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Heh, I’m flattered to see that both Dave and I got nominated in the Education category at the PodCastAwards.com.
They’re billing it as a People’s Choice type of awards show, which means its an over glorified popularity contest. I’m a little disappointed that they didn’t split up “education” from “Instructional”. Three of the podcasts in the category revolve around the world of education, one is about how to learn to play guitar and one is a podcast with tips for digital photographers (which I’ve heard is actually quite good). Lumping those five together really doesn’t make much sense, but that’s the way it goes.
So vote now, and vote often! You can vote once per day for the next 15 days for your podcast of choice.
I do have to admit that it’s kind of nice to have a good list of new podcasts to flip through in various categories. Now that I’ve been using iTunes to manage my ‘casts, I’m listening to more podcasts than ever. I definitely plan to check some of these out.
Maybe in a year we’ll have our own strictly education related podcast awards. I know someone did that for blogging and it turned me on to a lot of new blogs.
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I’m incredibly tired, but I have to make sure that I get this all down before I fall asleep. I just got back from Apple’s introduction into the podcasting arena. I thought it was going to be just a little social mixer with some Apple reps addressing people’s questions about podcasting. I thought it would be the perfect place to meet some of my fellow podcasters and say hello over a beer or two. I thought that it would generate some buzz, but still be dominated mostly by geeks.
I could not have been more wrong.
When I came up the escalator, I saw a massive line. I figured it was probably the line for drinks or for the free food. Just out of curiosity, I asked someone what they were in line for. You guessed it, Apple’s podcasting presentation. It was not a small line. In fact, it was a line for the second presentation. Second? Yes, it was so popular that they agreed to do it a second time. I also found out that it wasn’t a social gathering, nor was it a mixer of any sort. It was a presentation put on by Apple to describe how they were entering the podcast arena. Not what I expected at all.
I did decide to wait in line and got in to the second session. I’m not positive but I believe they even had to turn some people away. While waiting in line, I wound up answering quite a few questions about what podcasting was all about. It quickly became apparent just how excited people were by the idea.
There weren’t enough seats to go around though because many people from the first session stayed to hear it all a second time. Yes, you read right. How often would you stay to see a presentation twice in a row? Lights went dim and the Keynote began (yes, the Keynote. There is intelligent life beyond PowerPoint).
The main presenter was someone named Barnaby Wasson, the Director for Community Outreach and Special Research Projects at Arizona State University. He started simple and kept it simple. He kept it light, he kept it fun, and most of all he did an incredible job of describing to people just how exciting podcasting can be.
Anyone who reads this blog on even a semi-regular basis knows how critical I am of bad presentations. My tolerance level for people who read directly from PowerPoint slides is incredibly low. However, this presentation was exceptional. The visuals accented the information he was discussing. Often an entire slide was comprised of no more than three words. When you have something to share, that might be all you need. They said they were posting the slides as well as podcasting the audio. Definitely worth picking up and checking out.
After the first slide or two, he paused to play some clips from selected podcasts. I was completely stunned to hear my voice and Broadband connection coming out of those speakers. The first clip he played was from one of my shows. I had no idea they were going to be doing that, and to be honest I was thrilled to even be a small part of Apple’s coming out party. So long as I’m being honest, it was a major ego boost as well.
The presentation covered what a podcast is, how you used to subscribe to them, and of course how you do it now in iTunes 4.9. Ordinarily, I’m not a big fan of blatant sales pitches. I know they don’t sell iTunes, but it’s still a way to get people to buy in to their music store. However, in this instance I do have to agree that it’s quite simply the single best way to subscribe to podcasts. Certainly has my seal of approval. They also went over how you create a podcast in Audioblogger (not the greatest way, but definitely the simplest), and covered some of the new features available for podcasts through Apple products. In particular, the ability to break a podcast up into chapters and associate images with each chapters is extremely cool. It’s great to have built into iTunes, even better to be able to take it with you on an iPod photo. However, I don’t think it’ll work on MP3′s so people will probably have to create two files, one with chapters and one without.
He did reference Dave Warlick’s Educational Podcasters Network, which is a fantastic directory of ed related podcasts which I thought was a big bonus. I don’t remember exactly how it came up, but he did also suggest that people run their feeds through Feedburner. I found that a pretty interesting endorsement coming from Apple. Could there be some affiliation there?
I know that he covered several other topics, but I’m exhausted and not really thinking too clearly right now. Let me just wrap things up with a few comments. People wanted to applaud through the entire session. To say it was well received is a gross understatement. This is going to be huge. Dave had better be prepared for over 400 people at his Podcasting workshop on Thursday.
