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Show .:::M: mmRAMMmm. PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT OWEN Heidi Camp, assistant dean of the college, Happy Hour is when a group of people who pays a $100 yearly membership meets at Squatters for free hors d'oeuvres and drinks while they listen to someone speak about humanities topics each month. The topics vary from sexuality to poetry to history. The speaker's lecture is then edited and downloaded to both the humanities Web site and the U's podcasting Web site. The monies collected from membership fees go to support college programs and to scholarships for students. As of now, podcasting is still in the developmental stage at the University of Utah, but it's slowly progressing. Smith thinks that podcasting could eventually be used as a method of distant learning. Lectures can be prerecorded by the professor, be placed on the Internet, and then downloaded by the students to listen to. "A lot of learning will take place online," Smith said. According to Smith, the benefit of podcasts at this point is to showcase the U and the great speakers who come through the school. Drawbacks are lack of funding and lack of staff. Publications are the marketing and communications department's primary focus, so podcasting often has to take a back seat. Another drawback is that the U's podcast is strictly audio. Some universities have videos and/or PowerPoint presentations to accompany the audio file, but at this point, the U does not. One reason why they don't have visual media to accompany the audio is because files are too big. Smith said it best: "Many people don't have the space to download a file that big, and quite frankly, they don't have the time." The technology transition Tseveenbolor Davaa, a graduate student who teaches an economics course at the U, does not even know what podcasts are, and neither do a lot of students. After asking random students around campus, most of them admitted to me that they have heard of podcasts before, lessons | fall 2007 25 |
