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From the Office of Technology for Education and Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence at Carnegie Mellon University, Ashley Deal adeal@cmu.edu shares a recent white paper on Podcasting.

Abstract: Sharing audio and video files on the Web has been possible for most of the last decade. Why, then, in the past two years has podcasting exploded onto the scene and become such a hot topic in educational technology? How does this new technology and its widespread adoption create new opportunities in education? Is it just a passing trend, or is there genuine potential to improve the quality of the educational experience and learning outcomes? This paper attempts to answer these questions through the exploration of educational podcasting in three realms: the creation and distribution of lecture archives for review, the delivery of supplemental educational materials and content, and assignments requiring students to produce and submit their own podcasts.

Elizabeth Scheyder and John MacDermott, Univeristy of Pennsylvania, presented a poster session at June's NMC Summer Conference recounting their pilot study designed to further understand podcasting in higher education. To examine their poster presentation and research instruments, follow http://www.sas.upenn.edu/computing/instructional/recordings/. Free free to contact them directly: scheydec@sas.upenn.edu and macderm@sas.upenn.edu.

Linda Herkenhoff, associate professor of quantitative analysis and organizational behavior Graduate School of Business, Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, CA, creatively uses podcasts to teach quantitative methods in Business. She creates short (10 min max) vodcasts (video podcasts) on topics that she knows are very difficult for her students to grasp during normal class presentations. Hosted in her course web site, students can retrieve and repetitively review the files until the concepts become clear. She also asks students to create short podcasts teaching the basic concepts and methods to "their grandmothers,” therefore using very simple, layperson's language. Student reviews of both strategies have been very positive. Full article available: http://campustechnology.com/articles/41720_3/

Dr. Davide Bolchini, Faculty of Communication Sciences at the University of Lugano, Switzerland, shares podcasts produced by their students in a “New Media for Tourism Communication” course. According to Bolchini, students had no technological experience prior to the course, yet produced quality podcasts after a few hours of laboratory and lectures. Read further: http://luganotourism.blogspot.com/

The University of Michigan School of Dentistry, in partnership with Apple Computer, is providing classroom lectures, and other classroom media, through a customized iTunes interface for students. Authenticated using their campus ids and passwords, students can download materials to their desktop/laptop computers or an iPod or MP3 player, for review, remediation, and extension of the F2F classroom experience. [Submitted on behalf of Carl Berger]