Podcasting: Links to Literacy Teaching and Learning

Abstract

The term podcasting was only created in 2004, and was noted as the word of year in 2005 by the New Oxford American Dictionary. In the same year, podcasting was touted as 'the next big thing' in educational technology, even taking over blogging in popularity. As Balas suggests, 'blogging is so last year: now podcasting is hot'. Podcasting is one of the newest trends in online computing, and is at home with other recently coined terms such as e-learning, mobile learning, web-based learning and third-generation learning technologies. At the time of writing this article, a Google search for the word 'podcasting' produced almost 40 million results, whereas an identical search in 2005 yielded just over one million. [Author abstract]