podcasting in education[1]

8/12/2019 Podcasting in Education[1]

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She thinks about her own group’s presen-tation and its preparatory podcast withsome satisfaction: the group members areplanning to do a movie-trailer-style pod-cast on Nietzsche and Also Sprach Zarathus-

tra, and she is already musing about how to combine the sound effects with thereadings and commentary so that herclassmates will be especially inspired toengage with the presentation that day. Theinformal, good-natured podcasting com-petition in this class means that Jenny reads the assignments more carefully thanusual, hoping to find something that willmake her group’s podcast especially memorable—and enjoyable.

Jenny’s next school podcast comesfrom her Arabic class. Again, the students

in the class have put together a podcast,but this time they’re interviewing eachother in Arabic about a guest speakerwho visited their class last week. This dis-tinguished writer had just published anessay on international relations in the

Arab-speaking world, and the currentpodcast includes excerpts from her pre-sentation mixed with students askingeach other about the significance of herideas in relation to what they had learnedso far about Arab culture. Although it is

frustrating for the students to try to dis-cuss complex concepts in fairly basic Ara-bic—this is a first-semester intermediatecourse—Jenny finds that her classmates’struggles help focus her attention on oneparticular moment in the speaker’s lec-ture, one that is becoming more interest-ing the more she thinks about it. In addi-tion, listening to her classmates gently correct each other’s vocabulary and pro-nunciation in the podcast reminds Jenny that a big test is coming up at the end ofthe week, and she makes a note in her to-

do list.Now Jenny looks at her watch: each ofthese podcasts has taken about ten min-utes, and she has one to go. She also wantsto hear the first two podcasts again tocatch things she missed. So she quickly synchronizes her MP3 player to hermusic-management software to load thelatest podcasts onto her portable player.

With player in hand and earbuds in place,Jenny walks out to get in the dining hall

breakfast line before it closes. The ear-buds don’t block out ambient sound—shecan pause the playback and hold a con-

versation with a passing friend with littletrouble—but they do allow her to start lis-

tening to that last podcast as she walks thefive hundred yards to the cafeteria. Thisfinal podcast for the morning comes fromher biology professor, who each Wednes-day does a quick, enthusiastic summary of several journal articles the professorhas read in the preceding week. This pod-cast is a special favorite of Jenny’s; sheloves to hear the excitement in her pro-fessor’s voice. Sometimes the articles per-tain to the class or lab work for the week.More often they do not—at least, not di-rectly. But always, Jenny feels an intense

bond with this teacher, who shares withher students not only her expertise butalso her delight in continuing to acquireand reflect on new knowledge. News ofthis biologist’s “scholar’s diary” podcasthad spread across campus last semester.To her surprise, Jenny had found herselfgetting hooked on each week’s install-ment herself, even though she had nevertaken a class taught by this professor.

When she was fortunate enough to snag aseat in the course this semester, Jenny

found that the podcasts had done a greatjob of conveying the learning environ-ment the teacher created in class. Jenny felt as if she had become an apprentice toa master thinker. The interesting rhythmof lecture, lab, group projects, and eachweek’s podcast gives her a rich sense ofwhat the life of the mind could be at itsmost intense. Jenny has even e-mailedher parents to tell them about this profes-sor’s podcasts, and now her parents arelistening too.

Imagine a busy commuting student

preparing both emotionally and intellec-tually for class by listening to a podcast onthe drive to school, then reinforcing theday’s learning by listening to anotherpodcast, or perhaps the same podcast, onthe drive back home. Imagine the mem-bers of a debate team getting key instruc-tions from their coach on a podcast asthey hurry from debate to debate. Imag-ine a professor reading aloud a series ofpoems over the summer in preparation

for a fall seminar in which his readingswill help students overcome obstacles oflanguage and syntax in this difficult

verse. Imagine a liberal-arts university supplying its community, and the world,

with “profcasts” of classes and presenta-tions delivered by its talented instruc-tors—not to give away intellectual prop-erty but to plant seeds of interest and todemonstrate the lively and engaging in-tellectual community created by its fac-ulty in each course.

These things, and more, are happen-ing now.

