The Portable Media Expo Education Panel

Good afternoon. My name is David Bischke. I work for a company called LearnOutLoud.com.

And maybe we should do individual introductions here. Go ahead, Doug.

I'm Douglas Welch. I am the host and writer of Career Opportunities, Helping to Build the Career You Deserve at Welchright.com.

Okay. I am Seth Anderson. I work with David at LearnOutLoud.com.

And I am the media manager. And I pretty much, we pretty much put together the podcast directory together for LearnOutLoud.com.

Yeah. The educational podcast directory. Yes.

I'm Jeff McQuillan. I'm with English as a Second Language Podcast.com. No. English as a Second Language Podcast.

ESLpod? ESLpod.com. Thank you. That's my web address. Thank you.

Cool. Cool. Yeah. So if you're getting... I'm learning to speak English, so you have to know.

He's got a... If you're picking up a theme here, this is going to be an educational panel.

And we're going to talk about...

Talk a little bit about education and podcasting in general.

So to start off, I guess, me and Jeff had formulated a few things that we're going to talk about.

Sure.

So if you want to just... What do we got here to start us off?

Well, we thought we'd start talking about what got you into podcasting.

What was your inspiration to get into educational podcasting?

Want to start down the line there?

Yeah. Go ahead, Doug.

Basically, I've been writing my column, Career Opportunities as a Print Column, appears in a publication in San Diego, The Computer Edge.

And when I was working in a corporate world, and I was also writing for magazines like InfoWorld and NetworkWorld and publications like that,

one of the things I quickly realized there was the ability I had to write for what they called at the time the peer-to-peer columns.

It was something I could take from my own personal experience and relate it to 100, 200,000 other readers.

And so it made a... I felt it made a great effect.

And in fact, everything I do has some relationship to education in some way, including my own personal consulting.

Yeah.

And where did you start, Doug?

I am one of the first 20 podcasters.

Wow.

Like September or something?

September 24th, 2004.

Wow.

How did you find out about podcasting that early?

Yeah. Boy, I don't really remember how.

I was probably reading an online news group or something, but I actually used Adam Curry's first initial scripts, the Apple scripts, to check it out and went, hmm.

Because I'd been writing my column for eight years at that time.

Uh-huh.

And I had actually toyed with the idea of having an audio version of it.

And all of a sudden, I was like, okay, I'm going to do this.

I'm going to do this.

And all of a sudden, this thing came along and went, ooh, distribution model.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And I literally took the next column up that was going to be printed, borrowed some equipment, recorded it, and I've been doing two shows a week ever since then.

Fantastic.

Wow.

Well, I mean, do you want to talk?

I mean, when did we-

Well, LearnOutLoud.com, I mean, we kind of discovered podcasting a little bit later.

I mean, it was a little bit later.

Yeah.

So, we've been doing podcasting a little bit later down the line, I guess when the Wired article came out in March.

Would that be second generation?

Would that be Wired article?

Oh, hell.

I think it's probably 10th, 15th, 20th generation.

I don't know.

We're not in the top 100 podcasters.

But, yeah, we've-

Top 20.

But we began a podcast called The Audio Learning Revolution, which was educational in nature.

Our site features educational audio books, free audio, and video podcasts.

We have our own podcast directory there featuring strictly podcasts that you can learn from.

But, yeah, our Audio Learning Revolution podcast was just to kind of complement that.

We talked about, and we've been pod fading a little bit, but we talked about.

Pod fade.

No, but this podcast is going to put us right back on the map.

Right.

But we talked about, you know, all the resources that are coming out there.

Because there's just an amazing amount of resources in the audio space that are coming out there between universities,

putting up their podcasts, and just, like, free resources from all these different places.

But then recently we've been starting some new podcasts.

And, Seth, maybe you want to talk about those?

Well, the recent podcast is just some free audio, public domain stuff like Philosophers.

And the biggest one that we got that's pretty big right now is a series of Emerson essays that we put out every week.

And we're just kind of expanding from there.

