Man, I hate trailing higher ed
The Seattle P-I wrote about the University of Washington experimenting with podcasting lectures. Several professors are using DAT recorders (which, from the Land of Confusing Acronyms, stands for “Digital Audio Tape,” notwithstanding the fact that current DATs are solid state and use no tape) to capture their lectures, which are uploaded to Apple iTunes. Students subscribe to the lectures, which means they are automatically downloaded to their iPods as soon as the students connect after the lecture is posted.
Of course, the UW is not the only place doing this. As a matter of fact, just go to news.google.com and type the terms student and podcasting, and you’ll find a boatload of articles about universities and colleges across the country that are even more active in using this technology.
What I was intrigued with was the comment in the PI article that the tech folks have, for the most part, automated the process. I’m curious what it would take to set up a system in a high-school classroom to automatically capture a lecture and post it to the web. And while I’m intrigued by that, I’m also wondering just how many privacy issues we would open up. Does every teacher want the whole world to be able to eavesdrop on their classes? Does every student want all their friends to be able to play back the dumb question they asked in third period?