Educational Weblogs: Podcasting for Education
Some educational uses for podcasting. For anyone whose work relates to sound (through music, speech, natural sounds…), podcasting can become a very elegant delivery method. Interviews, which are quite important for ethnographers, are a very wide domain in and of themselves. For lectures, it might be interesting in some cases to use methods to artificially accelerate the speech rate for some people who have better concentration this way. Of course, many instructors would disagree with exclusive use of recorded lectures yet the idea might be that students come to class after listening to the lectures and use class time for deeper discussions. In some cases, it might just work.
Again, podcasting is only the convergence of existing technologies, each of which being rather commonplace. It’s an interesting intersection of syndication (which may help realize the dreams of ’90s “push” technology), compressed audio (especially MP3), “logs” (blogs, etc.), radio (for overall structure), and asynchronous downloads (as opposed to streaming). Some instructors have already made use of podcasting and there’s room for exploration. Universities’ available bandwidth (especially on-campus) and the pre-targeted content make the most difficult aspects of podcasting relatively unimportant.