We're getting a lot of kind of valuable stuff on audio that is in the public domain and people want to hear.

They were recently featured on iTunes.

I saw that.

That was quite amazing, yeah.

It was surprising.

And it's getting a lot of subscribers.

We're very happy about that, that Emerson in today's age is getting so, kind of getting out there and being so popular.

We didn't realize how many Emerson fans were out there.

But there are a lot.

And so the Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson podcast is one.

We also have the Philosophy podcast where we're taking a lot.

We're taking a lot of classic excerpts from the great philosophers and putting them in very short form,

good little bits that you can listen to on your commute or what have you.

And then we also have like the Founding Documents podcast.

And that's about it.

We're looking to do more in the educational sphere, set up a whole sort of network of educational podcasts through our site and just, you know, try to educate.

Well, I got my start.

I was in, I think, July of 2005.

And we, along with my co-producer, Lucy Say, started putting together a daily podcast.

We were really ambitious.

Yeah, very ambitious.

Wow.

Yeah, that lasted about 12, maybe 14 weeks.

Weeks?

That's pretty good.

I was going to say 12 days.

Yeah.

So that was our initial launch into it.

And then we sort of scaled that back.

And now we're down to three days a week.

We do three 20-minute podcasts.

And I come from sort of brick-and-mortar education world.

I was a university professor for 10 years.

And so it's really interesting that there's nobody here on our panel right now who's actually from a school setting,

which I think is very interesting because for me, even though there's iTunes U and there's a lot of buzz about that,

really the most innovative stuff has been coming out of people who are, like myself, no longer at,

an academic institution, and are really trying to do something different with this medium.

So I'm kind of curious to what you guys think is, one of the questions I'm dealing with is what's unique about podcasting in terms of education?

What does it really provide people that traditional models don't?

Well, definitely, I think it's what I always say about podcasting.

Podcasting is all about what you want, when you want it, where you want it.

The time-shifted aspect of podcasting, for me, is the most powerful aspect of anything.

I've been driving back and forth from the San Fernando Valley each day to here to attend the conference,

and you know what? I've listened to podcasts all the way out and back.

And it is really that functionality that makes it for me.

To be able to listen to the Emerson podcast, to be able to listen to other educational podcasts on the way out,

there's nothing better than that.

Now, I will say though, one of the issues I'm having is, my wife is actually getting her PhD, she just finished her,

she's kind of a non-traditional student, she's gone back to get her graduate degrees,

and in that case, we've been exposed to a lot more academics recently.

That's too bad.

And they don't, yeah, we won't go into that.

But what I'm finding is, they don't even know podcasting exists.

They maybe have heard of the word, but I'm still having to do a lot of education, tie it back together,

with them to say, why aren't you, you know, they're having these wonderful seminars or speeches or guest fellows come in to speak,

they're not capturing that material.

There's so much more that could be out there.

Yeah.

I'm just amazed every day at how much great content simply disappears into the ether.

Yeah.

And I think that's some role that Learn Out Loud can play, is assisting these people in capturing that information that's good for you,

it's especially good for them, and I would, everything I do is trying to facilitate that capture.

Right.

Because we have places to put it, if we can just grab it.

Yeah.

Have you seen some of those courses that are online, like UC Berkeley and stuff?

Yeah.

I mean, are you listening to stuff like that?

I mean, is that what you're thinking, or is that just sort of...

Not necessarily, but for example, one of the groups I'm trying to get a connection with is the Getty, the Getty Center.

Yeah.

The Getty Center has an excellent series of lectures, and I've actually attended those in person,

but frankly, I can't get there all that often, even though I live just down the hill from them.

Yeah.

Why aren't they recording both audio and video, those lectures, which are with the foremost experts in, for one of the examples of the one I went to personally,

Yeah.

It was a whole lecture on the restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water.

Excellent.

You know, I'm a geek in all things, granted.

I'm also an architecture geek, but for that market, it was an excellent talk that could easily have been podcast and wasn't, and was lost.

Yeah.

And I do consider it that way.

Yeah.