Finally, I did somehow manage to run in to Kelly Dumont of The Educational Mac. One of the main reasons that I went to the event was to meet him. we’ve talked over email, I’ve been reading his blog and listening to his podcasts and now I can finally put a face to the name. We talked until I realized that it was getting much too late. Honestly, we probably could have chatted all night long. Just as fantastic a guy in person as he is on the podcast. Fantastic way to cap off a fantastic day.
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I just walked away from the Apple booth and guess what? As I suspected, they unveiled iTunes 4.9 today complete with full podcasting support! After checking it out briefly, I raced out to the hall to find a wifi spot with an outlet and am downloading it right now. This really is huge. This provide a mainstream way for people to subscribe to podcasts. No more shareware software, no more futzing with RSS feeds, the entire thing can be done from within iTunes which has definitely been accepted as possibly the most popular way to organize digital music. This makes podcasting accessible to the ‘normal’ person off the street. They can hop in iTunes, browse through the directory, and simply click on subscribe. It’s big. VERY big. I am absolutely ecstatic.
Now comes the fun part of course. I have to submit my podcast to iTunes and figure out what formats they use for their information. I’ll probably have to quit using dircaster because it’s terrible for handling tags. I need to figure out how to get a logo associated with the feed and create something to stick there.
Heh, perhaps my next podcast should be, “How to take care of all the little things when submitting your podcast to iTunes.”
This year, there is one podcasting session conducted by Dave Warlick. The main reason is that the deadline for new workshops is in October, WAY before podcasting was even a whisper of a buzzword in education. Someone canceled their session and he was on the wait list so he change dhis proposal to podcasting.
Next year, I would be surprised if we have less than five podcasting sessions. If ‘Blog’ was the word of the year for 2004, ‘Podcast’ could very well be the word of the year for 2005.
Well, it’s done downloading. Time to get to work! Don’t forget, if you’re at NECC feel free to look me up. Email links are on the blog, or you can iChat me at sdembo@mac.com
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Podcasts on the radio?
I just read about a San Francisco Radio Station Going All Podcasts. For a while now, we’ve had traditional radio content being released in podcast form. However, this is the first time that I’ve heard about podcast created content being broadcast over the radio waves! They’re billing it as a radio station by the people, for the people. Fascinating stuff. I’m not quite sure that it’s a step forward because it takes away the time shifting, the subscribability, the ability to choose what you’re listening to when you want to, and the freedom from FCC regulation. However, it does add another sense of legitimacy to the medium, and is the start of what I think will become a trend; Radio stations mining through podcasts to look for new on air personalities.
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I think I’m going to have to buy into this one. iPodder has no provided people with a way to create a custom podcatching client preloaded with the feeds of your choice. You buy the client, for a nominal fee. Then you preload it with feeds of your choice and make it available for download. Then, people can download your custom podcatcher, install it and just click ‘receive’ and it will go to work! They don’t need to waste time copying and pasting rss feeds, browsing through podcast alley or searching for other podcast directory sites. They can download and jump right in!
What a fantastic way to eliminate some of technical issues that keep people from diving into podcasting. Brilliant idea by the iPodder crew.
*Update*
Ok, the more I think about the idea, the more I like it. I had already registered the name EduCasters.net, and I’m going to try to put together a directory/repository for Educational related ‘casts. If you are interested in helping out in the project, leave a comment or send me an email!
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I really enjoy reading the reviews posted at The New, New Podcast Review. It’s obvious that the author takes his time and really listens to several different episodes before he makes any judgements about a podcast. I’ve found him to be quite thorough in his critiques of peoples’ audio quality and dead on when it comes to reviewing content. I’ve discovered several quality podcasts through his reviews. He only reviews a podcast about once a week so he has a massive review-queue, but I’m actually glad that he takes his time and doesn’t rush judgements.
And no, I’m not just saying all this stuff because he gave me a positive review!
To be honest, I’ve actually been sort of nervous for the last week. Like I’ve always said, i enjoy making these podcasts and obviously people enjoy listening to them. That’s good enough for me. However, I did put my name in the review-queue a month or two ago and knew that it was coming up soon. It definitely made me nervous to know that someone was going to be listening to it for the sole purpose of reviewing it and critiquing it! I don’t know why I was nervous, it’s not like I would have quit podcasting if he had given me a scathing review. However, I respect this person’s a opinion based on my previous experiences with his reviews. Consequently I feel that his thoughts on the matter have some weight to them.
