"Take your typical college student – bright, curious, but probably a bit sleep-deprived and short on attention span. Stick that student in a lecture hall with a professor droning on for 50 minutes about macroeconomics or teleology. Then give the student a laptop with wireless access to the Internet, which lets him or her furtively chat with friends via instant-messenger software.
What you have is a situation in which a professor’s teachings do not completely sink in, says Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, an assistant professor of international relations at American University.
That scenario is all too familiar to Mr. Jackson, who aptly describes his speaking style as ‘blitzkrieg speed’ and his students as voracious consumers of technology. But the professor says he no longer worries, as he once did, that pieces of his lectures will slip through the cracks. And for that, he credits a technology known as podcasting.
Podcasting allows anyone with a microphone and an Internet connection to create audio files that others can download automatically to their iPods or similar digital-audio players. Listeners can download the files one at a time, or they can subscribe to a podcast and have a series of recordings transferred to their players whenever they hook the devices up to their computers. Podcasts allow students to go over passages while, for example, working out at the gym or jogging to lunch.
More and more professors, including Mr. Jackson, are turning to the technology to record their lectures and send them to their students, in what many are calling ‘coursecasting.’"
More for Chronicle of Higher Education subscribers at http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i10/10a03901.htm?top20