Reading Jon Udell's weblog, I always find something interesting. Many of the tools Jon has created and technologies he discusses have applications in the education world. His Library Lookup Bookmarklet is a great tool for educators. We utilize this tool at Lewis Elementary to help students, teachers and parents find books of interest at our local library.
Recently Jon has been experimenting with creating custom podcast feeds(1) using the social bookmarking tool, del.icio.us. In this entry, Jon notes that del.icio.us has the ability to create RSS 2.0 feeds with enclosures. This is pretty interesting. If you use del.icio.us to tag media items such as .mp3 or .mov files (a complete list of file types, and more information about rich media and del.icio.us can be found here... ), del.icio.us will identify that type of file and then create a special RSS feed with enclosures that one could then drop into a tool such as iTunes or iPodder to create a specialized audio feed, a customized podcast playlist.
For example I went out today and found 3 recent education related podcasts. Tim Wilson recently posted an interview with David Baugh of DV in Education. I went to Tim's website, navigated to the podcast entry, then once at the entry clicked through to the .mp3 file. Once the file started playing in my browser, I bookmarked it with del.icio.us. I gave the entry the tag educast. I proceeded to do this with the other sites. Since the files ended in a .mp3, del.icio.us added them to a unique RSS feed. If you are interested in subscribing to this feed you can point iTunes or iPodder to
http://del.icio.us/rss/timlauer/system:media:mp3+educast
If others were to use the tag, educast to tag educational related podcasts, one could subscribe to that feed using this URL:
http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/system:filetype:mp3+educast
1. Actually Jon is doing a lot more than just just creating the podcast feeds, he is also using text to speech technology to create audio introductions to the podcast clips he is pointing to. You can read more about that here.
Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, educast, podcasts