“Hailing Frequencies Open” A complete history of podcasting wouldlikely double the length of this essay. For-

tunately, there’s already a good one avail-able at Wikipedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcast>. As the article notes,

podca stin g is a portmanteau word thatcombines iPod with broadcasting . The termis mildly controversial, since it privilegesthe Apple iPod and to some people im-plies that one must own an iPod to listento a podcast. But podcasting is not limitedto the iPod or even to MP3s or portablemusic players. In some respects, podcast-ing is not even new: both streaming and

downloadable audio are as old as the World Wide Web, and the RSS specifica-tion that enables podcasting has beenaround for several years.1 What’s new about podcasting is the ease of publica-tion, ease of subscription, and ease of useacross multiple environments, typically over computer speakers, over a car stereo,and over headphones—all while the lis-tener is walking or exercising or drivingor traveling or otherwise moving about.

Still, “ease of publication” may over-state the case just a bit. A few intricacies

that lie behind the notion of publishing apodcast deserve consideration. One isthat you have to produce a podcast before

you can publish it. It is true that one canproduce a podcast very simply. Somegifted audio “jotters” can make very com-pelling off-the-cuff audio vérité podcasts,quick spiels spoken into inexpensiveMP3 players with voice-recording capa-bilities. Nevertheless, such “first take”podcasting is difficult to sustain, and it’s

34 EDUCAUSE r e v i e w November/December 2005

Imagine a liberal-arts university supplying its community, and theworld, with “profcasts” of classes and presentations delivered by itstalented instructors.



the rare individual who can make his orher rambling into a compelling listening

experience.For most of us, podcasting will involvea little preparation, and perhaps a littleediting or other post-production, beforewe’ll be ready for the world to hear our ef-forts. The good news is that once you getthe hang of a few technical issues com-mon to any kind of audio recording, you’llbe on your way. You’ll need to understandsome of the basics of digital audio: sam-pling rates (higher is usually better), bitdepths (greater depth, again representedby higher numbers, is usually better),

compression formats (the major playersare MP3, Windows Media Audio or WMA , and App le’s Advanced Audi oCoding or AAC), and compression bi-trates (higher is usually better). Why do I

keep saying “usually”? Because there’s atrade-off between quality and file size.

Whereas broadband access means that aten- or twenty-megabyte file is a conven-ient download for many people, espe-cially overnight, longer podcasts (of anhour or more) can generate rather largefiles if one isn’t careful. If only for the sake

of elegance and good bandwidth steward-ship, it’s good to try to hit the sweet spotwhere moderate file size meets pleasingaudio quality. Besides, bandwidth isn’tfree, and exceeding bandwidth limits on a

Web-hostin g service can shut down apodcast very quickly.

Producing a podcast is the hardestpart of publication. Actually distributinga podcast is quite simple. Any RSS 2.0feed includes an “enclosure” tag that willsend a signal to a special feed-reader orRSS aggregator (sometimes referred to as

a “podcatcher”) indicating that some kindof binary digital content has been pub-lished to that RSS feed and is available fordownload. Typically, podcast publicationis part of a blog or is structured around ablogging template. The blog is arrangedchronologically, of course, and it almostalways generates an RSS feed as well. Allone has to do to publish the podcast is toupload the audio to the Web server thathosts the blog, then link to that digitalcontent from somewhere within the blog

entry. The enclosure tag for the RSS feedis generated automatically.2 The bloggingplatform also has another advantage inthat one can easily publish “show notes”or outlines in the dated blog entry foreach podcast, a handy way to allow listen-ers to search for particular podcasts, sincesearching within audio files is still anemerging technology.3

At this point, many readers will havethrown up their hands in despair. Am Isuggesting that those of us in higher educa-tion—we who have spent our lives perfect-

ing our writing and speaking—must now learn to be audio and video engineers too?Can’t we leave the multimedia authoring tothe audio/video gurus at our institutions?The short answer is “yes.” Perhaps few of us

will have the time, energy, or motivation toadd an entirely new skill set to our workinglives. Most of us, however, can and shouldlearn the potential uses and value of richmedia authoring—in this case, the podcast.Once we have, we can certainly partnerwith the IT and AV specialists at our insti-tutions, specialists who will do the techni-

cal work to bring our teaching and learningdesigns to life in the classroom and on the

Web. Learning more about podcasts andother types of rich media authoring willsimply help us communicate more intelli-gently and precisely when we call in the ITspecialists.

