For a Digital Writing Course
You must read Podcasting News if you are interested in podcasts! The New York Times has NYTimes Podcasts covering almost every area of interest. For anyone and everyone, podcast.net is a directory of professional and amateur podcasts. Unfortunately, many podcasts come and go too quickly and the directory links to some ghost sites.
For October 30, 2007, we were instructed:
In your blog: listen to some podcasts and analyze different aspects of the production quality of these podcasts; then, reflect on ways that you could use writing to create podcasts or coursecasts; brainstorm some ideas for creating your own podcast: an interview, presentation…
I am a fan of Internet Radio, podcasting, and pretty much all things resembling “radio” in any form. For November 6, we have been asked to create a podcast of some form, and I certainly don’t see a problem creating a theatrical production of some sort.
Podcasting has the convenience that most Web tools lack. A podcast listener can be riding train, jogging, or sitting at home. As a listener, I don’t need to interact with the podcast; I can listen and think. I can review a segment several times, or skip boring segments. It beats reading a Web page!
Many of the podcasts I favor are radio archives, so they have the production quality of any good broadcast facility. I listen to KGO (San Francisco); podcasts allow me to listen to any show from the previous seven days. I can stream the audio from WCCO, for clarity, and then listen to shows that aired at the same time on KGO at my convenience.
On a technical side, I head for NYTimes because they have the best science and technology reporters on the Web. For general interest, I launch iTunes and simply browse both podcast listing and radio listings. I prefer audiobooks, especially film noir era mysteries.
As a playwright, I am drawn to podTheatre because it is similar to old-time radio (OTR) and Readers’ Theatre. I love the notion of students learning about narrative structure, cooperative production, and even the value of oral traditions.