Personal Broadcasting: Podcasting and beyond
It's not the only form. MySpace.com started out as a way to offer space to bands and artists without recording contracts so that they could offer mp3 music downloads and get their music heard. They still offer that but they are better known these days for the many personal sites that teens have created there. Another popular indie band site is http://garageband.com.
Internet broadcasting AKA webcasting is competing with - and frightening - traditional, over-the-air radio stations. There are thousands of streams with music and talk being offered by webcasters.
You'll also find crossover. Traditional radio stations are also offering their programming on the web (like my local NPR station in New York City WNYC) and are offering podcasts of archived shows. But I'm not talking about the big guys when I say personal broadcasting.
I'd say that colleges starting out with podcasts (sometimes called coursecasting, though it involves more than just course materials) are somewhere in the middle.
You have big university podcasting programs like Purdue's Boilercast. Listen to a few lectures - if you can. I find them unendurable. 90 minutes of unedited audio (sometimes with frequent references to things on the whiteboard or in an unseen PowerPoint!) It's almost like turning back the clock to the distance learning courses that used 90-minute videotapes of lectures (grad courses at 3 hours - yipes!) We've been celebrating the death of those tapes the last few years at NJIT and I'd hate to see us go back.
Take a look at Stanford's coursecasting that is part of Apple's iTunes U. More interesting. They offer lectures too but also sports, books & authors, music and campus speakers. They range from a few minutes to two hours in length.
Our own first semester of podcast experiments at NJIT includes formal, scripted lectures on World Literature, vodcasts (video podcasts) on Calculus I that run from 6-15 minutes, Calculus II audio lectures done live in class featuring homework solutions so that students can run through the solutions again after class. We are using a "Computers & Society" course that will offer video & audio-only versions to see how students use each. We are very interested in podcasts that have a "shelf life" that goes beyond one semester. Professor Eric Hetherington is preparing podcasts for selected topics for his "Engineering Ethics" course that he believes will be reusable.
We are uploading files in late February/early March to podcast.njit.edu and the files are currently open to the public. You can listen on your computer to any individual podcast or subscribe to a series using iTunes, iPodder or other podcast receivers. We have directions online. The experiment is in progress and we'd like to hear from you if you try out any of our files.
Another crossover in personal broadcasting can be found in blogs that are using audio files: http://www.plastercity.com/blogs/ears.htm, and http://www.teleread.org/blind/ are examples.
Audioblogger allows you to do blogs with audio and you can submit your text by email and your audio by phone!
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