Podcasts with a purpose

If I asked you what an MP3 is, you would easily tell me and explain how it's used.

Ask a group of teachers what an MP3 is and you can be pretty certain that several will have no idea. This situation is nothing new - young people pick up things much faster and much more eagerly than older people.

Back when televisions were the latest thing, as a nine-year old I knew how to use the vertical hold control to steady the picture long before my parents. A couple years later, my sister's kids could set the VCR to record a programme before I could figure out how to switch the thing on.

Formats explained

MP3s are not new, they're only relatively new, like a hundred-and-one other things these days. Similarly, podcasts have been around almost as long as iPods have. But what are they?

According to wikipedia.org, an MP3 is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form. It is a common audio format for consumer audio storage, as well as a de facto standard of digital audio compression for the transfer and playback of music on digital audio players. MP3 is an audio-specific format that was designed by the Moving Picture Experts Group.

A podcast is a series of digital media files, usually digital, audio or video that is made available for download via web syndication.

Normally iPods play downloaded MP3s they account for that irritating "tch tch tch" noise you can hear in the morning on buses and trains. But MP3s can also contain the spoken word too with organisations like the BBC and The New York Times using podcasts extensively.

Now I know that doesn't sound much like entertainment, but if you missed yesterday's edition of The Archers one of BBC's longest running radio soaps you can still catch up by finding the podcast. In fact, you can re-organise your days to suit your priorities.

Podcasts an educational tool

For students learning English, podcasts represent a great way of listening to informative, interesting, short talks on everything under the sun. You can listen to a short story by famous Russian author Anton Checkov, a talk about the environment, a comedy show, a news item you missed and, of course, music.

Podcasts are also a heaven-sent resource for teachers. Teachers know that when it comes to this form of communication, students "get it" and they know how to download them onto their iPods. Their predisposition to dismiss them as just one more thing the teacher assigns is down to a minimum podcasts are, after all, cutting edge stuff.

If there is any reticence, it will most probably be the teacher's. We cannot afford to overlook them, ignore them or pretend we haven't heard about them they are here and every student knows it.

Now the technology allows you to make your own podcasts record your own MP3s and broadcast them. Think of it: students telling other students the best way to write essays, where the library is and when it's open in English.

This is a medium, and as we know, "the medium is the message"! MP3s and podcasts surely represent one of the most convenient, innovative, creative ways of learning English and we need to use them now!

- The writer is a language lecturer at UAE University

Additional source: wikipedia.org