Podcasting in Education

This article isn't really about how to adapt a popular technology as a way to pass on course information. It's a comprehensive look at the whole phenomenon of podcasting, along with a discussion of the reasons pro and con using it as on of the many teaching/learning technolgoies.

"For educators, the implications of Apple’s embrace of podcasting are both exciting and troubling. The development is exciting because students will have a free, easy-to-use, dual-platform (Windows and Mac) audio-content manager that will help make podcasting pervasive and effective. Even more important for educators, the new version of iTunes enables enhanced podcasts that offer a chapter function, allowing the listener to jump directly to sections within a podcast. Each of these sections can be accompanied by an image and by a clickable URL. Since one of the challenges with audio feeds has always been that of making individual parts of the feed directly accessible, encoding chapters within podcasts (as opposed to dividing the audio into tracks, each of which would need to be downloaded separately) is a very attractive feature. Why is Apple’s embrace of podcasting troubling to educators? Because this easy-to-use audiocontent manager just happens to sit inside a store that sells music."