The longer answer is more complex—and also more daunting or exhilarating,depending on your point of view, risk tol-erance, and curiosity. There may be very good reasons for acquiring at least rudi-mentary skills in “rich media” (or “multi-

media”) authoring. More and more stu-dents come to school with these skills.This is a language they not only under-stand but use, often on a daily basis. Someof them have been blogging, shootingand editing video, creating Flash anima-tions, manipulating photographs, andrecording digital audio for many years.These are the tools of their native expres-siveness, and with the right guidance andassignments, they can use these tools tocreate powerful analytical and synthetic

work. Yet even such digitally fluent stu-dents need to learn to manipulate theirmultimedia languages well, with concep-tual and critical acumen, and we in highereducation do them a disservice if we ex-clude their creative digital tools fromtheir education.

At the same time, our own profes-sional lives will increasingly involve richmedia authoring. As the Infoworld writer(and prolific blogger) Jon Udell pointsout, there was a time when professors didnot do their own typing or line editing.

Now, however, moderate skill in typingand word-processing is simply assumed.Those of us who compose at the keyboardprobably prefer to do our own typing;indeed, in most cases, the line between


Open-source tools such as

Audacity (see <http://audacity.sourceforge. net/>)

can help you record, edit, andprocess digital audio. Detailedinstructions on how to produce apodcast are beyond the scope of thisarticle, but a Google search on “how to podcast” returned nearly 80,00 0

hits at the time of this writing, sothere’s no lack of free advice on how to get started. For good general adviceon voice recording on a PC, see<http://www.sonicspot.com/guide/

voicerecording.html>. Podcasting Newshas a helpful brief tutorial at <http://www.podcastingnews.com/articles/How-to-Podcast.html>. For a littlemore depth, see About.com’s tutorialat <http://radio.about.com/od/podcastin1/a/aa030805a.htm>. Thereis an excellent set of guidelines for

recording and processing at the IT Conversations wiki: <http://www.itconversations.com/wikis/itc/pmwiki.php>. Finally, there are lotsof good tips and tricks at Transom.org:<http://www.transom.org/tools/index.php>.

Even such digitally fluent students need to learn to manipulate theirmultimedia languages well, with conceptual and critical acumen.



typing and composing has grown so faintas to be practically invisible. The sameprocess will inevitably overtake richmedia authoring as well.4

Once a podcast has been produced

and published, it’s ready to be down-loaded by the listener. (Many writers callpodcast listeners “consumers” and speak of the activity as “consuming content,”but that metaphor denies the delicate, re-sponsive human interaction that charac-

terizes the best communication, indeedthe best listening and reading .) The realpower of podcasting, however, is un-leashed by the RSS function in tandemwith the podcatcher (audio-video RSS

aggregator or feed-reader) describedabove. With a podcatcher, the listenercan subscribe to his or her favorite pod-casts, which will then be downloaded au-tomatically to the computer at a time ofthe listener’s choosing, usually overnightas the listener is sleeping. When the lis-tener awakes and prepares for the day, asin Jenny’s narrative above, he or she caneither listen to the podcasts from thedesktop or transfer those podcasts to aportable audio device for mobile listen-ing throughout the day. The podcast re-

mains in the portable player as long asthe listener wants and can be deleted atany time.

The subscription feature (or, seenfrom another perspective, the notifica-tion feature) of the RSS feed transformsthe experience for the listener. Think ofthe daily newspaper delivered to yourdoor. It’s an aggregator combining thework of many individual reporters andeditors. Its production occurs while yousleep. And though you could go to a

newsstand to read or purchase the paper, you don’t have to. Instead, you subscribeto the newspaper and have it delivered to

your door each morning. As you preparefor the day, you look over the newspaperpages, read articles of interest, and if

you’re not finished with it, you take itwith you. The difference with podcasts isthat persistence of content is potentially greater (yesterday’s podcast may be moreworth preserving than yesterday’s news-paper), skimming the content is harder(though show notes help), and certain

kinds of portability are enhanced. Onemay be able to read a newspaper on ajostling subway, but one cannot (or atleast should not) attempt to read a news-paper while driving a car. Even reading anewspaper while walking across campusis difficult, although some people try. By contrast, podcasts can be listened to very easily while driving, walking, or workingout at the gym.5

Several especially promising devel-

opments in podcasting emerged duringthe spring and summer of 2005. First,

Adam Curry, a former MTV VJ and anearly developer of podcatching software,helped to create a utility he calls a “cast-

blaster” that automates much of therecording, encoding, and uploadingprocess.6 Second, Curry’s PodShow.com,“Odeo” (http://www.odeo.com), andother such services began promotingthemselves as one-stop-shops for pod-cast creation, publication, and subscrip-tion. (Both PodShow.com and Odeo alsoacquired considerable venture capitalover the summer.) All these services aimto become easy-to-use hybrids of pod-cast production, distribution, and pro-motion, offering something like the

blogging service provided by Bloggerbut with the greater sophistication andcomplexity that multimedia authoringrequires.

