On Podcasts

Today we looked at the medium of podcasts. These are audio or audio-visual "broadcasts" on almost any topic. Filling a niche between YouTube and RSS feeds, podcasts can be any length (unlike YouTube) and get delivered right to your "podcatcher" program, as RSS feeds are, allowing subscribers to get their content sent to them instead of having to repeatedly check the podcaster's website.

We looked at using iTunes to find podcasts, which I found difficult to browse for relevant 'casts, and it seemed like I needed to either know exactly what I was looking for or be satisfied with the stuff that happened to be "most popular" or "suggested" by iTunes. I imagine this is mostly me being unfamiliar with iTunes podcast-searching methodology, but I was disappointed that such a "user-friendly" company as Apple created such an obscure search method.

When it came time to create my own podcast, I was inspired by my Linguistics class, as we've been examining all the various sounds possible in English. I decided to make a simple, grade-school-version of looking at the different sounds each of our vowels can make. I cheated in a couple ways for time--I didn't look at dipthongs, or address why vowels make what sounds when, or why more than one vowel can make the same sound, but for a very quick overview, I'm pretty happy with it. I was actually irritated by the requirement of adding sound effects--if I had infinite time and infinite resources, I would have been happy to find a sound representing each of the words I used as examples, but trying to find useful sounds from the tragically incomplete iTunes stock library was frustrating.

However, the technology was easy to use and simple to create something useful--and I've used Jing before to create screencasts for another class, and think that will be useful in the future as well. My father creates podcast versions of his music lectures so that he can teach online (although I don't think he's familiar with the term "podcast" or the idea of subscribing, he just puts the videos on his website), and it's served him well.

All in all, a useful session.