In the News: New Media and Podcasting

Education’s Next Wave? Duke Augments Its Embrace of iPods With Beta Trial of Apple’s iTunes U outlines ways that the university is using podcasts in the classroom to share media files. There’s so much potential here: giving students copies of things rather than relying solely on one-time projection, for instance. And the possibilities for professional development are also great—imagine conference sessions where you could copy the presentation media to your own MP3 player. As these things happen, teachers will need to rethink the presentations that they give. Not only do they need to think about what students can see and hear, but how to get those files on their MP3 players, and how to deal with split attention (What are they looking at? The presenter or the MP3 player?)