Is there a noncommercial alternativeto Podshow, Odeo, or other such ser-

vices? Yes: “Ourmedia: The Global Homefor Grassroots Media” (http://www.ourmedia.org/). This service boastsnearly 40,000 members worldwide andpromises to host software, video, audio,images, and text “forever” with unlim-

ited bandwidth. To achieve these lofty aims, Ourmedia uses an open sourcecontent manager called Drupal as a frontend to media stored on the Internet

Archive (http://www.archive.org/). Stu-dents and faculty may use Ourmedia tohost blogs, store content, and publishpodcasts, all free of charge. The only catch is that everything must be madeavailable to “a global audience.” That kindof sharing may sometimes not be appro-priate for certain class productions—butthen again, publishing to a potential au-

dience of a networked planet could bejust the motivation many students need.Ourmedia is not a one-click-and-you’re-done operation, but it is free, and its mis-sion is laudable.

In the third development, both ease ofsubscription and ease of portability took a large step forward with the release of

Apple’s iTunes version 4.9, which incor-porates an extensive podcast directory-and-subscription service into the


With a podcatcher, the listener can subscribe to his or her favoritepodcasts, which will then be downloaded automatically to the computerat a time of the listener’s choosing.

In a March 2005 podcast (http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/03/ 03.html), Jon Udell

persuasively identified five majorfactors behind the explosive growthof podcasting and rich mediaauthoring in general:

1. Internet activity is pervasive.2. Broadband has grown very

rapidly, which makes it far easierto “consume large media objects.”

3. The multimedia personalcomputer can “more or less betaken for granted.”

4. The “distinction betweenstreaming and downloading ofmedia content has begun toblur. . . . People can now have theexperience of streaming whileenjoying the simplicity . . . ofdownloading.”

5. Finally, there is the iPodphenomenon and “the rapidadoption of portable MP3playback devices”—up toeleven million devices in theUnited States alone. Udell

calls the portable audiodevice “the new transistor radio”and points to the beginnings of a“renaissance of creative stuffhappening.” Because thisrenaissance coincides with theCreative Commonsphenomenon, traditionalbusiness models need notconstrain the artist’s work.



structure of the iTunes Music Store. Cor-porate podcasts, including content fromall the major broadcasting networks, areprominently featured on the front page ofthe directory. Some of the more popular“indie” podcasts are featured as well;several thousand that had already beenlisted in other directories were incorpo-

rated into the iTunes podcast directory atlaunch. Indie podcasts that are not cur-rently in the directory can be submittedto iTunes for inclusion, though all suchsubmissions are subject to review andone must have an iTunes Music Storeaccount to submit a podcast. But even if apodcast isn’t in the directory, it can besubscribed to very easily in the iTunesinterface by simply typing the podcast’sURL into a special subscription field.7

This new version of iTunes could take theentire podcasting phenomenon into the

mainstream. Indeed, Apple reported thatiTunes customers subscribed to overone million podcasts in the two days fol-lowing the launch of iTunes support forpodcasts.8 As of this writing, Apple statesthat more than 15,000 podcasts are avail-able for subscription through iTunes 5.0(http://www.apple.com/podcasting/).

For educators, the implications of Apple’s embrace of podcasting are bothexciting and troubling. The developmentis exciting because students will have a

free, easy-to-use, dual-platform (Win-dows and Mac) audio-content managerthat will help make podcasting pervasiveand effective. Even more important foreducators, the new version of iTunes en-ables “enhanced podcasts” that offer achapter function, allowing the listener tojump directly to sections within a pod-cast. Each of these sections can be accom-panied by an image and by a clickableURL. Since one of the challenges withaudio feeds has always been that of mak-ing individual parts of the feed directly

accessible, encoding chapters withinpodcasts (as opposed to dividing theaudio into tracks, each of which wouldneed to be downloaded separately) is a

very attractive feature. Why is Apple’s

embrace of podcasting troubling to edu-cators? Because this easy-to-use audio-content manager just happens to sit in-side a store that sells music.

