The Attack of the Pod People addresses student enthusiasm for downloadable lectures in lieu of, it would appear from the context, attending class. I neither fully agree or disagree with the author, but he is getting a fundamental point in terms of the student in question’s reaction to being able to podcast class materials–just because students like it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good for them. That being said, in the context of this opinion piece, there is a fundamental blurring of distinction between lecturing and instruction that would be nice for a lot of faculty to pay attention to. In fact, I would say if your argument for not providing podcasts is that students would have no need to go to your class anymore (a concern I have heard more than once), then you are doing something wrong. Why? Because if all your students do when they come to class is sit and listen to you, then WHY NOT just let them download your comments and listen to them through osmosis while they sleep off last night’s hang over.

Schneider asks: “At 8 in the morning I may not be beautiful — hell, I may not even be fully awake — but I’m there, and I’m dressed. Any questions?”

Yes, I have a question. What else –besides being there and wearing clothes– are you requiring of your students during this class time that makes the class relevant for them, which allows them to build on their knowledge of the content and receive feedback, and which allows them to interact with their peers in developing their expertise? I’m not picking on Scheider. I’m just suggesting that going even deeper into what is offensive about the lecture-podcast besides a sense that because he, as the professor has to be there to show s/he cares, students should too. That’s not enough of an argument because it leaves the opposite argument open–if a professor feels that creating podcasts is how they show commitment to their students, isn’t that caring enough? Production, after all, can be very time consuming. In fact, it’s the treatment of content as something that only need be transmitted to the student for learning to occur that is offensive.
In this debate, I’m struck by the contrast between research on learning which lauds the importance of social interaction in learning and the importance of understanding how to communicate with others in a target community of practice versus the advancement of the technological machine, which many seem to interpret as permission to distance themselves (students and faculty alike) from (other) learners. It is a curious contradiction.

I feel like I’ve been living under a rock. If you take a step back and don’t actively seek out new tech solutions, they are definitely not coming to you (unless they are listed in your aggregator!!!)

I struggle with recommending a good aggregator to people. Bloglines has always been too cumbersome for my taste, and I really like Sage, which integrates into Firefox. However, with Sage, I have not been able to find the time and energy to coordinate my reading list on various computers that I use. I was reading a blog last night which mentioned Google Reader, so I immediately tried it out. I imported my opml file from Firefox very easily and then started playing around with how it works. There are a few constraints that I don’t like, particularly the fact that once a subscription is set up, you have to go into Manage Subscriptions to change the category it is assigned to, which seems a little less intuitive than Google Mail.

The things I love:
-You can easily pull a Subscribe button to the top of your browser in order to easily add subscriptions while reading.
-No importing issues: When I pulled my bookmarks in from Sage, it maintained all the folder categories I had set up.
-You can star important items to come back to later (!), much like Google Mail.
-You can share items that will show up on a unique url.
-Items are easier to read than they were in Sage. Whereas Sage had a two-column format (that I don’t see any place to modify), Google Reader is one column with larger font.

The only thing I miss about Sage— it detects feeds for you. I could suspect there is a feed somewhere, click to subscribe, and I navigate away from the page only to find there is no feed. However, there’s no reason I can’t confirm there is a feed with Sage and then add the subscription to Google Reader.

A review excerpt at Question Technology has me noting that I should add What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, And Design to my reading list, when I have a moment (that being a huge caveat).