Tuesday, October 05, 2004

Blogs + IPods = Podcasting!

Well, if you like blogging, and if you like IPods, you'll love Podcasting. You can post audio files, which are sent by rss feeds to all your buddies' computers. They can then download your daily, or weekly, or whatever, audio file into their IPods and listen to it. If you want to read more, here's a news article, and here's Adam Curry's blog, where he posts a daily audio essay.

How cool would that be? Can you imagine getting a daily audio file from, say, lds.org? How about if your professor posted things to you every day? What if your best friend, or boyfriend/spouse, did that? Could this be better than email? What if you could record your voice into your computer, and then send it by rss to your friend's IPod, and they would hear it the next time they plugged their IPod into their computer. Fun!

Will Richardson started talking about some educational possibilities for this technology on his blog:
"..now let's take this into the classroom, huh? Foreign language students can now read their homework responses which automatically get sent via RSS feeds to their teachers who download them to their iPods or other player to listen to them. Or, the teacher creates a daily broadcast that his students download and listen to. Or, each day, one student does an oral reflection on the class that then gets sent around to kids who miss the class."

This is something I could get very excited about, maybe partly because I love audio talks and audio books. On my other blog I am carrying on a discussion with my students about possible educational applications of Podcasting. If you have ideas, please go there and post them! (or post them here, if you wish)

In closing, the article says this about Podcasting and why it might take off and get popular:
"But Podcasting -- like blogging -- seems to combine the best of the Internet with the best of traditional media. It's a way for someone to create and distribute a show to 40 people. And it also would allow a media company to distribute audio content to millions."

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