Podcasting - publishing mp3-interviews on websites - has become more popular in the social sciences, including anthropology. But as Paul Ayres writes in an article for ALISS Quarterly, the journal of the Association of Librarians and Information professionals in the Social Sciences, content producers have already started to move on to video.
Audio podcasting won’t take over the world, he explains:
Audio as a format has a number of limitations. It can be inefficient, as it takes 10 minutes to listen to a 10 minute audio file, plus time to download it as well. Much of this information could be summed up in a short piece of text that is easier to scan and retain. Plus, some content does not lend itself to being read out loud, such as complex URLs or detailed instructions.
In the Higher Education context, providing only the audio of a lecture leaves out PowerPoint slides, data, charts or diagrams that may illustrate a point and it also limits the presenter to a chalk and talk approach, which excludes problem based learning techniques and active learning strategies, which require interaction in the lecture theatre or classroom.
Information Professionals may find audio only user education assets very limiting. With an increasing number of online services available, screencasts that offer commentary on a video walkthrough of a service, website or database, will give a visual cue and a more meaningful learning experience to students.So users and content producers have already started to move on to video and it’s clear that audio podcasting won’t take over the world. Awareness of podcasts has only increased marginally in the last 18 months, and some say that it suffers from the “try me” virus effect, where something may be cool or interesting to sample, but not be engaging enough to return to.
>> read the whole article “Podcasting and Audio in the Social Sciences”
SEE ALSO:
Anthropology podcasts receive much attention
The Future of Anthropology: “We ought to build our own mass media”
Video by anthropologist Michael Wesch: How collaborative technologies change scholarship
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