Podcasting is cool

This session discussed about the podcast. Though I’ve heard it before, I didn’t particularly understand about the technical concept. Here, Prof. Gilbert explained deeper on how it’s being used by major companies to promote their product. One thing I found it interesting from his lecture is the concept that podcast enables people from any walk of life to learn about something at different times and places. Imagine a situation where every participant of a society do not have a common spare time or is impossible to arrange a session to meet with each other. A class in Open University might be a good example.

When a lecture or an issue needs to be delivered by the lecturer to the students who are not all possible to attend the class, there are many methods to do this. One may suggest to send the material in a printed form. Or it might be good to send them a recorded form of the lecture series in a CD. But all these so-called conservative ways require a very high investment, particularly , a financial one.

And here comes our “hero”: the Podcasting. By recording the lectures into several tapes, and uploading them into the Internet, the lecturer has now saved several dollars from the University budget. Students can go to the lecturer’s website to subscribe his lecture in a form of podcasting. This will help them to choose which lectures they would like to hear (for many reasons, such as they might find some lectures are easy to follow so that a quick read from the notes is sufficient). Students also don’t have to be worried of losing their notes or CDs because all study materials are available online. All they need to do is just subscribing to the podcast, download it, and save it into their MP3 player or computer. They can listen to it at their convenient time, and more importantly, it doesn’t cost as much as printed textbooks.

As for me, I have been subscribing for several podcasting such as: Desperate Housewives’ and Ugly Betty’s (my two favorite shows) Podcast, as well as Ong and Liong (Alternative characters of Daniel Ong and Mr. Young) Podcast from 987FM. It keeps me updated on what is going on on the show or just simply helps me to smile after listening to lawyer's stereotype joke by Dan and Young.