Question: Message Strategies: Providing Routine Information; Media Skills: Podcasting. As a training specialist in Winnebago Industry's human resources department, you're always on the lookout for new ways to help employees learn vital job skills. While watching a production worker page through a training manual while learning how to assemble a new recreational vehicle, you get what seems to be a great idea: Record the assembly instructions as audio fi les that workers can listen to while performing the necessary steps. With audio instructions, they wouldn't need to keep shift ing their eyes between the product and the manual-and constantly losing their place. They could focus on the product and listen for each instruction. Plus, the new system wouldn't cost much at all; any computer can record the audio fi les, and you'd simply make them available on an intranet site for download into iPods or other digital music players.
Your task: You immediately run your new idea past your boss, who has heard about podcasting but doesn't think it has any place in business. He asks you to prove the viability of the idea by recording a demonstration. Choose a process that you engage in yourself-anything from replacing the strings on a guitar to sewing a quilt to changing the oil in a car-and write a brief (one page or less) description of the process that could be recorded as an audio fi le. Th ink carefully about the limitations of the audio format as a replacement for printed text (for instance, do you need to tell people to pause the audio while they perform a timeconsuming task?). If directed by your instructor, record your instructions as a podcast.