Scholarly Life of a Committed Technofile

I went to this wonderful presentation at CCCCs about how a faculty member assigned podcasts in her writing class. Now, I am a stickler for saying that podcasts are periodically published texts; however, she had her students follow the general conventions that are emerging in the world of podcasting. (So…they made audio files structured whose formats followed individual podcast structures). I really liked the idea of having them listen to podcasts, and then emulate them to dabble in multi-modal composition. Last week I found this article about 5min.com (oops, forgot to save the article). I wonder if we’ll start seeing video sites like this, or themes/threads within YouTube and Google Video that have conventions of short syndicated information video segments (or the advanced Podcasts, or videocasts). In other words, getting format and content conventions to emulate, just like with Podcasts.

Ultimately, I’m thinking it could be interesting to have students make short “casts” (whether audio and/or video) that would build, over time and classes, into a repository of information about the topic/course. This would be the same type of idea of having students adding to a course wiki that would expand over time as a resource for future classes.