“Radio Is a Strange Craft”Radio began as an amateur medium. Evenafter it became thoroughly professional-

ized, radio retained a strong flavor of par-ticularity linked to specific announcersand specific localities. Beginning in the1980s, however, more and more radio sta-tions were bought up by giant broadcast-ing conglomerates such as Clear Channeland Infinity Radio. The result was pre-dictable: a few popular syndicated shows;a timid playlist relying on overplayedsongs; and a homogeneous approach toprogramming and announcing. Part ofthe reason that podcasting has taken offso quickly is that there’s very little worth

listening to on the radio. Ironically, Infin-ity’s KYOU in San Francisco is now an all-podcast radio station with substantially listener-generated content. As of thiswriting, KYOU has 2,338 podcasts in its

lineup, nearly double the number of justtwo months ago.

But the collapse of radio is only part ofthe story of the rise of podcasting. Theendurance of radio, or the idea of radio, isthe other part and is a major reason why podcasting has such potential value inteaching and learning. There is magic in

the human voice, the magic of sharedawareness. Consciousness is most persua-sively and intimately communicated via

voice. The voice is literally inspired lan-guage, language full of breath, breath aslanguage. Consider the phrase “thinkingaloud.” Consider a Shakespearean solilo-quy. This peculiar capacity of spoken lan-guage puts the edge on Tennyson’s grief inIn Memoriam: death is horrifying not be-cause of decay but because of silence.Photographs are undeniably powerful,and perhaps a picture is worth a thousand

words, but a few words uttered by a dear voice may be worth the most of all.Of course, the droning voice of a pro-

fessor reading from yellowed lecturenotes will not be so affecting, but a voice


The new version of iTunes enables “enhanced podcasts” that offera chapter function, allowing the listener to jump directly to sectionswithin a podcast.

Adam Curry’s nickname is “the podfather.” His Daily Source Code podcasthas done much to popularize the medium, and along with witty (andsometimes profane) banter, the show continues to be an inspiring example

of what can be done with podcasts. In some respects, it’s as if the most popularpodcast on the Internet is also one of its best proof-of-concept productions. That’sin large part because Curry is besotted with the very idea of radio. Curry’s DailySource Code is also free (as are almost all currently available podcasts), but Curry’slarger plans include a business model in which he and his co-investors willestablish a service that hosts and aggressively promotes the most-listened-to

podcasts, many or all of which will be available exclusively through Curry’spodcasting site (http://www.podshow.com). These shows will presumably makemoney through advertising or, perhaps, through paid subscriptions.

What’s particularly interesting about Curry’s model is not that it seeks tocommercialize podcasting, an inevitable development despite complaints fromsome quarters that Curry is out to ruin the medium. No, what’s interesting is thatCurry plans that the money earned by hosting and promoting premium podcastingcontent will help pay for a free service that will enable podcasts with smalleraudiences to reach those audiences and sustain their service. If Curry’s plan works,it could restore older models of public service and public access in broadcasting—models that have withered as deregulation has spread across the industry over thelast three decades. Or it could end up simply confining premium podcasts withina “walled garden” along the lines of MSN or AOL. It’s a measure of this new

medium’s potential that so many interesting developments and troubling questionshave emerged so quickly.



that creates a theater of the mind—radio’stime-honored heritage—can connectwith the listener on a profound level. Thetheater of the mind can be both com-pelling and transformative, often far

more than anything witnessed visually. A gifted teacher could be said to create justsuch a theater of the mind, as well as theconditions whereby students may be en-ticed to create such a theater for them-selves. At its best, podcasting can serve astraining in rich interiority and in sharedreflection.

There’s also considerable value inwhat I call “the explaining voice,” the

voice that performs understanding. Theexplaining voice doesn’t just convey in-formation; it shapes, out of a shared at-

mosphere, an intimate drama of cognitiveaction in time. The explaining voice con-

veys microcues of hesitation, pacing, andinflection that demonstrate both cogni-tion and metacognition. When we hearsomeone read with understanding, weparticipate in that understanding, almostas if the voice is enacting our own com-prehension. In other words, the explain-ing voice trains the ear to listen not justfor meaning but for evidence of thethought that generates meaning.

