Dialcasting: Making Podcasting Easy and Interactive
The Fourth of a Multi-Part Series on Emerging Technologies and the Second of Four on Podcasting.
Gary A. Cziko
Professor
Educational Psychology & English as an International Language
University of Illinois
Podcasting has become a runaway success ever since June 2005 when Apple first provided support for podcasts in its iTunes music software for Macintosh and Windows computers. Podcasting was first used as a way for individuals to produce audio programs that listeners could automatically download and listen to on their computers or portable media players (such as Apple's iPod). Soon public and corporate broadcasters discovered podcasting and began to use it to make their programs more accessible and portable (you can find WILL-AM's offerings at http://www.will.uiuc.edu/RSS/podcasting.htm).
Educators have also started using podcasts. One example is Purdue University's "Boilercasts" which makes it possible for instructors to record their live lectures and publish them as podcasts so that students can easily listen again (or listen for the first time if they missed class).
"There are two characteristics of podcasting, however, that have limited its use in education."There are two characteristics of podcasting, however, that have limited its use in education. First, podcasts can be a challenge for educators and students to produce and publish. At a minimum you need to have equipment to create digital recordings (typically a microphone connected to a computer running sound editing software), have access to a server to store your audio files, and know how to create, store and periodically revise the "feed" for your podcast. Second, normal podcasts are not interactive as typically just one person produces the podcast and everyone else listens.
One way of overcoming these limitations is to employ a technique I discovered that uses a telephone to record and automatically publish podcast episodes. I would have liked to call this technique "phonecasting," but phonecasting has already been used to describe listening to audio programs using a telephone. So I use the term "dialcasting" to refer to the creation and publication of podcasts using a telephone.
"...creating a dialcast and publishing it as a podcast is as simple as dialing a series of numbers on any telephone and speaking into it." Dialcasting involves three steps to set up (see below for details). But once they are completed, creating a dialcast and publishing it as a podcast is as simple as dialing a series of numbers on any telephone and speaking into it. And dialcasts can easily be made interactive by allowing students to add their recordings by providing them with the access number and PIN used to create the dialcast.
"Podcasting has made audio programs easy, convenient and portable on the listener's end. Dialcasting completes the job by making the recording and publishing of podcasts easy, convenient and portable on the producer's end." Dialcasting is a new technique and I know of no reports of its use yet in education. Yet it is easy to imagine ways in which dialcasting could be used to enhance both on-campus and online courses. Instructors can use dialcasting for announcements or mini-lectures to which students can respond with their own audio comments and questions. Foreign-language teachers can provide listening comprehension assignments and questions as dialcasts and have students respond in the foreign language. Students working on projects either on campus or in the field can use their cell phones to file reports of their activities. Journalism students can likewise use their cell phones for interviews and radio reports. Podcasting has made audio programs easy, convenient and portable on the listener's end. Dialcasting completes the job by making the recording and publishing of podcasts easy, convenient and portable on the producer's end.
I have already set up dialcasts for the two courses I will be teaching in the fall and am curious to see how the students will respond to this new way of communicating with their instructor and fellow students. I hope that other instructors will do likewise and join me in exploring the new ways of audio interaction that dialcasting makes possible.
Steps for Creating a Dialcast
First, you need to have a blog hosted by Blogger (http://www.blogger.com). Blogs (or weblogs) started as an easy way for writers to create a web page to which they could easily add text entries chronologically, although today photos, audio and video can be added or linked to as well. It is also possible to set up your blog so that others can comment on your posts. There is no charge for establishing a blog on Blogger. Once you have created your account, your blog will be publicly available at an address like http://mydialcast.blogspot.com (you will replace "mydialcast" with a string of your choice).
 The second step is turning your blog into an audioblog by visiting Audioblogger at http://www.audioblogger.com. Here you indicate which blog (you might have more than one) you want to turn into an audioblog and provide a "primary telephone number" and four-digit PIN to control access to the production of your audioblog. You can use any 10-digit number as your "primary telephone number" (it does not have to be a working number). If you are setting up an audioblog that you want your students to be able to access, I suggest using an easily remembered number, using 217 as the area code, 333 or 332 as the prefix (I use 333 for instructor-only audioblogs and 332 for student-authorable ones) with the three-digit course number preceded by zero as the last four digits ( e.g., 0480 for EPSY 480). Using these same last four numbers as the PIN is easy to remember, too.
You now have an audioblog to which you can easily add audio. This is done by first dialing 1.415.856.0205 and then entering when prompted the "primary telephone number" and PIN you had established earlier. You will then be able to record, review, and re-record your post until you are satisfied with it. There is a five-minute length limit, but you can record and post unlimited additional posts on the same phone call. Your audio post will show up almost immediately on your blog at http://mydialcast.blogspot.com) and can be heard there (and text comments left if you had enabled comments when creating your blog).
 A final third step is needed to turn your audioblog into a podcast. To do this use Feedburner (http://www.feedburner.com) to give your audioblog a "feed" that iTunes (or other podcast aggregating software) can recognize. Your feed's address will look something like http://feeds.feedburner.com/mydialcast.xml and this is the address you provide to others to subscribe to your dialcasted podcast and automatically download audio posts as podcast episodes.
Note that you can have many blogs on the same Blogger account, but only one of them from the same account can be an audioblog. If you want more than one audioblog to use for your dialcasts, you will need to create a separate account on Blogger for each audioblog desired.
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