Published: April 30, 2008 11:33 am            

Learning through podcasts

April has gone by, and soon it will be summer time.

Teachers? Give up on teaching your students anything else this year. Their minds are gone, out wandering the endless fields of summer vacation. I hope that you managed to teach them everything they needed to know because from here on out, there’s no hope at all of getting anything into their heads.

As for the rest of us, it seems that summer won’t bring anything other than higher electric bills and the need to dig the lawnmower out of the garage and make it work again. Oh sure, maybe we’ll take a vacation and go somewhere hot and crowded for a while, but really, summer has lost a lot of its charm for me.

It’s probably part of being old.

I mentioned to a friend of mine the other day that I knew I was old because I listen to podcasts on my mp3 player on my way to work in the mornings. He agreed and replied that he listened to podcasts while working in the yard, which seems as good a way as any to pass the time while you cut the grass to make it short and water it to make it long again.

So if you are someone who actually likes to learn, someone who doesn’t believe in shutting the brain off just because you’re out of school, perhaps you do this as well.

Maybe you got started with podcasts from your favorite site as a way of keeping up with an area of interest while you were away from the PC, like the excellent gaming podcasts from Fear The Boot (www.feartheboot.com).

Maybe you’re not familiar with podcasts but you’d like to be. If so, then fear not, because this column can hook you up.

An excellent source for podcasts is Podcast.com (www.podcast.com), although the site does require registration to use. Registration is free, so go ahead and do it. Then you’ll be able to look around the site and find something that’s useful to you.

The site can be a bit confusing at first, so I recommend that you read the instructions on how to use it before jumping in and adding feeds all willy-nilly like. Once you have, then jump in and start looking for podcasts that interest you. You’ll find some for sure.

Of course, some of them won’t be that good, but you’ll want to subscribe to the good ones so that you can be automatically updated when they are.

You’ll find podcasts on a huge range of topics here, which is probably enough to keep you happy and learning for a long time. But what if it isn’t? What if you feel you need even more audio goodness to challenge (or relax) your mind as you go through your daily life?

I would suggest that you make a stop over at Librivox (www.librivox.org) and get a few audio books. Librivox is the source for free audio versions of works in the public domain, which is essentially everything published before 1923. If you’d like to help them by recording your own versions, go right ahead. There’s a great big link on the front page to show you the way.

You’ll find books in many languages and styles here, ranging from mysteries to travel guides (old) to classics to — well, just about anything. There’s generally a link to the Gutenberg project e-text of the book in question as well, so if you need to print something out, you’ll be set.

Podcasts. Try them out, see if you like them. It’s an excellent way to pass the summer, and you just might learn something.

Scott Wilson, Stillwater, can be e-mailed via family@stwnewspress.com.

        

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