Apparently our Apple Rep’s name is Calvin Clark and here are some questions I’d like to ask him when/if he comes to meet us:

• Recording speech with an iPod. There are a bunch of iPod photo add-ons to record voice but none of these apparently work with the new iPod video because it does not have a line-in port. What’s being done about this, or do we have to go to e-bay to purchase a bunch of iPod photos?
• Issues with ipods in public Labs, especially synchronization. There has to be a way of configuring iTunes to save/retrieve its preferences from a network drive. We can’t have the situation where student’s are compelled to use a specific PC/Mac because their ipod is synced to that particular machine. They need to be able to use any machine in the Lab to bring up their iTunes Library.

Janet Russell, Jon Breitenbucher (Wooster) and I (Earlham) are looking at ways to collaborate with student podcasting project. The guts of the idea was to have students comment on each other’s podcasts across campuses / courses. More conversation is on the Wooster Woodle Wiki .

Requirements for project to succeed:

Students need to be able to create the audio recordings easily and encapsulate these into podcasts. This presupposes that a blog would be used. Have to make an easy way to create a podcast by posting to the blog. Therefore:

• students would need to be using a blog as part of their course.
  This blog could either be the Moodle blog (can that handle podcasts?) coming in v1.6 or an independent blog like MoveableType.
• Does Moodle 1.6 blog system support podcast enclosures?
• How would one access the remote moodle/blog pages to comment? I guess it should be possible to locate a fixed URL.

How students would work:

• Student writes paper.
• Student records paper for podcast. Student realises while recording that paper has a lot of mistakes. But student goes ahead and publishes podcast.
• Student self evaluates own podcast in blog.
• Student then listens and comments on other student’s podcasts (from Wooster / Earlham) knowing the mistakes she has made herself.
• Student then polishes up paper and re-records for new polished podcast.
• Students now comment on different polished podcasts.

This is based on my experience with how students have approached recording their own writing in my course last semester.