Podcasting and online education

It's interesting, just as I posted my very first CastPost podcast this evening, Blogger began a 2-hour outage for site maintenance. Not only were many blogs (including mine) unavailable, for some reason, my mp3 file just wouldn't play at the CastPost site, though it plays fine on my own system and other files I've posted to the site play fine... after an hour or two of fiddling around with it, I was ready to give up and just uploaded the file to my server.

Just another reminder of how difficult and time consuming it can be to implement new technologies into an active class. Along with the sometimes significant benefits comes significant challenges - and for every technology that works like a dream there are plenty of little daily nightmares.

With each new technology that comes along, we all have to weigh the potential benefits against the amount of time we're willing to spend - and ask our students to spend - dealing with the initial learning curve, implementation problems, etc. I tend to be more respectful of my students' time than my own, so I generally spend a fair amount of time as a guinea pig with every new technology before I even consider making it a required part of my classes.

I've given a lot of thought to podcasting over the last year. It's a great technology with a lot of potential - especially for courses, like ESL or Speech - and one that seems a natural fit for my own online classes, since all participants already have headsets, microphones, and audio recording capabilities.

However, I'm not ready to use podcasting as anything other than an optional technology for my own classes... there's still too much of a learning curve for things like coverting file types and setting up media accounts, and I'm not quite sure which podcasting resources are likely to be around long enough to make the investment of time worthwhile. In addition, there's the problem of the amount of time needed to *listen* to a podcast... something that I think will be a barrier to my use of podcasting until it becomes much easier to tag media files so users can skim through them to points of interest. For now, this is a technology I strongly recommend to my participants who are teaching classes that are a natural fit with audio, but I don't see it becoming a standard part of my own classes for the immediate future.

However, I do thank jmaddrell for giving me a podcasting task in this class that reminds me of what it's like to be on the "student" side of the assignment... and a chance to really start playing around with vlogging in my own media blog!