A Consideration of a Possible Evolution of the Blog,
with Some Discussion of Using This Tool in Teaching

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Introduction
"Podcasting," a recent development in online genres, is the term used to describe online "radio" broadcasts created by news sources or, more commonly, by individual amateur content creators. Users can subscribe to, download, and listen to podcasts. I include podcasting in this primer because it's often seen as a kind of audio blog or as the next step in blogging.

Podcasting lies at the intersection of several technological and cultural trends. In terms of technology, the ubiquity of the MP3 file format for audio has created a broad cross-platform standard for audio files; the emergence of RSS (described in the section on tools) has established a standard means for subscribing to and aggregating a variety of content; and the spread of broadband internet connections has made downloading the often large files feasible for a broad spectrum of users. In terms of culture, the popularity of Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) such as Tivo has led to a familiarity with time-shifted content consumption; the tremendous spread of MP3 players using hard drives and, in particular, Apple's Ipod, has not only provided a portable solution with memory enough to store and play these files but has in fact created a culture that seeks out audio content and expects automatic synchronization of new content with the MP3 player; and, of course, blogging has fostered a large and diverse community of individual content producers (and, here, we might recall Blogger's original motto: "Push-button publishing for the people").

While it remains to be seen what applications podcasting will have for the writing classroom, Duke University's pilot Ipod program, which distributed Ipods to all incoming freshman, certainly suggests that institutions are willing to consider the pedagogical applications of tools that deliver content through audio files.

General Resources
Despite the short history of podcasting, there are already a broad range of resources for understanding what a podcast is and how it works:

  • Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting)
    Wikipedia, a collaboratively constructed encyclopedia on the Web and itself an interesting object for study, contains a detailed entry on podcasting, including information on the origin of the term.

  • Ipodder.org History (http://www.ipodder.org/history)
    Ipodder is the original application for subscribing to podcasts. Adam Curry, former MTV VJ, describes how he came up with the idea of the podcast and how Ipodder was developed.

Making Podcasts
As with the RSS feeds for blogs discussed elsewhere in this article, there are two parts to podcasts. As a podcaster, you must create content and the RSS file that will tag that content (thus creating the RSS "feed"). As a podcast listener, you must find podcasts of interest to you and then use a program to subscribe to these feeds. In this section, I will provide resources for both making and listening to podcasts:

  • How-To: Podcasting (http://www.engadget.com/entry/5843952395227141/)
    Engadget provides details on all parts of the podcasting process, both subscribing to podcasts and making podcasts of your own. The information on creating podcasts is directed to users of Apple computers exclusively.

  • Create Podcasts Using Your PC (http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/ 2005/04/05/create_podcasts_with_pc.html)
    Because the original Ipodder script was written on an Apple computer, and because podcasting is so closely associated with the Ipod, many of the tutorials on creating podcasts are written with an Apple computer in mind. This tutorial provides instead information on making a podcast on a computer running Windows.

  • Ipodder (http://www.ipodder.org)
    Ipodder is a central resource for podcasting, allowing you to find podcasts as well as providing the original software for subscribing to them.

  • Podcast Alley (http://www.podcastalley.com)
    Another popular site for locating podcasts of interest. You might start with one of the top podcasts listed on the main page; otherwise, podcasts are sorted by categories to make it easier to find one that matches your interests.

Podcasts in the Classroom
Educators have already started thinking about how podcasts can be used in the classroom:

  • Podcasting for Education (http://www.darcynorman.net/2004/10/30/podcasting-for-education)
    D'Arcy Norman provides several excellent suggestions on how to use podcasting in education, primarily connected to archiving oral performances such as lectures and interviews.

  • Education Podcasting Network (http://epnweb.org/)
    This site not only provides an introduction to the uses of podcasting across a range of educational institutions but also provides a directory of podcasts that might be of interest to teachers.

  • E-Learning Centre: Podcasting (http://www.e-learningcentre.co.uk/eclipse/Resources/podcasting.htm)
    The E-Learning Centre provides a series of links related to podcasting in education, ordered in reverse chronological order so that you can find the most recent resources first.

A Final Note
In considering how you might use podcasts in your writing classroom (as compositional practice or as class content) it's important to keep in mind what is and what isn't a podcast. According to the definition of podcasting at the Evil Genius Chronicles, there are three essential features of a podcast:

  • Must be a discrete and downloadable media file
  • Published in an RSS 2.0 enclosure feed
  • Handled automatically on the receiver end, downloaded and moved to where it needs to be and put in the playlists for your playback device
    (http://www.evilgeniuschronicles.org/wordpress/2004/09/29)

So, creating an audio library of all the texts from your freshman composition reader isn't a podcast. Using RSS to tag these files would make them podcasts.