I’m counting on the explaining voice,or at least as much of it as I can muster, inmy current series of podcasts: A Donne aDay. This fall I’m teaching a senior semi-nar on John Donne, and in my summerpreparation I was reminded just how dif-ficult it can be, even for a specialist, tomake sense of some of these poems. Thesyntax is tough, made even knottier by Donne’s various poetic licenses. The sub-ject matter is self-consciously erudite, infact recondite. The poetic voice is witty,bitter, exuberant, desperate, naughty,

hyperintellectual, self-mocking, self-celebrating. I can’t pretend to capture allof that in my own recitations, but I know that I start from a position of greater com-prehension than my students (at least, Ihope I do, though I always look forwardto being surprised). In casting about for away to share that tacit knowledge withoutspending every class meeting doing noth-ing but reading aloud—lovely as thatmight be for me—I decided to podcast a

Donne poem each day during the sum-mer, thereby building up a collection ofpoetry and commentary in little five- toeight-minute chunks that students canuse to help them prepare for each day’s

reading assignment. My hope is that stu-dents will understand the main argumentin each poem faster as a result of hearingmy reading and will thus come to classbetter prepared to mine the depths. I alsohope they will come ready to question,even to take issue with, my readingand/or my commentary; indeed, I will en-courage them to do so. As usual for my poetry seminars, I will also assign a recita-tion for each student, and my reading canserve as a paradigm to emulate or to work against. Best of all, I’ve found that reading

these poems aloud to prepare them for apublic audience has put me on my mettleand has taught me that some lines Ithought I understood well could standmore sustained attention from me beforethe fall term.

One of my colleagues at Mary Wash-ington, a cognitive psychologist, insiststhat audio is a poor channel for conveyinginformation to learners because thelearner cannot control the pace. The lis-tener is at the mercy of the speaker’s

tempo. I take the point, but I wonder ifthat necessity doesn’t have a virtuous di-mension. Perhaps it is sometimes a goodthing for the learner not to control thetempo, particularly if one wants to leadthe learner away from habitual patterns ofperception and cognition. Perhaps listen-ing attentively to the pace of anothermind, revealed in voice, can help train thelearner to be more attentive generally. Onecan listen to a podcast with “half an ear”just as easily as one can skim a written text,but in the case of the podcast, it is more

difficult to believe that one has actually at-tended to the words. Moreover, effectivelistening is no less crucial a skill than ef-fective speaking, and even if the learnercannot control the tempo of a speaker’sdelivery, with a podcast he or she can lis-ten again and again, in whole or in part,and thereby grow more practiced in lis-tening. Listening is an activity. No goodaudience is passive.

Along these same lines, one crucial el-

ement of the promise of podcasting is itspotential to be uniquely immersive, toevoke the intimacy and focus of a study carrel deep in the stacks of a library. Oneemerges from those dark, womblike

spaces blinking and perhaps a little dis-oriented: a useful state of being in theconstant struggle to defamiliarize one’ssurroundings and to prepare oneself forfresh insights. Podcasts, then, are likebooks in a study room, an informationtechnology that may be scaled withoutnecessarily becoming a mere commodity.

The voice also conveys our commonhumanity. For example, the Washington Postrecently reported that many e-commercesites have found more economic benefitsin allowing customers telephone contact

with real people rather than forcing all in-teraction through the Web. In another ex-ample, several newspapers are producingtheir own podcasts. Why would one wantto listen to a newspaper? Frank Burgos, theeditorial page editor of the PhiladelphiaDaily News, tells us why: “Podcasting, donethe right kind of way, can . . . make a news-paper sound like a human being. Becausethat’s what newspapers are: they’re a col-lection of human beings.”9

There’s a strong analogy here. Done

well, podcasting can reveal to students,faculty, staff, communities—even theworld—the essential humanity at theheart of higher education. Among the im-pressive facilities and intricate processes,colleges and universities are essentially collections of human beings who seek toshare the fruits of their labors with theworld that helps support them. If this po-sition seems extreme or sentimental, con-sider Todd Cochrane’s assertion: “Pod-c a s t i n g r e p r e s e n t s a n e w w a y f o rindividuals to communicate about the

things they love. They can actually broad-cast content that comes from theirhearts.”10 If a mass-market text on pod-casting begins by stressing the affectivedimension of this new medium, educa-tors would do well to think about how they might harness that energy in theirteaching and learning practices.

