Jeremy calls it straight on podcasting, with a great link to a comment on audio blogging (and check out the music… well worth it!):
“right now it looks like everyone is simply exorcising their childhood fantasies to be radio DJs because they can.”
And I sympathise a lot with that, seriously, and well said too :o) But but but but you know, when I started ed designing at a tertiary level I felt pretty similarly about lectures, actually, come to mention it I still do, I mean what a waste of time – information transfer – egocentric – pile – of – crap. And yet, as I come across the (probably less than 5% of) people who can engage, interest and involve 100+ students through waffling on in an amphitheatre come movie theatre, there is a kind of good that comes out. It’s like some people are just good to listen to, and if I can listen to them while I’m driving or going for a walk or having a coffee then – hurrah – I probably wouldn’t wade through their 2000 word blog post in a million years (with another hundred or so in the aggie).
So keep it going I reckon, live those fantasies and I reckon we’ll get some fantastic people who probably should have been on the radio out of them… one thing though, you certainly ‘aint never getting them from me and I’m probably only ever going to subscribe to, like, 2 or 3 of them, so you’d better be good ;o)
That’s an interesting perspective that I hadn’t heard before. I hadn’t thought of podcasting as an ego thing, or as a way to live a dream of being a DJ. I suppose there may be something there… Never wanted to be a DJ, though ;-) I was only hoping to experiment with the technology, so when a prof comes to me with a question about it, I can respond with something more intelligent than “podwhatnow?” Regardless, I’ve been questioning the value of the “links” podcasts. Even though they’ve been downloaded a whole lot (just checked, and it’s over 800 downloads now. oy!), it may be more of an early adopter thing…
Hi D’Arcy,
Yours are great, naturally :o) Plus you do do the links thing and have from the start! For my buck I reckon that the annotated, descriptive text entry plus the podcast is a good way to go… how much time do you have :o)
Cheers, James
If you couldn’t tell from the tone of my post, I was feeling cantankerous. ;-) Didn’t mean to slag anyone’s attempts to experiment with the technology…
Just as there are lots of blogs I would never read, there will lots of audio posts I’ll never listen to…but you make a good point, James — there are those speakers who really do convey something special, and there are times when I might be interested in listening to what they have to say. But we’ve had books on tape, motivational recordings, instructional tapes for decades, and I’ve never got into those either…