Portability and Podcasts

by Jim Lengel, Hunter College CUNY

Buy a computer in the back-to-school promotion, and get a free iPod. Strap it on to your arm so you can listen as you jog. Download The Daily Show so you don't miss the news, and watch it during study break. Subscribe to your math professor's podcast so you can prepare for tomorrow's quiz. Use your cell phone to snap a picture of your physics experiment, and send it to your computer via email. Students today enjoy the portability of their digital resources in ways that none of us dreamed about as few as five years ago.

How are teachers taking advantage of this new channel into their students' minds? Millions of students own iPods, treating them as constant companions and digital drop boxes. More than simply a way to listen to music, the portable devices have become a depository for email messages, a storage space for software, and a location for listening to lectures at leisure. So it's natural that their teachers seek to find ways to make educational materials available on this new and highly competent portable multimedia device.

While traveling the country helping faculty with this work, I have uncovered some interesting approaches that I will share with you in this week's article. I have heard science podcasts that sound like comedy sketches and I have watched endless video archives of lackadaisical literature lectures. I have watched students eagerly download morsels of math instruction with clever slides and nice narration to prepare for tomorrow's test. As teachers think about the possibilities of this portable medium, they consider the three C's:

• Context
• Content
• Quantity

Context

The ubiquity of the iPod stems from its excellence as a music player. It was designed to be easy to carry and with headphones so you could listen anywhere. And with simple controls that you can work with one finger. People use their iPods on bikes, beaches, trains, cars, sidewalks, park benches and lecture halls. They listen for a few minutes or a long stretch, depending on where they are and what else they are doing. They listen or watch alone -- only one person at a time in most instances. What they listen to habitually is music, so they are conditioned to audio experiences that last about four minutes, the duration of a typical popular song.

So the first question for the teacher to ask is where and how and why the students will be using the podcast. Will they be on the subway reviewing two-minute key concepts lessons for an upcoming quiz? Or will they be in the library listening to the hour-and-a-half lecture they missed because of football practice? Will they be in a place suitable to viewing video or images, and have the equipment that can handle this? Will they have a few minutes as they walk between classes to let your voice enter their minds through the little white ear buds? Or will they schedule an iPod study group and all listen together in a digital all-nighter?

The podcasting context for undergraduates may be quite different from the contexts for grad students or middle-schoolers. The nature of the context will determine what your first podcasts should look like. It's easier to achieve success if you match the style and purpose of your podcast to the context that most iPod-using students are familiar with.

Content

We think of the iPod as a music player, so we assume that an academic podcast should be first of all an audio experience. But a podcast may contain images, text, and video as well as sound. This means you may use printed words, diagrams, photographs, animation, and film clips in your podcasts, as well as voice. So your first consideration is to select the content that best serves your purposes. An art historian may find images to be quite useful, a musician may need to include symphonic recordings, a math teacher may use diagrams to make her point, and a geographer may be partial to maps. A podcast may include any and all of these.

(It may also include text. A new software tool called iWriter has just appeared on the scene, that lets teachers prepare text files that appear quite readably on the iPod, can interact with each other and be linked to audio files. We'll cover this possibility in an upcoming article.)

Your choice of the type of content to use will stem from what you have available already, and how much time you have to produce it. It's easier to turn an existing video clip into a podcast than to produce a brand new one. It's easier to modify a slide show you already have into a podcast than to build one from scratch. Its easier to base a podcast on a proven story you have told over and over than to write a brand-new original script. So examine your photo collection, your lecture slides, your class notes, and your video library for appropriate source material before you plan your podcast.

But don't fall into the trap of simply copying an existing lecture and pasting it into a podcast. The context for consuming a podcast is quite different from that of the lecture hall. Think instead about adapting the content of a lecture -- images, key points, examples -- into the shorter forms more appropriate to the portable medium. Split the lecture into three or four podcasts. Re-record your talk in a style that's more person-to-person.

You will find that certain types of podcasts are easier and quicker to produce than others:

• Audio podcast. Sound only. Easiest to produce. At its simplest, you click the record button in GarageBand, speak your piece, and save it to iTunes or iWeb. And it will work on all iPods and on many MP3 players. And on a Web page, or in a course management system such as Blackboard.
  
• Enhanced podcast. Sound plus pictures. A bit more difficult to produce, but perhaps more useful. Just drag the artwork into the track in Garageband, and slide them around to synch with your voice. Most existing images -- including slides from Keynote or PowerPoint -- can work well, and are easily imported.
  
• Video podcast. A bit more work, especially if you are shooting new scenes, but easy to produce with iMovie. Existing clips can be imported and mixed, titles and narration can be added. iMovie exports directly in iPod format.

Quantity

How long should a podcast be? Long enough to accomplish its purpose, but short enough to work in the podcast setting. The average length of a popular song, on which the iPod experience has been based for most of our students, is three to four minutes. An episode of The Daily Show is about 22 minutes. This is the kind of material iPodders are used to working with. On the other hand, some iPodders listen to talking books over many hours and seem to enjoy the experience.

The length of your podcast should match the context of your students and the nature of your content. How much are they likely to be ready to consume at one sitting? What are the natural chunks that your content divides into? It may work better to design each podcast to teach a single concept or idea rather then an entire lecture or chapter. Students will use your podcasts for review and reference, where shorter episodes make it easier to find what they need to learn and to listen it to it multiple times as necessary. Shorter podcasts are also easier to produce and edit and modify than long ones.

To experience some sample educational podcasts, open iTunes, connect to the Music Store, and then click Podcasts in the genre list. Then on the podcast page scroll down to the bottom left and click the Education category. Browse some of the featured podcasts.Most of these were home-grown, created by teachers like you. Then search the podcast collection for podcasts in your field, using the keyword search feature on this page. You will find examples ranging from two-minute introductions to two-hour lecture archives, in all three formats (audio, enhanced, and video). Let these examples inspire your own portable podcast productions.