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.

Great blog entry from Steve Greenlaw over at Pedablogy about a collaboration involving him, his Economics colleague, and his Instructional Technology Specialist, Jerry “Running With Scissors” Slezak. It’s a wonderful example of how teaching and learning technologies can make potential synergy into kinetic synergy. Take some nifty tools, simple and direct methods, and conceptual sophistication that focuses on teaching needs and goals first and technology second, and the outcomes are, well, mighty encouraging. Add to that the opportunity the blog affords for not only sharing the experience but also (and crucially) reflecting upon it, and as John Lennon once sang, “I feel fine.” I bet the students are pretty happy too.

Kudos to all.

My first set of attempts at recording and commenting on “The Relique” was spoiled by a technical problem: I thought I was using one microphone, but in fact was using the built-in microphone on my tablet PC. I redid the recording to get a better-sounding podcast. So why podcast the spoiled attempt? Because I think the reading is usefully different and perhaps better, and because the commentary is fuller and more exploratory. By the time of the re-take, I had more of an idea of how I was going to say what I wanted to say. That led to a more concise and perhaps better commentary, but the first take is much fuller and more searching, even in its rambles.

Comparing the two takes is interesting. Comparing two takes of a student performance would also be interesting. Anything that enhances mindfulness while preserving discovery and delightful, serendipitous surprise is a good strategy for education, in my view. And thus I am bold enough to tax the listener’s patience with an inferior recording of the very same poem.

BY JOHN DONNE

From Poetryfoundation.org

Podcast: Play in new window | Download ()

As so often happens, I began this reading with great admiration for the poem and ended more than a little awestruck by it.

Some thoughts on that awe. A successful or at least meaningful performance demands commitment, in time; a committed process or a process of commitment, in other words. And from that commitment, vital meanings emerge. So meaning both precedes and follows from commitment. Commitment is exclusive, true: this, not that emphasis; this, not that timing; this, not that commentary. That exclusivity forces decisions, and decisions help to make or discover meaning (or both). (“Reason also is choice,” writes Milton.) At the same time, commitment can lead to a heightened awareness not so much of multiple meanings as of multiple nodes of meaning within the overall semantic shape or experience of the whole, and the way the modes connect to each other. Commitment demands connections, unless the commitment is completely random and blundering. Perhaps even then.

I’m aware I’m describing another version of the hermeneutic circle here: you can’t understand the whole unless you understand the parts, but you can’t understand the parts unless you understand the whole. Here’s the distinction, though, at least to my mind today: apprehension precedes comprehension, and commitment is the connection between them. There’s not a bottomless pit of ambiguity, nor is there a fierce conviction of one single interpretation, as a result of this commitment. Rather, there is a readiness, and an occasion of answerability, a time when I am called upon (by myself, in this case, but also by the presence of my teachers and mentors whom I have internalized) to give an account of the ongoing work of this poem.

That its work is ongoing I have no doubt.

Postscript: A Donne a Day 25 will be another take of the poem and commentary. Unfortunately, the quality of the recording is not as good: I thought I was using my Snowball USB mike, but in fact I was using the built-in mike on the tablet PC. You’ll hear lots of room tone, and not as clear or intelligible a recording of my voice. Still, the contrast, and the value of the initial take, are potentially interesting enough to warrant the duplication.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (5.1MB)

Strange headline–I’m irresistibly reminded of Blue Oyster Cult, even if I can’t get the proper diacritical mark there–but an interesting article in the Chronicle nonetheless. Rebecca Goetz writes a thoughtful, even temperate essay on her own experience as a grad-school blogger, offering evidence of its personal and professional value in her studies, and challenging the current backlash-assumption that blogging is dangerous to one’s career. She cites the earlier, pseudonymous “Ivan Tribble” essays in the Chronicle, and shares the “metablogging” questions and answers that emerged for her as she considered “Tribble”‘s arguments.

I’m not naive enough to think that masking and the ultra-careful control of information don’t play a large role in academic success, but I am stubborn enough to think it shouldn’t be that way. Higher education in particular has the responsibility to demonstrate to the world that there’s a better way. Irony doesn’t begin to describe the current situation, though, in which we urge our students to find their voices and spend most of our time manipulating our own. Perhaps this is the sour result of Foucault’s argument that all discourse is merely the circulation of power. I don’t believe that’s true, myself, but if it is, who could be blamed for turning to concealed weapons? And what could be more disruptive than the blogosphere?

Unless the blogosphere itself is nothing more than the latest instance of discourse as the circulation of power, as some (not all) students of social network analysis believe. I don’t believe that myself, not because I don’t believe the blogosphere cannot become a Foucaultian power exchange, or that power circulation doesn’t characterize some of the blogosphere already, but because I don’t believe such a thing is inevitable.

Rebecca says it’s a great time to be an academic blogger. I agree. And that greatness is our shared responsibility.

They’re coming thick and fast now. Yesterday’s student presentation in our Donne seminar focused on the tradition of erotic theology as it is manifested in Donne’s work, especially his sacred poetry. Holy Sonnet 14 (“Batter my heart, three-personed God”) occupied a great deal of our attention, but Holy Sonnet 18 (“Show me thy spouse, dear Christ”) also had its provocations, some of them even deeper than those occasioned by Holy Sonnet 14.

Mulling over the presentation, discussion, and poem on the way to work today, I found some ideas emerging. I was inspired to do my first first-thing-in-the-morning podcast. (For the curious, I was aided by the fact I had brought my new Snowball USB microphone into the office for use later in the day on another project. I used that mike for yesterday’s podcast as well. Cardioid pattern, -10db pad.) And as is often the case, I had what I think is my best idea just as I was getting ready to commit to a reading. The thought of hanging on the morrow concentrates the mind wonderfully, Sam Johnson observed; I’d say that the thought of podcasting in a few moments also focuses the mind. At least it did mine.

Have patience. My commentary eventually arrives at the topic for consideration: how to scale transformative intimacy. A question all religions must confront. And a question all educators must confront as well.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (4.1MB)

A dark epiphany at lunch today. I hope it’s an example of lifelong learning.

The audio isn’t as polished as usual. Perhaps that’s apt. I wanted the iron-fresh odor before it dissipated, so I rushed the recording. But not the reading.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (2.9MB)

Spring 2006 will see the rollout of another campus-wide podcasting project: Chargercasts, at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Timothy McDaniel, podcasting director at UAH, calls podcasting “easy, flexible, and infinite.” (What more could one want out of an educational resource?) It’s also a way to get a campus radio station when the FCC says they can’t grant you a license. The student-run, student-funded angle is especially intriguing.

More details on the Chargercast project in the Huntsville Times article. I confess I am tickled to see Adam Curry’s “Daily Source Code” called the “Daily Secret Code.” Serves me right for leaving my decoder ring at home on the nightstand.

Via Podcasting News.

One of my favorite Donne poems, and unfortunately one of his toughest. This lyric is thus a rather severe test case for my assertion that reading aloud can help elucidate poetry. Don’t judge my thesis just by my reading, though. Do me one Donne better!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (7.0MB)

Matt May at Corante reports that “podcasting paraphernalia” (a word spell-checkers were born to flag) are starting to aggregate in interesting ways. I mean dangerous ways, of course, in my own case, seeing as how Guitar Center/Musician’s Friend, already a source of major podcasting goodness for me, now has kits for sale to ease the way into wholesale addiction, I mean devotion.

Market economies: sometimes they pull through. I hope my own spending has in some small way contributed to this encouraging development (tongue firmly planted in cheek, or maybe not).