Stephen's Untold Stories

Thanks to my dad for alerting me to this one!

Are you a PC? Then you’d better not go to the University of Missouri’s journalism school, where 99.5 percent of the students have Macs and incoming freshmen have just been told they’ll need an iPhone or iPod Touch as well.

Why? So they can play back lectures in their free time, according to Associate Dean Brian S. Brooks.

“Lectures are the worst possible learning format,” he told the Columbia Missourian, the campus newspaper. “There’s been some research done that shows if a student can hear that lecture a second time, they retain three times as much of that lecture.”

In a conversation with FOXNews.com, Brooks said that any MP3 player could actually be used.

“You could use a Zune, for example,” he said.

But he said the Apple devices, which start at $200 apiece, were made official requirements for the benefit of students on financial aid.

“If it’s required, it can be included in your financial-need estimate,” he told the Missourian. “If we had not required it, they wouldn’t be able to do that.”

Brooks said the journalism school was stressing Apple devices to standardize software — lectures are downloaded for free from a special section of the iTunes Store — and because so many students either already had or wanted an iPhone or iPod Touch.

“There are about 50 other schools across the country that are doing this,” he said.

Link to article

Well worth the almost 10 minutes.

More and more colleges are starting to do this. It’s nice to see some research that shows it is worthwhile.

The ability to pause and rewind podcast lectures gave the upper hand to college students in a recent study that compared the performance of students who attended a lecture in person and those who viewed it from iTunes University.

The study, “iTunes University and the Classroom: Can Podcasts Replace Professors?,” was conducted at the State University of New York Fredonia. It called for some introductory psychology students to watch a recorded lecture available online and others to attend a traditional classroom lecture.

Students who watched the lecture podcast–available from the iTunes U online video library–scored an average of 71 percent. Students who sat through the 30-minute classroom lecture scored an average of 62 percent, according to the study.

Dani McKinney, the study’s lead researcher, said test scores were most dramatically affected by note taking. Students who watched the video lecture and took notes, McKinney said, scored an average of 15 points higher than their peers in the lecture hall.

“They listened to [the podcast] over and over,” said McKinney, a Fredonia psychology professor since 2006 who completed the iTunes study with researchers Jennifer Dyck and Elise Luber. “Listening passively doesn’t get anything accomplished. It’s not enough to just do rote memory and repetition.”

Examining the notes taken by students who participated in the study, McKinney said it was clear many students took advantage of the pause and rewind buttons.

Read the rest here.

Very cool story from New Mexico.

Students at a rural New Mexico school made a unique pledge last winter: Right hands raised, they promised to take care of their Zunes.

This past semester, nearly every one of the roughly 100 students at Fort Sumner High School was outfitted with the Microsoft media player, similar to Apple’s iPod, enabling them to watch videos and listen to recorded lectures created or recommended by teachers and fellow students. Fort Sumner High was one of two schools nationwide taking part in the project.

The students were encouraged to use their devices during class hours, on bus rides home, and on school trips. Teachers got a $400 bonus for coming up with lessons to identify 20 downloadable digital lectures that supported their lessons and to develop five of their own.

“My main hope is it’s going to save us lost class time,” said English teacher Pam Richards. “We are small, and the kids are involved in so many things.”

Link to article

Great story about a guy who just won’t stop learning. Nice to see his being able to take advantage of these opportunities.

Baxter Wood is going back to college. But the 62-year-old truck driver won’t be quitting his day job or going to discussion groups with kids 40 years his junior.

Instead, he will have his pick of professors from elite universities like Columbia, Yale, MIT and Stanford — and his tuition will be $0. How’s that for financial aid?

Wood is one of the thousands of students attending iTunes U, downloading lectures available free of charge on the iTunes Web site to his MP3 player.

“It’s amazingly realistic,” Wood said. “The sound of the pages rustling, chalk on the board … I’m convinced that the best way to learn something is to get a professor who knows more than you do to explain it to you.”

More than 50,000 lectures are downloaded every week from almost 30 universities whose professors offer their teachings to anyone with a computer.

Professor Hubert Dreyfus of the University of California at Berkeley, Wood’s current teacher, is one of the most popular picks among iTunes U students.

“I’m podcasting my course on Heidegger, ‘On Time and Being,’ which is the hardest philosophy book of the 20th century, I think, and the most important,” Dreyfus said. “That surprises me that Heidegger has such an audience.”

Link to article

Mashable has done it again, and again. Following the releases of their blogging and video toolboxes, we now have two more. Fantastic Stuff!

Podcasting Toolbox

Online Music Toolbox

Thanks for Mark Wagner for pointing this one out.

-Podcasting White Paper

Tony Vincent has a great post that will tell you everything you need to know about the cost of podcasting.

• Read all about it here!

