Jeff Longland

As I start this entry, I’m sitting on a train looking at the shores of Lake Ontario as I make my exit from Toronto. I don’t make it to Toronto often nor am I particularly drawn here. You can take Jeff out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy. Or something to that effect. I’m headed home to a less urban locale.

So what brought me to the big smoke? A conference hosted by Apple and McGraw-Hill Ryerson on podcasting in higher education. I haven’t written much here about podcasting, but don’t take this as an indicator of my interest – in fact, I’m borderline fanatical about podcasting… this from someone who doesn’t own an iPod! As with most of my obsessions, I’m more excited about the technology that makes all of this possible. So here’s my big anti-climatic announcement: I’ve been experimenting with the ROME RSS utility and the WebCT PowerLinks SDK to add podcasting support to WebCT. It’s nothing pretty yet, but I’m confident it can work – albeit in a manner that may or may not be inline with how Apple would like to see podcasting in WebCT. At the moment, my concern is to simply generate the RSS feed and the means to retrieve the enclosures. I have both of these pieces working, but as I said – it’s not pretty, nor ready for release. From the instructor perspective, the podcast is uploaded to a ‘podcasts’ directory in the WebCT section – it is from this directory that the RSS feed is generated. One item with enclosure in the RSS feed for each audio file in the podcasts directory.

Getting back to the conference, I was pretty happy with the speaker line-up. In particular, it was a great opportunity to meet Brian Lamb who came in from UBC. On our way into the city, a few of my colleagues asked me if I was familiar with any of the speakers – so I gave them my two cents and a strong recommendation for Brian. At the end of the day, they came back to me and commented about his energetic / humorous / passionate performance. And? They want to learn more! Sadly, they were unaware of my interest in this area. I think this tells me that I should probably be putting more of myself into this blog and generally promoting emerging technology more. Brian made a similar suggestion to post more regularly. I admit that I need to knock it up a notch.

The other presenters that impressed me were Robert Lyons and Bob Burke from Carleton. Having years of experience recording and processing lectures for television delivery has given them an opportunity to implement vodcasting with minimal effort. Copyright issues were briefly touched upon during the Q & A and it appears that due to the current state of Canadian copyright laws, Carleton can only vodcast original content. As a few audience members commented, Bob’s vodcasts are probably just as popular as his in-class demos because of his sense of humour.

Above and beyond everything else that was discussed today, I was most impressed with the depth of knowledge and passion displayed by the aforementioned presenters. A great day for reflection on the way home.

Edit: If you want to know more about the event, here’s a blog that will fill in the detals.