The English word radio comes from theLatin radiare, to “emit rays.” Podcasting,like radio, has the potential to spread its


The endurance of radio, or the idea of radio, is a major reason whypodcasting has such potential value in teaching and learning.



effects to people both near and far and tounite them into a community of sharedlearning. Like radio, podcasting is lesslike a web and more like the spokes of awheel. There may be many or few spokes

radiating from the podcast, but the con-nections are essentially one-to-one, nomatter how many listeners are in the au-dience. Indeed, one of the lessons Ilearned in my own thirteen years of pro-fessional broadcasting was that no matterhow far the station signal carried or how many people lived in the listening area, Iwas speaking to one listener at a timeevery time I turned on the microphone.That kind of direct personal connection,scaled to encompass a large and diverseaudience, offers a powerful glimpse of

how podcasting can be a transformativeinstance of information technology inhigher education. And the persistence ofthis content enables the “long tail” phe-nomenon to bring new listeners into thecommunity many weeks or even yearsafter a podcast was first published.

“Call Out the Instigators BecauseThere’s Something in the Air”By the time this article is published, thephenomenon called podcasting will be

about a year old. Its growth has been star-tlingly rapid even by IT standards. In April2005, the Pew Internet & American LifeProject reported that over six million adults(eighteen or older) in the United States hadlistened to a podcast.11 Teenagers, ofcourse, are the ones who use mobile audiodevices the most. Who knows how many of them have listened to a podcast?

In a blog entry dated September 28,2004, Doc Searls, a co-author of the book The Cluetrain Manifesto, discussed podcast-ing in some detail and noted that a Google

search on “podcasts” brought up twenty-four hits. Searls went on to predict that inanother year, the same search would“pull up hundreds of thousands, or per-haps even millions,” of hits.12 That esti-

mate probably seemed liberal to Searls,but in reality it was far too conservative.On May 25, just eight months later, a com-menter on Searls’s blog entry clicked onthe search link and found 4,460,000Google hits for “podcasts.” On June 23,that same Google search link returnedwell over 6,000,000 hits. On August 28, itreturned over 21,000,000 hits. On Sep-tember 18, the number had exceeded

60,000,000. Clearly, this medium hascaught the imagination of a large andgrowing audience. During his keynoteaddress at the Apple Worldwide Devel-opers Conference in June 2005, SteveJobs estimated that more than 8,00 0 pod-casts were available through iTunes. Atthe time of this writing, that number hasnearly doubled.

In the meantime, Musselburgh Gram-mar School in East Lothian, Scotland,carries on with its podcasts (http://mgsonline.blogs.com/mgspodcast/) and

brags that it is the United Kingdom’s firstregular schools podcast. Steve Sloan, ofSan Jose State University, tracks andreflects on educational podcasting (http://www.edupodder.com). By the time you

read these words, the University of Mary Washington, where I teach, will have be-gun its “profcasts” (http://www.profcast.org). The University of Chicago will becontinuing its Poem Present series (http://

poempresent.uchicago.edu). Students atManhattan Marymount College in New

York City will be extending their fascinat-ing “Art Mobs” project (http://mod.blogs.com/art_mobs/), in which they recordtheir own guides to art galleries through-out Manhattan. Purdue University’s“BoilerCasts” (http://boilercast.itap.purdue.edu:1013/Boilercast/Index.html)will be bringing entire courses to studentsas podcasts or streaming audio. My hypo-thetical Jenny will be producing podcastsof her study-abroad experience, or her

service-learning assignment, or her jobsearch. These podcasts will be listed iniTunes or in directories such as Podcast

Alley (http://www.podcastalley.com) andPodNova (http://www.podnova.com).

With a speed that makes even Moore’sLaw seem sluggish, podcasting has won aprominent place among the dizzying vari-ety of grassroots media now available toeveryone. As Jon Udell has noted, “Whenall the players are bloggers, podcasters,and screencasters, the game can be taken

to a whole new level.”

13

Those of us inhigher education owe it to our students tobring podcasting and other rich mediainto our courses so that they can lift theirlearning to a whole new level too.

