http://accidentalpedagogy.typepad.com/accidental_pedagogy/
2006/03/do_students_act.html
Glenda Morgan points to an article which questions the moniker of ‘podcasts,’ as apparently 80% of downloaded recordings never make it off the desktop and onto a mobile device (or worse, are never listened to at all).
I think ‘personal publishing’ is a great thing, whether it be blogs, wikis, podcasts, videocasts, etc. What has really annoyed me, though, about podcasts as a phenomenom and as hype, especially in the context of podcasting ‘lectures’ or other ‘knowledge transfers,’ is that it replicates what is already not a very good model of how to distribute information/learning – the synchronous spoken lecture.
So sure, having a recording means you don’t have to actually be in the classroom. But the assumption this rests on is that if you had been able to be in the classroom, that sitting there listening to someone drone on was actual a useful or effective or efficient way to learn anything. So you can fast forward the recording to find the good bits – have you ever tried to listen to something in that way? Unlike say video, where there are cues you can conceivably process at high speed that something has changed which might warrant checking in again (say a ‘scene’ change) most audio, and certainly most recordings of someone just talking monotonously, don’t avail themselves easily to such high speed scanning.
I will get more excited about podcasting as voice recognition and search technologies, and automated voice transcription technologies improve – podcasts then become a rich source to mine with tools that can allow you to zone in on what you need without having to sit through lots of what you don’t. And maybe the fact that we’ve attached them to RSS feeds will allow for rich and relevant recommendations to emerge as we are starting to see in the blogosphere (especially if they get SHORTER!). (It sure to hell ain’t going to happen by asking people to write reams of metadata about their podcasts!) And maybe I’m just a grumpy old git (this is entirely possible) who needs to get an iPod and start commuting to work, or develop partial shared attention skills at my desk, to appreciate the value that podcasts can bring to my life. Maybe. Never say never, right? So maybe this isn’t the only post on podcasts I will ever write. But it’s the last one for now. I have to go back to what this post distracted me from. – SWL