Everything we don't record is a loss.

Yeah.

It's gone in the ether, and it will really never come back again.

Ironically, I went to a Getty lecture last week.

And I always thought the exact same thing.

I went over to Villa.

Yeah.

Now that podcasting's there, just that it's there.

Yeah.

We know that it can be out there, and it has a way to be out there very easily for people to, you know.

Well, the other thing is conferences, too.

Now, obviously, we're at the podcast and portable media expo.

Yeah.

There are tons of conferences.

I recently purposely attended a sustainable building conference at the city of Santa Monica, hosted down a few months ago, called AltBuild.

I also do a gardening podcast.

And my joke is, yeah.

Come and learn with me in my garden, because I am not an expert.

Watch me screw up, basically.

But it's fun.

People love it.

I have, you know, a couple hundred listeners, and they really enjoy it.

I went down to AltBuild with this express purpose of capturing some of that content, at least by myself.

Again, they had a whole series of speakers the entire day.

None of it was recorded.

But I went from booth to booth, and I talked to people specifically who had something to do with gardening.

And I gave them an opportunity to say, tell me who you are.

Tell me why you're here at this conference.

What you're promoting.

And then give me your URL at the end.

And I ended up with 12, 15, 3 to 4-minute segments that I could then release through my podcast.

So anyone who wasn't in Santa Monica that particular week, suddenly they could at least get some of the content from that conference.

Yeah.

Doug, do you think there's something particular that educational podcasters should be thinking about in terms of how they present things?

I mean, Seth mentioned the courses online.

Yeah.

Which I really liked.

I was listening to existentialism in film.

Like, all week last week.

Just enjoying that.

I listened to a few of the podcasts from Berkeley.

And I think what Berkeley's doing is really cutting edge.

Because universities take time.

And a lot of them probably won't because they're just too concerned with their intellectual property.

But when it comes to events and things like that, I think those will eventually.

Like, I know you guys are talking about the Getty Museum.

I know the Hammer Museum, they're doing some podcasts now.

And so I think it just will take some time for people to just catch on.

That, hey, wait a minute, we can get this out to a lot bigger crowd.

It's a good way to let people know about museums and what kind of events we're having here.

Well, there's this little, there's a music podcast.

It's the Bowdoin School of Music.

I actually have no idea where they are.

Yeah.

But it's the recitals.

Yeah.

It's the music school's recitals.

You know what?

Talk about, I like to do stuff that kind of forces me to pay attention to stuff that I might not otherwise pay attention to.

Yeah.

And sometimes, and the one great thing about subscribing to a podcast like that is you don't necessarily know what you're doing.

Yeah.

You don't know what you're going to get.

Yeah.

And you know what?

You don't like it.

You fast forward to it.

You mark it.

It's played.

Whatever.

But the point is there's going to be those times when you're driving down the freeway in your car, you're riding your bicycle, and it's going to stop you in your tracks.

And you're going to go, oh, my God.

Yeah.

There's something I would have never run into before that has totally opened my mind in a given way.

Yeah.

Can I give an opposite experience?

Please.

No, you're not allowed.

I'm sorry.

All right.

You closed your mind.

Yes.

I've listened to a couple of educational podcasts from some of the major universities.

Yeah.

You don't have to name any names, Berkeley, Stanford.

And some of them are good.

Some of them are really good presenters.

They're professors who really know.

And they've zoomed in on them.

Some of them are just like being back in torturous days of my undergraduate years.

Yeah.

So is it enough just to stick a mic in front of?

I think that's one of the things that the universities haven't even thought about.

And I went to the universities.

I went to the university panel yesterday.

Did you just stick a mic in front of some?

Is that sufficient?

Yeah.

Or isn't there something about that personal connection of podcasting that we?

Well, the fact is you have lousy communicating instructors regardless of where you go.

Yeah.

And you've got to sift through them.

And I think, but I do think universities, if they're going to take podcasting seriously,

they have to think about the podcasting audience.

And in a lot of lecture courses, they're asking questions to the class and there's no mic on the class.

