Podcasting in the campus

I’ve been playing with iPodderX trying to figure our some podcasts (audio feeds) we can do here at the campus.

iPodderX is the desktop application where you can subscribe to audio feeds. Podcasting is relatively new yet there are many feeds across several categories and interests. Podcasting clients are also available for Windows PC.

The audio is downloaded and sent to iTunes. I can listen to the audio on iTunes and when you connect the iPod the audio is moved to it.

Creating our own podcast is fairly easy. All we need is a computer with a microphone and a sound recording software. We export the audio as mp3 and host it on a web server. We then write an enclosure (a XML file describing the mp3 file - it’s length, it’s URL etc.) text file. This file becomes the feed just like a RSS feed and our listeners can subscribe to our feed using the iPodderX client.

I guess Podcast would be a way to get our campus radio station programming out. Even the guys who publish the campus magazines could podcast as a way of advertising. Language lessons (I am always interested in learning languages, as someone who wanted to grow up and become a spy) in the form of short audio skits could be podcast.

Here are some people looking at podcasts in education
Hugo Schotman: Podcasting for Education
D’Arcy Norman: Podcasting for Education

Software Downloads
ipodder: Available for both Mac and the PC
iPodderX: A Mac OS X client for receiving podcasts
Doppler: A Windows client for receiving podcasts

More reading
Podcasting related resources at Wikipedia