Thankfully he gave me a pretty decent review. 3.5 stars and he said that he’s going to “watch” the podcast. No, I don’t know that that means and I’ve already asking for clarification on that one 
To be honest, I think he was dead on, both in his compliments and his critiques. Among the critiques were a suggestion to drop the bit rate down because my show doesn’t really require 96kbps encoding and a hint to pay more attention to my environment. I definitely need to do that. Unfortunately my office has a rather loud heating system in it, so I’m considering trying to get a better microphone/software combination that can cancel out some of that noise.
So that’s a big relief. Glad I passed my first big review! Oh, and just for the sake of posterity, it’s Stephen, not Steven
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Heh, Allen Levine of CogDogBlog seems about a few steps away from becoming a full feldged podcaster. Just a few short months ago, he wrote up a great post about yawncasting as he called it. While I disagreed with some of the things he said, I did agree that it was a budding broadcast platform, still in its infancy.
Once of the things that I’ve been saying all along was that one reason I’m podcasting is to help get the ball rolling. I can’t wait until my daily commute is completely filled with people having incredibly intelligent conversations about education, technology and related topics.
Last week, Alan posted a link to a podcast during which he was interviewed. It was absolutely fascinating. I wound up listening to it twice. I get the feeling he’s right on the verge of becoming a full fledged podcaster, although knowing him, he’ll probably insist on calling it something else. Something wry and cynical I’m sure 
Regardless though, I love reading what he writes, so I’m pretty darn sure I’ll love hearing what he has to say.
Come to the dark side. Together we can rule the galaxy!
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More from the international front, I just found Israel News Radio Featuring Marty Roberts on-location in Israel. This is a great example of someone taking a traditional format and adjusting things slightly to accomodate syndication. I’m not sure how long he’s been doing his show, but it’s now available in podcast format.
I know this may be difficult, but podcasters really need to make use of services like archive.org to create a permanent archive of their material. It amkes it easier for people to get on board, and it makes material available to people to refer back to in the future. Shows like this Israel News Radio could be a fantastic resource for students who are researching foreign countries to get the latest news, but I’d really love for them to be able to look up specific events in recent history and get authentic commentary about them. There’s some real potential there.
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Jack was emailing me back and forth a few times after the BlogWalk, and brought an interesting idea to my attention. He pointed out that I didn’t have a direct link to my last podcast so he couldn’t listen to it. The reailty is, the number of people with pdocatching software is still pretty minimal. For people who want a ‘taste’ of podcasting, or to sample a show, I really need to make sure I keep including direct links. After updating the show notes with a link, he gave my ‘cast a listen and sent me the following email…
There are zillions of bloggers. You can find a plethora of information about your very small niche of information. i.e. Rodeo Clowns. (quick search – Dream Job description. No blogs dedicated to the job, though there seem to be
more that are Rodeo-centric.)
* most attendees were business (value to the company; worth of the blogging activity)
* Steve is looking at education
* “education” doesn’t think about value – wasting time isn’t the same as dollars down the drain for the school (but then it is too). Maybe educators should be thinking about this.
* i.e. “bad blogging” could translate into lots of wasted dollars for a company
* what kind of expectations should we have for teachers who blog? communication, resource for students, communicate with parents?idea that testing doesn’t have value
* schools that scored low at the start are looking like they are improving
* riff on why testing isn’t helpful – hard to test “do they know how to find out how to solve a problem” when they don’t know how
* How do we teach kids how to learn. This is the most critical aspect. Personal example of learning about technology in Steve’s job.
* Can we show “the government” that we have a better way to achieve (teaching how to learn), but how do we measure and compare this capability?
Ok, this was just a sample, but I have to tell you it sparked quite a few fireworks going off in my head. Whenever someone thinks about podcasting and education, the first thing most people say is, “Wow, we could record every class and the students could download the lectures!” This is true, and it might be a good idea for students who are absent, or want to be able to concentrate on content first and take notes later. But most podcasts don’t fall into this category. The reality is that most podcasts are closer to radio shows. When I record my podcast, I assume that people are listening to it in the car, on the bus or while walking. However, there could be just as many people listening in front of their computers.
Jack was an active listener. He was trying to absorb everything that I was saying, taking notes, even following up on some of the comments i made by doing a few searchs (appearantly rodeo clowns are out of luck in the bloggosphere right now). I generally think of my audience as passive listeners. I’d like to think that at some point they might take some of the things I talk about and put them into practice, but I don’t think about people actually taking notes during my ‘cast.
It’s something I need to think a bit more about. There’s a seed of an idea germinating inside right now, and I’m having trouble pinning it down. But there’s an innovative way to harness active listening and podcasting. I’m just not sure how yet. Thoughts?
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