Yeah.

It just kind of become and, you know, I mean, it's a weakness of it, but, you know, they're putting it out there for free.

So depending on how good the professor is, it's like some professors actually take into account like that people are listening.

But some professors are just like they have the mic and then they just whatever.

They don't care if they're like walking away from the mic or whatever.

They just.

I'd even go deeper than that.

And I think one of the good aspects of it, what it might show up is just how a professor can know their topic to the nth degree and be an expert in their field.

Yeah.

But if they can't communicate that.

Right.

That's an issue.

Yeah.

And honestly, what it's going to point up right away is if people, kids who are looking at colleges start to watch some of the podcasts or listen to the podcast from the schools they're thinking of attending, guess what's going to happen?

Yeah.

That's a very good point.

I don't want to get stuck in that guy's class.

My God, I'd be asleep.

And you know what?

It's going to become yet another definer of the service and universities do provide a service.

Yeah.

It's going to be another definition of the service they provide to their students.

A good filter.

Yeah.

That's a great point.

Absolutely.

That's a great point.

I've been thinking a lot about whether doing educational podcasts should be something that is part of a larger system.

Universities, for example, have some really great lecturers.

I mean, if you're, an example I'll use, if you're Noam Chomsky and you can get Noam Chomsky to record his linguistic podcasts or his political podcasts and translate them into Spanish for Venezuela,

Yeah.

whatever you're doing, that would be, I mean, what university wouldn't want to get that content and use it in their linguistics classes?

Yeah.

I mean, it would seem to be a natural fit.

And I just, I don't know if you guys have seen educational institutions moving in that direction in your own context.

I see it with video.

We see a lot of big name speakers with the video podcast that we've been, or not, it's actually our more free video stuff that we have.

Google video.

Yeah.

I mean, we have like a free audio and video directory that we have.

And like, yeah, I mean, there's, I think there's a lot that can supplement the educational experience.

Yeah.

I mean, there's, I think there's a lot that can supplement the educational experience with just the various like speakers and authors that are out there that have audio and video content.

Because when you're dealing with, you know, students, they're, they're on the go, they have their iPods.

They don't like, you know, like so many times, you know, they're on the go.

Yeah.

to the educational experience, and probably one that's underused.

And I guess to some extent you can say, well, not everyone's got an iPod,

and so they miss out, but everyone will eventually.

I think Learn Out Loud is actually at the forefront of something very big here,

and that is something that I've been doing myself for the last 20 years.

Thank goodness I figured this out early on,

which was education at its best is self-directed.

And resources like LearnOutLoud.com facilitate the on-demand, user-driven,

learner-driven access to education.

And personally, that's where I see the benefits from various university podcasts.

I'm not going to go get my master's.

I'm not like my wife who's going back to school at age 44 to get a master's and a Ph.D.

In fact, I watched her get her master's, and I figured, okay, I could have probably done that.

And I'm watching her getting the Ph.D., and I'm going,

forget this, I'm out of here.

But I am very self-driven to learn stuff.

And I do seek out stuff that is outside of my knowledge area,

and even in some cases outside my comfort zone.

And Learn Out Loud and other directories really provide a great resource

for finding those things that can really help me out in that.

Yeah, I agree with you.

Most of our listeners, maybe I would guess 95% of our listeners are adults

who are interested in improving.

They're English.

These are all self-directed learners.

These are all, you know.

That's our users.

I mean, that's our users.

That's who are coming to our center.

Yeah, yeah.

So the question is, you know, what are the traditional schools going to really do about that?

I'm pretty, I have a pretty pessimistic view, actually.

Yeah, it seems obvious.

We're going to change that.

About what universities and schools can do.

Because I've worked in, I was a high school teacher and then a university professor.

And the system is very traditional.

The rewards and the incentives in that system are very different than in, quite honestly,

a market situation that we're all in.

And so that pushes them or really hinders them in many ways

that they don't even think, they're not even thinking along those lines.

I think it would be great.

