Abstract
O ver the past five years, the Web has undergone subtle but important shifts in structure and function. Taken as a whole, these changes mark the emergence of a new Web, generally called Web 2.0 by its proponents. Unlike the early Web, in which expert users, called Webmasters, developed sites with unchanging content, Web 2.0 is characterized by frequently updated sites, publicly constructed and shared information, and easy-to-use online applications, most of them free. If the early Web gave us the online Encyclopedia Britannica, Web 2.0's most heralded achievement is Wikipedia, a user-created encyclopedia that anyone can edit. In other words, as Time magazine proclaimed, Web 2.0 is all about you-the Web user (Grossman 41). New Web 2.0 applications-blogs, wikis, social networking sites, and more-offer educators exciting ways to publish student work to the Web. Of these, the podcast is particularly useful for reinforcing the goals and practices of literature instruction. Simply defined, a podcast is audio delivered over the Web in serialized episodes. You might think of a podcast as a blog in audio form: Like the blogger, the podcaster publishes content to the Web on a regular basis, only the content is recorded rather than written. Listening to a podcast requires media software such as iTunes, Windows Media Player, or an RSS aggregator such as Google Reader. Once installed, this podcatching software finds, downloads, and plays podcasts. Podcasts may be transferred to a personal MP3 player for portable listening, but this hardware is not necessary. In fact, the idea that podcasting requires an iPod is a persistent misconception, perhaps because pod is associated with the iPod, the ubiquitous MP3 player with the trademark white earbuds and snazzy television spots. I recommend thinking of pod as an acronym for personal on-demand, a good description of the highly individualized and instantly available content that podcasts offer. As with blogs, podcasts can take a variety of forms and can cover an enormous range of subjects. Many mainstream media outlets now offer complete or supplemental programming via podcast: National Public Radio, for example, now podcasts its award-winning This I Believe essay series; the New York Times offers, among others, a podcast that summarizes the major headlines of the day. Some p dcasts provide alternative takes on the mainstream media. The Alive in Baghdad podcast, for instance, is produced by a team of Iraqi and American journalists and aims to counter the sound-bite riven news by recording the real stories of Iraqis living through the war. But podcasting goes well beyond mainstream topics: special-interest groups use podcasts to advocate their causes, and individuals publish podcasts on pet topics. The podcasts archived at iTunes alone seem to cover nearly every subject imaginable, from Harry Potter (MuggleCast) to hairstyles (Secrets of Style with Kim Foley) to hairballs (Purina Animal Advice Podcast Series). And iTunes is only one of hundreds of podcast directories. Other popular sites include Podcast
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