VOIP alternative to Skype called Gizmo Project, I wanted to offer the following lessons learned. This one was with John Smith, community liaison of Community of Practice Square, a community of practice about communities of practice.

  • Gizmo’s one-click record to .wav format has a lot of potential and is very much worth using…but it’s also harder to turn into a finished product than you might think.
  • The .wav audio format is not very compact, so the finished recording can end up being a large, unwieldy file. My 22 minute interview ended up being a 75 megabyte file. I had enough software problems with Audacity and Cacophony on my Mac that file conversion into a smaller, iPod-compatible format was a ridiculous struggle.
  • The sound quality of Gizmo was not great and the volume was not high enough, although it was a soft spoken person I was interviewing.
  • There is not very much control available over the type of recording Gizmo makes – sample rate, etc.
  • In the end I had mangled the file so badly through trying to crank the volume, etc. that I just posted short excerpts. I’m still not sure how the volume turned out.
  • I really wish I knew why Audacity’s MP3 converting program, LameLib, crashes every time I try to use it. I’ve tried downloading it several times and ended up using Cacophony instead. I wouldn’t recommend that for large files either, as it slowed my computer to a crawl. The speed of the Gizmo recording and Garage Band were not compatible.

I sure wish there was a functional, simple Mac solution to this problem.

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