iPod technology has been adopted at a phenomenal ratefaster and more widely than any other technologymaking iPods and podcasting technology prime targets for developing educational applications.
However, at IUP, podcast technology use is in its infancy and has not been used (to our knowledge) for guiding student academic work. Project iCast (as in IUP podcast) is a proposal to have students generate course material by recording appropriate speaker interviews which the students then edit and release as podcasts and contribute to a resource pool for future semesters.
Pagnucci's graduate students (English 830) interviewed a variety of writers (technical writers, business writers, creative writers, academic writers, and journalists), recording these sessions and storing them in the IUP project directory (to ensure class accessibility). Students will then edit them using Audacity (shareware) and will publish podcast feeds through I-Cast.org.
Sherwood's English348 Oral Literature students recorded performances and readings to study spoken delivery. Student projects included oral "tours" of poetry and analytical remixes of class performances.
With the availability of campuswide blogging and more access to portable recorders, we anticipate extending the project to beginning students (in English 101: College Writing and English 202: Research Writing) who will draw on podcast archives, produce revised ("remixed") materials, and/or collect new audio.
As sample assignments, students in College Writing might access the archived podcasts and then write comparative essays contrasting how different types of writers enact the writing process; and students in Research Writing could interview other IUP students about iPod use, using the interviews as primary sources to reference in their essays.