June 2007 — News
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Podcasts: Where's the Learning?
Podcasts are becoming popular for educational purposes. Increasingly students in K-12 and in higher education are creating podcasts to demonstrate what they are learning. The technology is becoming so important that online course management systems, such as Angel Learning, are now incorporating features enabling content providers to include podcasting (Nagel, 2007). However, many of those I've heard appear to be created by individuals experimenting with the technology and suffer from poor quality in the audio, content, and speaker presentation. It appears accessibility is also a major issue that is being overlooked in their development. Think of the last time you were in a public place watching a large screen TV with captions. Why were they there? Obviously, so that you would know what was being said over the din of the crowd. And you hear just fine. Then put yourself in the shoes of a deaf or hearing-impaired learner who is asked to listen to a podcast as part of a course learning experience. There is no text equivalent provided. Unless you are hearing-impaired, you probably don't think about this problem in using or creating them. Let's begin with some discussion about podcasts and their role in learning, and then look at what you might do to improve quality and their accessibility.
What Are Podcasts?
You can think of the word "podcast" as derived from "POD" (playable on demand) and "broadcasting," but the term was inspired from Apple 's iPod. A podcast is essentially an audio file on the Internet, like a radio program. At sites that host podcasts, such as Podcast.net or the Education Podcast Network, you can selectively listen to one at a time via your computer or download them to an iPod or any device that can play mp3 files. According to Wikipedia, what makes podcasts different from other digital media formats is that they can be downloaded automatically using software capable of reading feed formats, such as RSS (which stands for Really Simple Syndication).
Podcasts are one-way communications and not designed to be interactive. The better sites that host them categorize podcasts to help retrieval on a topic of interest. Better searching is made possible because of tags or keywords that are added to each podcast to help identify its content and to help with navigating the entire directory.
When you subscribe to a tag via an RSS link, such as at Podcast.net, you automatically receive new podcasts that contain the tag of interest. Thus, content finds you, not the other way around. For managing podcasts, consider using Juice for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux users. Juice is free software, lets you capture and listen to podcasts anytime anywhere, and supports more than 15 languages.
