TT #8 Podcasts

I myself enjoy listening to podcasts. I have listened to many different podcasts over the past few years and have my genre set on sports talk and comedy. I have some podcasts that I subscribe to that I listen to on the regular.  These being; The Jay and Dan Podcast (sports/comedy), Pardon the Interruption (sports/comedy) and Baseball Central (sports). I try to subscribe to new ones that are high on the featured list to listen to something new. I tend to listen to podcasts that cater to my likes (sports and comedy).  I did a lot of driving with my summer job the last 2 summers so podcasts were my go to on the road. I made sure I had plenty downloaded for my travels. I sometimes will even listen to them when I workout.

The podcast that I tried for this assignment was technology based.  It was rated high on the most downloaded list under that categories in the iTunes podcast vault.  It is called "This week in Google."
The two people involved in this podcast are Leo Laporte and Jeff Jarvis.  I found myself lost at times because they discussed technology very in depth and referred to data and research behind it. It was very business related which I found myself uninterested in.  So I guess I would say I wasn't that interested in it and didn't like it but I will describe what they talked about. They ranted and ranted quite often. The theme of the day seemed to be how people make money off of YouTube. This one specific issue came up where a young musician put her music on YouTube with no real agenda of making money put getting notice. She did and some started using her music in different videos and actually made the big screen. She was happy but felt that YouTube didn't credit her the way she felt it was necessary. The two hosts went back and forth about this for about 30 mins.  They spoke of issues that google has had in the past and will in the future.  Most of this section of the pod was fuzzy to me. They also talked about a Google retreat in Switzerland and how that was. I found this story telling to be far more interesting and found I liked that part.  Overall I won't be subscribing to this podcast but it is well done and the right person certainly would enjoy it.  I'm not sure this specific episode could be used for an assignment in a class.

I would consider using a podcast for an assignment. I would have students listen to a much shorter podcast about 10-30 minutes. Some podcast tend to run quite long like the Google one which ended up being 90 minutes long.  With the podcast you can do a formative type discussion or listen to before and have them answer specific questions. A bigger assignment would be for them to make up their own podcast. I made one last year using audacity with classmates. It was only 12 minutes long so you don't get too bored. Garage band for apple also works well.

Thanks for reading
Rod