Podcasting for Education

Yup!

Podcasting for Education: "

I just wanted to capture some possible compelling uses for podcasting in an educational setting.

• Lectures. Imagine students being able to subscribe to an RSS feed, and have recordings of every lecture automatically stored on their hard drive or iPod or whatnot for review. This would remove the need for the dozens of recorders at the front of a large lecture hall, all getting crappy and redundant audio. Why not produce a single quality feed, and let everyone use it? (on a related note - why not share a single high quality set of notes, rather than making lectures a speed-writing test…)
• Interviews with external resources - an instructor could interview a scientist, or someone practicing whatever the subject is, and add that recording to the RSS feed for the class - making it available to all students. Something like a Campus iTunes Music Store could do something similar, but everyone would have to go to it and grab the files, rather than have them quasi-pushed out to them.
• Lots of other things I haven’t come up with…

It’s the second point I’m hoping to play around with - documenting some of the thinking and developments by some of the folks in the learning technology field - hopefully I’d be able to do something like an ITConversations for educational technology stuff. If it works, and doesn’t completely suck, I’d use that as an example for faculty who are interested in the concept. If it doesn’t work, or completely sucks, well - that’s a valid data point as well… The shared lecture audio is a no brainer, in my mind…

The various bits that make up podcasting have been around forever (digital audio, internet distribution, RSS syndication), but the combination of the three makes for a system that approximates a personalized radio station. Imagine each institution having its own podcast directory, and students (as well as faculty) could select which ones they wanted automatically downloaded for review, in their own “university radio station” aggregation…

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(Via D'Arcy Norman @ The Learning Commons.)

Comments

[bryan]

i have been recording my classes for a while using my ipod and italk which works surprisingly well. i have been putting them in itunes and sharring them through itunes. that was one of the first things i thought about when i learned about podcasting and rss, however not alot of people know about rss, syndication or podcasting. one other thing is that when you get to college these days its getting very competitive and it acctully helps me when others dont get the infomation from the lectures. However, I have plans to change this and when i do im definatly going to get this "podcasting for education"

[steffanie]

I'm trying to use podcasting for learning German. At the moment I'm just blabbing away but I hope to get more focused in the future :-)

[D'Arcy Norman]

Hugo, I'd been working through your setup instructions (parts 3 and 4) - if I had gone back to part 1 I would have seen your list! :-)

Thankfully, most of these things are rather self evident - just waiting for tools that make it possible. I'd love to see podcast feeds for each course/session, with audio being pushed out to anyone who cares. I'd love to see supporting resources distributed this way as well. I'm sure there are all kinds of fun stuff we're not even thinking about yet...