Heather Ross

I keep thinking about the podcasts of lectures from Berkeley and Stanford I've been listening to. I think that if professors had podcast lectures for courses that I had taken I would have made a lot of use of those.

One professor of a distance course that I took had Quicktime video lectures that we could watch off of the streaming server or from a CD. If he had put either the entire video in a vodcast or just the audio in podcast, my learning could have been more mobile.

I think that students are going to start demanding such mobility in the very near future.

Hi there.

Heather Ross from Saskatoon here. I've been fortunate enough to be involved in three podcasts thus far and am looking forward to many more.

I think that podcasting is already playing a significant and growing role in education:

•  Students are trying it out just as they have video, newspaper and other forms of media production in the past.
• Educators are using it to share their lectures.
• Many involved in education are podcasting about educational issues.

I think that podcasting is making it easier to provide new venues for informal learning. I can listen to a podcast of a history lecture from an institution in another country. In some cases I can listen to entire courses worth of lectures. Podcasting is also making it easier for educators to share ideas through their own podcasts (as I mentioned above).

As for your last question, Richard, what are the dangers ... right off the bat I think that podcasting has grown so quickly we may be looking at backlash from some powers-that-be as we've seen with attempts at blocking and censoring social networking Web sites.

Anyway, this is just my pre-coffee two cents.

You can listen to some of the podcasts I've been on at http://www.mctoonish.com/blog/?page_id=203

Liz,

I remember using irc more than a decade ago and lurking was a big issue. You could see someone was there, but they never said anything. It made people uncomfortable just as it would if you sat in a room having a discussion with several people and someone else sat down and just listened.

I think that people are less upset by this on discussion boards because you don't see the person "sitting there". As a result, lurking seems to be more expected and accepted on discussion boards and email lists.

Wow Sylvia. Thanks for the great response. You've given me so much to think about.

I have a few comments about the ownership issue:

- In my experience, the concern about ownership extends outside of just teachers. Other professions are also dealing with this.
- It hadn't really occurred to me before your post that there may be administrators or others telling teachers which communities they may join. Again, I suspect that this is true in other fields. I had not, however, thought that knowledge management concerns like this had invaded education. As a classroom teacher everyone seemed willing to share their resources and lesson plans.
- Finally, do you think that as Gen-X, Y, and beyond become the prominent force in the workplace that the normalcy of open-source, Creative Commons, etc. will overtake the ownership issue or am I too optimistic.

I?m not sure if this should be a new discussion topic or not, but here goes.

I've been working on a small study that has an element on teachers using technology to connect with each other. I presented at two conferences on this study and at both members of the audience said, "They will not use the discussion board." In several cases the individual raising this point said that he or she had tried to set up such boards and the community died quickly.

They said that teachers had no time, no interest, and no knowledge of how to use the technology.

I'm curious about the experiences of others. Have you been part of virtual communities for teachers? If so, did the communities thrive, stagnate or die?