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Show ON PfinPAQTINfi ny A QUI pv EfSElTA© | ^| â- "-. --^ :-:-; If you have heard about podcasting but don't know anything about it, you are not alone. The University of Utah Department of Marketing and Communications is in charge of podcasting at the U. Jason Smith, manager of the department and editor of Continuum magazine, said that podcasting allows faculty and staff to "record lectures, Q & A interviews [and] presentations by prominent visitors to campus/' and then his department provides the podcasts "via the Internet and students can download those either to a personal computer desktop or a smaller player like an iPod and take them with them wherever they go/' The key element to making podcasts a useful tool for student education is getting students to download them. "Podcasting sorta has an ownership to it," Smith said. The biggest distinction between a podcast and an audio file or a clip from YouTube is that a podcast is automatically downloadable, whereas other types of audio files often are not. Students can basically call podcasts their own and take them wherever they want. According to Smith, "Some of the larger universities have been doing this for a few years now... in different ways. Some offer it for free, some charge for it, some have limited offerings... it's all over the map," he said. Podcasting at the U At the U, students and professors have to sign up for subscriptions for podcasts at www2.utah.edu/podcast. The great thing is that everything is totally free, and whenever there is a new podcast, it is automatically downloaded to your computer. This saves people the hassle of going to the Web site and finding and downloading each individual podcast. Podcasting at the U is fairly new. It was introduced by the department of marketing and communications, and more specifically by Smith's boss, Mark Woodland, who is the associate vice president of the department. "He was having some conversations with some people here in the department, and it just sort of blossomed," Smith said. The central Web site that showcases all the different podcasts from departments around the U has been available for a year now, however, one department that has been utilizing podcasting for even longer is the U's College of Humanities. The college has been making podcasts available for about two years. Their "Happy Hour" podcast is one that has sparked interest from many people. According to 24 lessons | fall 2007 |