In Areopagitica (1644), John Milton ar-gued: “For books are not absolutely deadthings, but do contain a potency of life inthem to be as active as that soul waswhose progeny they are; nay, they dopreserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect thatbred them.” Podcasts too convey that po-

tency of life, and they can preserve andcommunicate the living intellect with un-usual immediacy. The air within thehuman voice retains its inspiration, evenas it inspires the listener to speak in


Done well, podcasting can reveal to students,faculty, staff, communities—even the world—theessential humanity at the heart of higher education.

As an experiment to accompany thisarticle and test some of its claims, theauthor’s reading of “There’sSomething in the Air” is also

available as an audio file. See theonline version of this article(http://www.educause.edu/er/ERM05/ERM0561.asp). Or, for thefull podcast experience, RSSsubscribers to Gardner Campbell’spodcasts at his blog (http://www.gardnercampbell.net) will receivethe podcast automatically. Thosewho both read the article and listento the audio version are invited tocomment on how the twoexperiences compare.



response. In this way, podcasting canhelp education realize one of its noblestgoals: to make a better conversation out ofthe thing we call civilization.e

Notes

1. “RSS” stands for “Really Simple Syndication,” amethod of subscribing to Web pages and beingnotified automatically when they are updated. By definition, podcasts are RSS-enabled. For more in-formation on RSS, see the Wikipedia entry at<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_%28file_format%29>.

2. My own blog—at <http://www.gardnercampbell.net>—uses the popular open-source bloggingscript called WordPress, which in its latest version(1.5x) includes this automatic support for pod-casting. Sites such as FeedBurner (http://www.feedburner.com) will enable RSS 2.0 feeds fromany blog, ensuring that all blogs can sponsor apodcast no matter what version of RSS or Atom

they support.3 . B ut s ee < ht t p : //w ww .s t r eams a g e.co m> a n d

<http://www.nexidia.com/> for a fascinating look at recent developments in this area.

4. See Jon Udell, “Hypermedia: Why Now?” O’ReillyNetwork, March 18, 2005, <http://www.oreillynet.

com/pub/a/network/2005/03/18/primetime.html>. Udell has an extremely rich body of writingand thinking. In my view, Udell is one of the mostimportant practitioners and theorists of whatmany people are now calling “Web 2.0.” His work also has tremendous implications for education.

Three unusually fine pieces offer a good introduc-tion to Udell’s work. One is a podcast on podcast-ing, rich media, and the blogosphere: <http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/03/03.html>. Another is Udell’s “screencast” on Wikipedia andheavy-metal umlaut bands, a fascinating look atthe social construction of knowledge (or under-standing, depending on your theoretical model):<http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html>. A third is Udell’s justly famouswalking tour through Keene, New Hampshire, ascreencast uniting rich media, a compelling phys-ical environment, Google Maps, and a global posi-tioning satellite (GPS) receiver: <http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/02/25.html>.

5. Since I’ve been subscribing to IT Conversations(http://www.itconversations.com) and to the

EDUCAUSE podcasts (http://connect.educause.edu), my morning commute and all my road tripshave become extremely valuable developmentopportunities as I listen to expert presentationson every conceivable facet of information tech-nologies in culture and particularly in education.

Ano the r per son al fav ori te, th e BBC ’s In Our Ti m e (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/), offers mini-seminars on the history of ideas, with subjects ranging from “Perceptionand the Senses” to “Renaissance Mathematics,” allfacilitated by the redoubtable Melvyn Bragg.

6. A free beta version for podcasts up to ten minuteslong is available at <http://www.podshow.com>.7. For a look at the design and operation of this ver-

sion of iTunes, see Steve Jobs’s demonstration atthe June 2005 Apple Worldwide Developers Con-ference, available online at <http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/wwdc05/>.

8. “iTunes Podcast Subscriptions Top One Millionin First Two Days,” Apple press release, June 30,2005, <http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/jun/30podcast.html>.

9. Reported by Frank Langfitt, “Papers Turn to Pod-casting, the Newest of Media,” All Thin gs Con-si dered , June 2, 2005, <http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4673646> .

10. Todd Cochrane, Podcasting: The Do-It-Yourself Guide

(Indianapolis: Wiley Press, 2005).11. See <http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_

podcasting.pdf>.12. See <http://www.itgarage.com/node/view/462>.13. Blog entry, June 17, 2005, <http://weblog.info

world.com/udell/2005/06/17.html>.


podcasting in education[1]

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