PODCASTING
THEORY &
PRACTICE
Dr. Alisa Cooper
South Mountain Community College

A podcast is a
collection of digital
media files which is
distributed over the
Internet, often using
syndication feeds, for
playback on portable
media players and
personal computers
(Wikipedia).

Digital Media Files & Players
audio, video, other digital content

What is Podcast?
The term
“podcast” is a
portmanteau of
the acronym
“Pod”—standing
for “Portable on
Demand”—and
“broadcast”.

What makes a podcast different from
other digital audio formats is its ability
to be downloaded automatically using
software capable of reading feeds like
RSS or Atom.

RSS Aggregator
Podcast audio
uses
syndication
feed enclosures
which pass the
address of a
media file to
the RSS
aggregator

Aggregators
Media aggregators are
sometimes referred to as
“Podcatchers” due to the
popularity of the term
“podcast.”
Media aggregators refer to
applications: client software
or Web based, which
maintain subscriptions to
feeds that contain audio or
video media enclosures.

What is RSS?
RSS 2.0 stands for Video: RSS in Plain English
Really Simple
Syndication.
RSS is a type of web
feed, a data format
used for serving users’
frequently updated
content. Video from commoncraft:
Explanations in Plain English

RSS
Simplified
Websites syndicate the
web feed which allows
users to subscribe to it.

Podcasting Usage in
Education
course content dissemination,
classroom recording,
field recording,
study support (via repeated listening to
audio content), and
file storage and transfer

How does this improve
teaching & learning?
Time shifting
Expanding Classroom
Review Capability

Time Shifting
“The iPod technology also offers the
potential to shift the proportion of class
time devoted to learning that benefits
from face-to-face interactions between
faculty and students, and shift preparatory
work to outside times and
locations” (Leland quoted in Blaisdell,
2006).

24/7 Education
Create a learning environment that extends well
outside the boundaries of the classroom.
Create community among students.

Review Capability
Course lectures can be
dense and difficult to
grab ahold of in just
one sitting.
Podcasts allow for
review, review and
more review.

Is It All
Hype?
For some, maybe. It gets
attention from students
Duke spent $500,000 and
generated substantial
publicity
It’s a developing
technology and faculty
need to buy in and be
trained.

Podcasting Faculty
A recent study found individuals who were
venturesome, socially mobile, rated high on
intelligence and innovativeness, and were
not concerned with uncertainty or risk
were most likely to adopt.

Major Issues
content storage and access,
procurement of licenses for copyrighted
material,
lack of instructor tools for content creation,
and
limited documentation and training
resources

iTunes U
the campus that never
sleeps
iTunes U has arrived, giving
colleges an ingenious way to
get audio and video content
out to their students.
Presentations,
performances, lectures,
demonstrations, debates,
tours, archival footage

Copyright & Legal Issues
Rights and permissions
need to be secured for
material included
Copyright law is
relevant to podcasts
because it applies to
creative and expressive
works and copyright
attaches automatically

Future of
Podcasting
There are sound
theoretical arguments for
at least investigating the
extent to which
podcasting can be an
effective pedagogical tool
(Lim, 2005).
talk Uploaded on February 11, 2008 by Walsh on Flickr