Monthly Archives: July 2005

More on custom podcast feeds

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Right on the heels of my post about custom podcast feeds I found that the other Tim has been thinking along the same lines. He’s discovered a feature over at del.icio.us that allows you to search for particular filetypes in addition to tags and generate RSS feeds that include enclosures.

It’s a cool feature and it’s almost what I was looking for. Unfortunately, it still requires the extra step of separately creating a del.icio.us bookmark for the actual MP3 or other media file. I still think the best solution would take a simple Technorati tag, search the tagged post for an enclosure, and generate the custom Technorati podcast feed from that. The simplicity would mean more content would be included when bloggers and podcasters are at an event like NECC and they agree on a common tag (like “necc“) in advance.

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Wikipedia for language learners

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I was driving home from work today listening to an IT Conversations podcast of Jimmy Wales’s brief talk at O’Reilly’s Emerging Tech Conference. Wales, who is the founder of Wikipedia and now head of the Wikimedia Foundation, was describing the growth of Wikipedia and highlighting the many versions that exist in languages from around the world. At that moment it occurred to me that the non-English versions of Wikipedia could be a fantastic tool for the foreign language teachers in my school district. Wouldn’t it be cool for Spanish students to contribute to the Spanish version of Wikipedia? That sounds like an authentic learning experience to me. Why didn’t I think of this before?

Podcasting wishlist

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Blogging and podcasting has been the single most important part of my personal professional development over the last two years. Now that Apple has built blogging into OS X Server and has made creating blogs for users as easy as clicking a checkbox, my goal of getting blogs going at school just got a whole lot easier. But I also know that some key pieces of the puzzle are still missing. Here’s my short list:

  1. I need the built-in OS X blogs to support podcasting. They don’t support the full RSS 2.0 spec right now.
  2. We need a tool that teachers who don’t blog can use to create RSS feeds and it has to support enclosures. Two candidates: Feeder (overkill for my needs and a bit too expensive) and Dan Bricklin’s ListGarden (open source, but no enclosure support)
  3. iTunes has made it easy to subscribe to podcasts, but iTunes only supports enclosures of file types that it natively understands (e.g., MP3, AAC, QuickTime, and PDF). I want iTunes to download anything and put it in some default location if it doesn’t natively know how to display/play it. There are other alternatives like iPodder (which is also a cross-platform solution), but having it part of a standard OS X application would be better for our school.
  4. I’d like a better tool for producing “enhanced” podcasts that incude chapters and other artwork. The command line tool that Apple provides works fine, and I’m sure that something’s on the way, but it’s obvious that 99% of teachers aren’t going to touch the command line.
  5. And, of course, recording and uploading audio podcasts has to be really easy. I saw a demo in Cupertino last week showing how to record audio with QuickTime Pro. It was easy, but a more integrated solution that included recording, tagging, uploading, and RSS feed generation would be great. Vendors are starting to fill this space already (see this list), but I need more time to look through them and see if anything looks like it would work for my school district. Anyone have any experience with any of them?
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High school students aren’t challenged

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Will references the NYT article and I saw similar results as I was looking over research in preparation for our one-to-one project. Our high school students aren’t being challenged. From the article:

A large majority of high school students say their class work is not very difficult, and almost two-thirds say they would work harder if courses were more demanding or interesting, according to an online nationwide survey of teenagers conducted by the National Governors Association.

Consider that and then have a listen to this interview with Thomas Friedman, author of the red-hot book “The World Is Flat,” over at NPR’s Science Friday show. Is there any question that we need to be producing the brightest minds possible? And let’s not get sidetracked by lamenting the loss of manufacturing jobs to cheaper labor markets overseas. It’s a done deal. It’s over. Get used to it. Instead, let’s focus on the kind of work that isn’t easily outsourced—the creative, right-brained work that produces innovation. Let’s ask tough questions about what kind of curriculum is needed to produce citizens that can adapt rapidly, use technology effectively, communicate convincingly, cooperate seamlessly, solve problems creatively, and think unconventionally. Somehow I don’t think it looks much like the curriculum we have now.

RSS and podcasting still relatively unknown

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A recent survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project reveals that most Americans are not familiar with some terms that many of us toss around pretty regularly. Of those surveyed only 13% “have a good idea” what podcasting is. RSS got only 9% and “phishing” was a bit higher at 29%. By contrast, 88% of respondents have a good idea what spam is. I think it’s safe to say that RSS and podcasting have a lot of room for growth.

Custom podcast feeds

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If you haven’t discovered Technorati yet, you should. It’s one of the best sites on the Internet to track what’s being said in the blogosphere. Last week at the Apple Distinguished Educator Summer Institute in San Jose, those of us who were blogging the event agreed to use the “ade2005″ tag to facilitate aggregation of all of our blog posts, Flickr photos, and Delicious links. It worked great and you can see the results at http://technorati.com/tag/ade2005. Even better, the site provides an RSS feed for each tag allowing anyone to subscribe to a Technorati search. For example, the URL for the ade2005 tag is http://feeds.technorati.com/feed/posts/tag/ade2005.

That’s a lot of background information to get to the main point of this post. Currently there’s no way to generate a Technorati feed of podcasts. Even if the Technorati RSS feed points to blog posts that contain enclosures (podcasts), the feed doesn’t have the <enclosure> tags that podcasting clients like iTunes and ipodder look for. So here’s what I want: a special Technorati feed that will actually include the enclosure links. The feed URL might look something like:

http://feeds.technorati.com/feed/podcasts/tag/ade2005.

By subscribing to that feed I would automatically receive any podcasts that were tagged “ade2005″. You wouldn’t really know what you’d be downloading in advance, but at an event like NECC where the quality of the posts and podcasts are consistently top notch I think it would be worth a try. And it doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to do. Technorati, are you listening?

Group presentation: online collaboration

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The first group at the Summer Institute is talking about ways to do online collaboration. Has anyone really tried this in the wild? Our tech department at work has used a wiki with great success for online collaboration. (We’re using MediaWiki, the engine behind Wikipedia.) It’s not real-time, but we’ve found that relatively few collaborations really require synchronous communication.

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