I mean, I think there's always going to be some, you know,

I expect the real growth in this to come from places like the University of Phoenix,

non-traditional universities that are going to start seeing,

the power of this, even though Berkeley and Duke and Stanford have gotten sort of the press on this.

I think the real innovation in terms of, for example,

if you're going to develop an educational podcast,

it's much better to develop that, I think, as an original programming,

rather than taping the professor.

Because there are certain specific ways that you can help the learner

in a more one-to-one conversation, which podcasting is about,

in addition to providing.

In addition to providing other,

sort of pedagogical, you know, supports for them.

For example, on our website, you can subscribe and download the PDF file

that has vocabulary words, all that sort of thing.

Well, one possible method, too, to help professors, help the academic,

academic communities, academic missions?

Academic existence.

We're all educated.

Make the sleep, too, is something that I see that is lacking,

is rather than sit down and record their lecture,

do a,

inside the Actors' Studio.

You need a facilitator to sit down with them.

Hey, we're back.

We're back?

We're back.

Can you hit record again, please?

Is it still recording?

We lost our PA for a second.

Are we okay?

Okay.

Is it good?

Recording?

Yep, we're back.

Okay.

Okay, it's recording again.

But you can have a, yeah.

Yeah.

You have a facilitator who can sit down,

with the expert, and help to draw them in.

Because the truth is, and I myself am very much this way,

I am much better in conversation with someone

than I am standing up in front and simply disclaiming something.

And I think there's an opportunity.

It's a great idea.

Going back to what you were talking about,

the University of Phoenix and others,

I think podcasting is a way to break through those walls,

to break down those ivory towers,

to really, and it's to the benefit of the university,

to break that down.

Yeah.

To open to the community at large.

Because it's going to draw more students into their system

if the system is seen as adaptable and educational

and amenable to people coming in,

especially non-traditional students.

I agree with you completely.

I just don't think they're going to do it.

Well, you and me, we'll go out together.

Okay.

And we'll go down here to Claremont Graduate University.

Yeah, right.

And we'll start knocking on doors.

Yeah, there you go.

No, I do think that's a challenge in terms of like, you know,

like if you're getting, let's say you're trying to major

in English literature or something like that,

like one of the key things is sort of the community aspect

that the university provides.

And, you know, and we've always kind of had that on our radar

at Learn Out Loud.

Like how do you facilitate?

I mean, you can have people listen to great lectures

and listen to great audio books, great podcasts.

But how do you kind of facilitate the discussion with podcasting?

And it's, you know, it's a stumbling block,

but I think, you know, with maybe like sort of the social networking sphere,

even though now it's kind of like for teenagers

and stuff like that, like eventually there could develop more

kind of along those lines of a networking

for kind of educational stuff online.

So, you know, people wouldn't just be like the isolated learner,

like learning stuff and, you know,

they could interact with people that have similar interests.

And so we're always thinking of that.

I have some direct experience in that

because my wife is teaching online classes.

Okay.

Okay, she's teaching, mainly teaches writing episodic television shows,

one-hour episodic television shows,

but she's also teaching some other more traditional classes.

And they all, all the universities tend to use a system called Blackboard.

It's by a particular company.

It's not, I used Blackboard in college.

Frankly, from a technical standpoint, I don't like it very much.

No.

But one of the ways in which we are involving podcasting is rather

than simply put up the text of her lecture, which she does,

she is much a very personable person, a very personable speaker.

And so we started recording all of her lectures.

Mm-hmm.

And.

And what we've seen immediately is people getting more involved

in the discussion groups where they're required to, you know, discuss the issues.

I call it the whispering in the ear effect.

Podcasting is a very intimate media.

Right.

You're literally whispering in your customers, your students, your friends' ears.

And I have found that to have a dramatic effect on how her students,

her online students perceive her as opposed to when we were just putting up

the text.

And so it's one of those other elements where I like to push on people and say,

look, this is, this is different.

This is, this is whispering in their ear.

They're going to retain this information in a different way,

in a different part of the brain.

And yes, they can read the text too.

