Podcasts (Exercise #21)

I recently watched a really interesting teleconference called "The Classroom Will Now Be Podcast: Podcasting in Higher Education and Implications for Academic Libraries," so I've been thinking a bit about using podcasts. David Free, the presenter, made some great points about how to use podcasts effectively in the classroom. For instance making podcasts of some basic information that students could listen to before they get to class. This would give more time for different kinds of learning activities, which is always great for library instruction because there's never enough time in most 50 minute one-shot sessions. We've also talked at our library about using podcasts of recordings of special events we have in the library, like book discussion groups and speakers.

I like how the Yahoo tutorial described podcasts as being like a radio show. I think that really captures it, especially how you can subscribe to a podcast and listen to a "show" on a regular basis.

I had a lot of fun poking around Podcastalley.com. Under Top 10 Podcasts I found a podcast program called MuggleCast. I love Harry Potter, so I really enjoyed listening to it. I had to add it to my RSS Feed, if for no other reason that I felt reassured that there are people out there more obsessed with the books than me. Looking under the genre Education I found a more "serious" podcast about Harry Potter called Harry Potter Prognostications. It was amusing listening to both.

I looked under the genre Education to see if I could find some stuff on libraries, but I only found a couple of things. I did find one called Econtalk at Econlib.org, which was hosted by Russ Roberts, of the Library of Economics and Liberty and George Mason U. I did listen to some of them because I'm the liaison for Economics. I only found 119 results when I put in the search term "library" in the Search for a Podcast box. Some were podcasts from specific libraries and others were musings of individual librarians. I liked Library Geeks, especially when I saw Jessamyn West was involved.