I guess I’m one of the late adopters of a number of technologies. I didn’t get my iPod until Christmas of 2004, though I did buy my oldest son one the year before, and #2 son is getting one from Santa this year. I’m intrigued by podcasting, though I’ll admit that I don’t listen to the ones that I subscribe to very often…I just like having them there. I’m quite intrigued by the idea of podcasting lectures. Not that from a conceptual standpoint this is new technology (folks have been doing casette recordings of lectures since the dark ages). However, now that Apple made podcasting easy by incorporating in iTunes (podcasting for dummies) even folks like me can easily subscribe.
A number of universities are experimenting with podcasting of lectures. Here’s a article from the Chronicle from March about Drexel, and a September Chronicle article about podcasting at Purdue.
The technology makes it much easier to contemplate doing this. Hey, maybe the folks at Duke were onto something when they distributed iPods to incoming students.
Those of us in IT who pooh-poohed Duke when this first came out need to remember that there are many ways technology development and adoption move forward, and we don’t have a corner on that understanding.
I’ll be interested to see how this all works out; here’s an article about the Duke experiment.
I’ve gotta say, though, that as an adjunct faculty member here at UNC (in the School of Information & Library Science), having all my lectures recorded would be a strange thing…I guess I’d get used to it, but I’m sure that I’ll sound like Gomer Pyle…well gollleee, y’all….