More about student podcasting

Adrian comments (link from title) on my musing about incorporating podcasting into my classes. He has a very good point:

I have a ’sustainable teaching’ rule. Which is that if the use of a technology, or methodology, leads to more assessment or teaching load, then it probably isn’t a good idea... Rather than have students interview me, I’d get a group, let’s say four, to do research around idea n, and they are to then have a structured conversation about the idea.

Too often I (and perhaps others?) tend to think of teaching as me, rather than the students, doing something. That is clearly not the case. Like anything else, we only have so much time we will devote to teaching; more time on X means less time on Y. For those of us making the transition from "old style" teaching to newer approaches, the change in viewpoint involves spending more time in course, assignment, project, infrastructure, etc. development and less time as the center of in-class attention.

On the legal front, it appears that posting podcasts so that they are accessible by individuals outside the classroom may be problematic. The solution I've found is authentication supported by UW's web servers (access lists are updated nightly by the Registrar's office) and the rss2html.php script to generate an HTML view of the podcast feed (since podcatching clients won't be able to subscribe to the restricted-access feed).