PodcasterCon2006 report

I spent the last part of the xmas holiday at UNC in Chapel Hill, NC at PodcasterCon.

Dave Warlick promised an "un-conference" and that is exactly what he delivered during his afternoon session on podcasting in education.

He first briefly demonstrated a few examples of educational podcasts. Then he asked who had audio recording capability and divided up the "audience" into 6 groups that each recorded their conversation. Each group was tasked to generate 3 answers to questions relating to educational podcasting. My group talked about the issues related to ownership of content.

Dave then asked someone to take notes into a wiki as he and Steve Dembo got every group's ideas over a microphone. The rest of the 2 hour session was spent collecting additional information from anyone on any part of the topic.

Here is the resulting wiki page.

There was just the right mix of experience in the group to make this work really well and it was a much more efficient use of time compared to the traditional one-way speaker-to-audience format.

I also got to meet John Blake and learn about his blog and class podcast. He has a student interested in educational games so we are exploring a collaboration with Unreal Tournament on EduFrag.

Left to Right: John Blake, David Warlick, Steve Dembo, Jean-Claude Bradley