PODCASTING THEORY & PRACTICEDr. Alisa Cooper

South Mountain Community College

A podcast is a collection of digital media files which is distributed over the Internet, often using syndication feeds, for playback on portable

media players and personal computers (Wikipedia).

Digital Media Files & Playersaudio, video, other digital content

What is Podcast?

The term “podcast” is a portmanteau of the acronym “Pod”—standing for “Portable on Demand”—and “broadcast”.

What makes a podcast different from other digital audio formats is its ability to be downloaded automatically using software capable of reading feeds like RSS or Atom.

RSS Aggregator

Podcast audio uses syndication feed enclosures which pass the address of a media file to the RSS aggregator

Aggregators

Media aggregators are sometimes referred to as “Podcatchers” due to the popularity of the term “podcast.”

Media aggregators refer to applications: client software or Web based, which maintain subscriptions to feeds that contain audio or video media enclosures.

What is RSS?

RSS 2.0 stands for Really Simple Syndication.

RSS is a type of web feed, a data format used for serving users’ frequently updated content.

Video: RSS in Plain English

Video from commoncraft:Explanations in Plain English

RSS Simplified

Websites syndicate the web feed which allows users to subscribe to it.

Podcasting Usage in Education

course content dissemination,

classroom recording,

field recording,

study support (via repeated listening to audio content), and

file storage and transfer

How does this improve teaching & learning?

Time shifting

Expanding Classroom

Review Capability

Time Shifting

“The iPod technology also offers the potential to shift the proportion of class time devoted to learning that benefits from face-to-face interactions between faculty and students, and shift preparatory work to outside times and locations” (Leland quoted in Blaisdell, 2006).

24/7 Education

Create a learning environment that extends well outside the boundaries of the classroom.

Create community among students.

Review Capability

Course lectures can be dense and difficult to grab ahold of in just one sitting.

Podcasts allow for review, review and more review.

Is It All Hype?

For some, maybe. It gets attention from students

Duke spent $500,000 and generated substantial

publicityIt’s a developing

technology and faculty need to buy in and be

trained.

Podcasting Faculty

A recent study found individuals who were venturesome, socially mobile, rated high on intelligence and innovativeness, and were not concerned with uncertainty or risk were most likely to adopt.

Major Issues

content storage and access,

procurement of licenses for copyrighted material,

lack of instructor tools for content creation, and

limited documentation and training resources

iTunes Uthe campus that never sleeps

iTunes U has arrived, giving colleges an ingenious way to get audio and video content out to their students.

Presentations, performances, lectures, demonstrations, debates, tours, archival footage

Copyright & Legal Issues

Rights and permissions need to be secured for material included

Copyright law is relevant to podcasts because it applies to creative and expressive works and copyright attaches automatically

Future of Podcasting

There are sound theoretical arguments for at least investigating the

extent to which podcasting can be an

effective pedagogical tool (Lim, 2005).

talk Uploaded on February 11, 2008 by Walsh on Flickr