A mixture of video, podcast, and lecture notes. Here are some of the universities:

• Harvard
• Rice
• Stanford
• University of Washington
• Carnegie Mellon
• Penn State
• Princeton
• Caltech
• University of Virginia
• University of Georgia
• MIT
• UC Berkely
• UCLA

Here is the list

If you haven’t added Open Culture to your RSS list, you really need to do so. It might be the best site for compiling great podcasts out there. Here are some of the full-length audio books you can download.

• A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens (iTunes)
• Animal Farm, George Orwell (iTunes)
• Collected Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson (iTunes)
• Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving (iTunes)
• Shakespeare’s Sonnets, William Shakespeare (mp3 download)

Here is the complete listing.

Very interesting stuff here.

 In the beginning, the iPod let you listen to every CD you owned, even when you were stuck on the Red Line. Then Steve Jobs said, “Let there be video,” and lo and behold, you could watch “Lost” die a slow, overwritten death on a two-inch screen. But while people seem content to load their little devices with as many songs and TV shows as possible, podcasts (think of them as radio programs that you download) tend to be neglected.

Which is really too bad, because some of the more educational ones can help give you a truly brainy rep — if you listen to them regularly. The free podcasts below can teach you how to say, “Where’d my job get exported to?” in Mandarin and why, psychologically speaking, listening to that Regina Spektor single makes you burst into tears.

Link to article

Wes always has some great stuff, and this one is too good not to share with you. Wes lead a workshop with teachers in Oklahoma City and they did this great KWL chart. Click on the image for the full-sized view.

I have to admit that I don’t download or listen to them as much as I thought I would, and I guess I’m not alone.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project said Wednesday that 12 percent of Internet users have downloaded a podcast, an increase from 7 percent earlier in the year.

However, only about 1 percent said they download a podcast on a typical day — unchanged from the survey earlier this year. The rest do so less frequently, perhaps only once.

News organizations such as National Public Radio and The Associated Press offer news podcasts throughout the day, while amateurs have produced podcasts once or twice a week to discuss their favorite television shows, among many other subjects.

“While podcast downloading is still an emerging activity primarily enjoyed by early adopters, the range of content now available speaks to both mainstream and niche audiences,” said Mary Madden, senior research specialist at Pew. “We are at a crossroads of a major transition in the way media content is delivered and consumed.”

Men and online veterans are more likely to download podcasts, according to the telephone survey of 972 adult Internet users, which was conducted Aug. 1-31 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. The previous survey was conducted February to April.

Link to full article

I expect this won’t be the largest for too long. And that’s a good thing!

Kansas State University announced today its use of Tegrity Campus to convert an unprecedented 6,000 recorded classes to enhanced podcasts. K-State plans to have all 6,000 class podcasts available to its students this year, making it by far the education realm’s largest podcasting implementation worldwide.

K-State students already have access to several hundred lectures in podcast format, some converted from older recordings, and some being created automatically as faculty continue using Tegrity to capture their classes each day. The school will continue to offer its students access to these and future class recordings on demand – whether they choose to experience them online or on their mp3 players.

Link to article

Now this is really something.

The White House RSS feed for President George W. Bush delivers headlines and links to White House news releases on www.whitehouse.gov/news, including events, speeches, statements, and press briefings from administration officials. In addition to the RSS feed, audio files of the President’s Weekly Radio Address and selected remarks are available via Podcast.

Link to site

As promised, here is my Moodle podcast. Keep in mind I’m still refining my podcasting skills, so bear with me!

UPDATE…I’ve decided to re-record the podcast as I wasn’t happy with the quality. I’ll repost it in the next couple of days.

Here is the updated version!

Thanks!
Stephen

My colleague Brent Williams has put together a very informative podcast intended for anyone who is using or who plans to use wireless networks in schools. This would be helpful for teachers as well as technology specialists.

WiFi works when installed and managed correctly! Learn why students, teachers, and administrators are frustrated with WiFi. Then learn how to make it work!

I’m probably a little late with this one, but I was browsing the National Geographic website and noticed that they have an RSS feed for news and also podcasts available!

I have posted about their photography section, so don’t forget about that one!

I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in a skypecast hosted by Wesley Fryer on Tuesday evening. We had about 25 people participating from all over the US, Canada, and Australia. This was my first experience with a skypecast, and I had a great time. Here is Wesley’s summation of the event.
Wesley also set up a Wiki for us so that we can continue the discussion. Please check it out here.

You can download the podcast of the event here. (21.9 megabytes)

Here is one you should definitely save!

Headphones…check! Computer and web connection…check! Podcasts…good ones…huh. We’ve all heard about how podcasts offer ground-breaking indie audio content on the web, but how the heck do you find them?

You could spend hours scouring the end of the very long tail for quality podcasts, but thankfully, there are a few sites that have already done the heavy lifting for you, including podcast search engines, directories, and roundup sites. Keep reading, and I’ll show you how to find some of the best, most interesting, and must-listen-to podcasts on the web.

Lifehackers’ guide to podcasts