By Aaron Campbell · June 21, 2005
Graham Stanley points us to the students of Fudan University High School in Shanghai, who are creating their own English language podcasts as part of their studies this year. Topics include student life, stories, debate or discussion, music and movies, and more. So far, eleven students have published their podcasts, with titles such as A Chinese Magazine I Like Best, X Japan, and A Korean Boarding School Student’s Life.
After listening to some of these students’ creations, it is clear that the podcast form of expression gives them the possibility to communicate in ways that text alone cannot. Hopefully their teacher will reconfigure the site to allow for comments. At present, you can only send feedback via email.
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Rudolf
wrote on June 22, 2005:
Judging from the repetitivenes with which the teacher describes the students’ work as “show”, I suspect it’ll be a long time before the place becomes interactive.
Also, for a completely non-rhetorical question: what was the most recent school site you saw that was both interactive (as in: allows comments) and official (as in: runs on school servers and carries the school’s insignia)?
In my rather limited experience, things are moving in the opposite direction. As a matter of policy, the data center here at Mie University never supported interactive sites because of security concerns. Until not so long ago, teachers who wanted to run interactive sites were told by the data center to run these sites out of their respective Department or even office servers.
A while ago a directive came out which stated that all Web servers hooked to the university’s DNS were forbidden to run any sort of server-side scripting. It used to be quite popular for professors to run their little message boards on Department servers—that’s out now and anyone who still wants to do it is required to get it hosted privately.
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Aaron
wrote on June 23, 2005:
Well, I think there exists an undercurrent of fear and anxiety in many institutions today, which is why “protective” policies like that come into being.
The more that learners and educators start using P2P technology to communicate with one another, the instituions will have no choice but to evolve in a more positive direction. We are doing our part in that here on Dekita.org I think.
At any rate, I salute the educator in China who provided students with a means of getting a message out to the world in their own voices. This does much to inspire the students to create and express and offer something to the world, not just their teacher.
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Rudolf
wrote on June 29, 2005:
I’m not so sure about the “fear and anxiety in many institutions”—once you look at the realities of hosting interactive applications on Web servers, it may make level-headed good sense to ban them, particularly if, as many schools are, you’re short on resources.
Why? Hosting static HTML pages on a Web server is relatively straightforward and unproblematic from a security standpoint. But as soon as you allow people to interact with those pages, you need to allow server-side scipting, you need to open certain ports, and you’re laying the servers open to a whole raft of potential security issues.
You’ll have to throw hardware and processing capacity at these issues, and you’ll have to throw human expertise and hours of frustrating hard work at those issues. If you’re an under-funded, under-staffed data center that, say, just about manages to keep a university network afloat, the extra problems associated with interactive Web applications are the last thing you’ll want to deal with.
Take an example: back in January this year a vulnerability was found in Movable Type that allowed anyone to send e-mail spam through Movable Type’s comment script. The spammers exploited this vulnerabiltiy in a highly concentrated attack. Here’s how our hosting company, TextDrive, fought off the attack. Anyone who’d prefer not to indulge in this kind of fun has my understanding.
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Mick
wrote on September 06, 2005:
Apologies for my luddite naievity but how does one create Podcasts?
It sounds like a really cool project from initial listenings…Cheers!
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Aaron
wrote on September 07, 2005:
Hi Mick…
I’ve found podcasting to be easy and a lot of fun. You can use a program like audacity to record, edit, and mix the sound. You then save it as an mp3 and publish it in an RSS feed with enclosures. Some blogging software, like Wordpress, automatically creates enclosures in the feed when you link to an mp3 file, making it super easy. Check out a few of these links to get started:
http://www.podcast411.com/page5.html
http://www.meidia.ca/archives/2005/06/podcasting_for.php?l=en
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podcasting
Have fun!
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