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January 6, 2005
Pay No Attention to the Podcaster Behind the Screen
David Warlick has just posted a blog called The Other End of Podcasting, in which he talks about podcasting from both a podcaster's point of view and a listener's POV. Interestingly, he uses my most recent podcast as a reference point (not to mention inspiration to the schematic he created, seen on the right). Dave writes this:
Last night, Andy Carvin published a very interesting podcast (a must listen), as part of his Waste of Bandwidth blog. I believe that he used an iPod with an iTalk attachment to do the actual recording, but most podcasters use more traditional microphones. He imported the audio into his computer, mixed in some music, and saved it all as an MP3 file, and added the reference into his RSS syndication file.
At the end of his essay, he makes two very important points:
The broadcast industry has been completely passed over. This is true multicasting (as opposed to broadcasting), where anyone with the skills (basic literacy skills, I maintain), and access to basic consumer technology, can share their thoughts and ideas in a compelling way to a global audience.If virtually anyone can populate the airways (webways) with compelling content, then it becomes all the more important that we teach our children to critically evaluate the information that they encounter. We must teach children to always ask questions about the answers that they find.
In an age of rampant media concentration in which quality programming can be counted on a single hand of a cartoon character, there's nothing more compelling than a person taking a microphone, a computer, and a few good ideas and turning it into a powerful, entertaining narrative. Hopefully we'll start seeing more young people producing podcasts in the same way that they've practically cornered the blogging market.
But like Dave says, we also need to make sure we teach kids the critical thinking skills to evaluate all of this content. Podcasting will face the same criticism often thrown at blogging - that much of the stuff being produced is personal naval-gazing on unsubstantiated rumor-mongering. How do you tell when one blogger or podcaster is more credible than another? Is it simply the slickness of their product? Or is there something more tangible than that? Can we teach kids to be smart consumers -- and producers -- of blogs and podcasts? And do we want to remain in a situation in which probably nine out of 10 educators don't even know what a "podcast" or a "blog" even means? (According to Lee Rainie a the Pew Internet and American Life Project, two-thirds of Internet users surveyed don't know what a blog is. Imagine if the same survey happened amongst educators in any given school district. I shiver at the thought.
With podcasting, we have the luxury of foresight. Blogging has been around for over five years now. (Or more than 10 years, if you count those of us who slogged away coding manual HTML to create personal homepages with news updates.) What can we glean from blogging as a phenomenon - and as an educational opportunity -- and apply to podcasting? What can we do to encourage a generation of smart, thoughtful podcasters?
Sorry, folks, no answers today. Just a bunch o' questions to chew on for a while... -andy
Posted by acarvin at January 6, 2005 9:58 PM
Listen to a computer-generated podcast of this article
