You have undoubtedly heard people talking and writing about Blogs - from "Weblog" - and even maybe "Wikis" - 'wiki' is Hawaiian for "quick" - but have you heard about "Podcasts?" Whereas the first two are text authoring tools to allow people to easily publish their thoughts and ideas via the Web, a podcast, as defined in one of the most popular Wikis, "Wikipedia," is "a way of publishing sound files to the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed and receive new audio files automatically. Podcasting is distinct from other types of audio content delivery because it uses the RSS 2.0 protocol. This technique has enabled many producers to create self-published, syndicated radio shows." (more...)

In my position at the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education we are exploring how these three, relatively new, media formats might be used by our faculty and students to good effect. This, therefore, is an experiment for me in using a podcast in a very natural way. Janee asks us to comment on our work as we complete our weekly assignments and to post those comments in a discussion thread and/or on the pages where we post our finished assignment products. Well, it occurs to me that hearing the student actually talking about his/her work might be a nice alternative to personalize the experience of sharing one's thoughts and hearing those thoughts by other classmates.

I have created an overview Podcast for this experimental series and it lasts 1 minute and 10 seconds. My Podcast for the first lesson ended up lasting 5 minutes and 48 seconds. Now, this is where some may have problems with Podcasts: size of sound files to download! My short overview file is a little over a meg in size, whereas the longer Lesson 1 file is 5.5MB! By today's standards, those are not really big files, but if you are connecting to the Internet via dial-up modem, they're big! If, however, you are connecting to the Internet via cable/DSL modem or through a broadband connection at school or work, then such file sizes can be pulled down to your computer quite quickly.

If I have piqued your interest in Podcasts and you would like to follow along with my experiment, follow the links below to get yourself ready to receive my podcast "episodes:"

• Getting Ready - What you need
• Subscribing to Bill's "Blank Canvas" Podcast Series