Well, they’re sort of meta-podcasts.

Perhaps not.

I do know a very clean cheese shop that’s wonderfully uncontaminated by cheese…. Don’t get me started on the ex-parrots.

Harvard’s Extension School is podcasting lectures on “Understanding Computers and the Internet.” For more details, see this Harvard Crimson story. The podcast comes in both audio and video flavors. It’s the first Harvard course to be podcasted. It’s also available to everyone on the Internet, not just those students who have the key to a special locked-down iTunes store.

Student response, according to the article, has been very positive, for a number of reasons. And the teachers are starting to get fan mail from all over the world. (What’s not to like about that?)

Why all the excitement about “canned lectures”? Perhaps the excitement is about lectures. Is that excitement misplaced? Perhaps not.

So-called canned lectures may well seem less canned when the context for listening shifts: you don’t have to sit still, for one thing, and interesting words well chosen can make an interesting soundtrack as the scenery goes by. There’s also a shift when the listening device becomes more intimate. I remember my first transistor radio. I could play it under my pillow late at night, press it to my ear on the school bus, listen with an earphone on my elementary school’s “safety patrol” while waiting for the next group of kids to need help crossing the street. It felt like carrying a secret world around, one I could dip into and experience in many different settings, a parallel universe whose boundaries became a lot more fluid and permeable with my little radio.

But is it interactive?

Certainly can be. All good listening is interactive. All good listeners are co-creators. That’s not to say that the students should simply listen. No, eventually many or perhaps most of them should make their own podcasts. But there’s an art to listening well, just as there’s an art to reading well or viewing well, and that art is no mean craft. These arts probably aren’t complete unless they lead to speaking, writing, or designing oneself, but the practices are reciprocal, not mutually exclusive.

We need a theory of co-creation that maintains the vital distinction between writer and reader while articulating the common source of energy, inspiration, and attention that fuels them both, and the essential reciprocity that defines their relationship.

I’m coming to think that it’s all multitasking, whether divergent (attending to disparate and apparently unrelated events that are somehow synthesized in cognition) or convergent (attending to multiple modes of awareness, realization, reification, and attention within one tightly defined event–say, listening to a piano recital, or reading a poem). But that’s for another post.

Harvard story via Podcasting News.