And then you've got a double effect on it.

And so there's no reason not to do it.

Yeah.

Does Blackboard support podcasting now?

It supports attached files.

Okay, right, right.

So you simply attach the MP3 and for most people they click on it.

But there's no RSS on it.

There's no RSS on it.

That's one of my big complaints.

Yeah.

Nowadays, if a website or

forums does not have an RSS feed, I simply do not use it.

It is too cumbersome.

It's too difficult to visit that site every single day.

And it eventually just falls off my radar.

Yeah. It really is important.

Yeah.

What about commercial aspects?

I mean, as I say, we're all in this as private entrepreneurs for the most part.

What are some of the ways that

someone who's interested in getting into educational podcasting as providing content.

I mean, is there advice that you would give them?

I know there are some things I would have liked

to have been told in terms of how to go about it and how to reach an audience.

Yeah.

Well, I certainly think the podcasting is an excellent marketing tool for larger projects

that you've spent a lot of time on.

And frankly, you probably deserve to be able to get a little compensation for it.

Yeah.

and forth and um and so like for the instance like esl pod like you know like you have your

your english as a second language podcast but then like there's there's actually very few sort of uh

downloadable like uh language programs that are out there right um you know you have your pimsleur

and you have that but it's it's not downloadable because it's expensive and it's very young yeah

and it's very expensive it's not it's not very personable and um and you know and um i think that

there's a big market out there like for language learning and for a lot of other areas where you do

something a little bit more comprehensive and podcasting is is used to provide a sample of that

because like especially like in language learning like all the companies that produce that stuff are

so concerned about their intellectual property for that and stuff like that and and really like you

know you can do it a lot cheaper than what they're doing and you can um you know you can even provide

all like the pdfs and what you said and just all the sort of like learning materials you would need

to put out a good language

program like all those tools are out there and so it's just i think the podcasting is just a great

tool to be able to introduce people to kind of your methods of teaching language or whatever

what have you um and i think um like you know when it comes to entrepreneur i mean we our podcasts

that learn out loud are very much like you know let's we just want to get uh kind of our brand

out there and and um bring people in to uh to check out what else we have on the site yeah i

mean basically the podcast

is not the product the podcast is a marketing tool the product you're selling for example for

myself i'm actually sort of being pushed drug leaning toward you know doing career coaching

yeah that's that's where i'm starting to see the possibility of turning the career opportunities

podcast into something uh that is monetary monetarily feasible and that is by selling

the ancillary services selling the whiteboard sessions selling the private one-on-one consulting

selling the email consulting whatever whatever it grows out of it that way and personally that's

what i like i actually get paid to write the column as it is and so i'm actually even at that

point getting some money for writing those words that i put out there but it's mainly as an

attractant and honestly my columns are written to make people think and so the extra services would

be about okay let's think together on how to apply what i've what i've written in the column so yeah

that makes sense that makes sense well what are we on here we got a little time left huh

just a little bit i think yeah nothing one minute um where are you going to go with your podcast you

think what do you got new plans i our plans i think are to move into doing uh more packaged

courses and and using great idea with you using what we have as an audience base and start getting

them to buy premium podcasts that we sell as downloads absolutely great what do you think

with us huh i'm not going to ask my question myself um yeah well we're going to keep putting

together we keep recording content for our users and it's it's primarily like free stuff um i don't

know that we're going to be uh launching any sort of podcast where we are like writing all the

content for but but we'll still do our audio learning revolution uh and uh we yeah we just

want to get out a lot of public domain stuff that really hasn't been explored that fits well into

the podcast format just so people can can see um sort of like what we're about and uh and just

really learn i mean it's it's all about education for us

uh in the end and um so yeah our future is just put out put out more podcasts so real quick urls

everybody uh eslpod.com and we are www.learnoutloud.com and our podcast directory is

podcast.learnoutloud.com and career opportunities that's at weltrite.com w-e-l-c-h-w-r-i-t-e.com

thanks a lot thank you thank you for coming thanks nice meeting you formally yes