RECAP Wiki - Mobile podcasting

Phonecasting and podcasting for wireless devices

Phonescasting® is the latest service provider to offer a way into providing podcasts via mobile phone networks. Based in the USA, the new website phonecasting.com is an online social network that is designed to bring the best in podcasting, phonecasting, mobile and video content. Via the website, you can obtain simple tools to publish content to the podcasting community. The solution aims to make podcasts available for to podcast subscribers through RSS and SMS alerts.

Essentially, this service aims to provide a ‘one-stop-shop’ and is aimed at those individuals and organisations that wish to take advantage of this new content distribution, advertising and revenue streams.

Podcasting and mobiles

Another new company is providing a podcasting to mobiles service. Melodeo, based in Seattle, is combining podcasting and social networking on the PC and mobile phone. The service allows you to manage your favorite podcasts with no effort and share your play list.

The service is enabled via an application called "Mobilcast", which allows you to listen to podcasts anytime, anywhere. Options allow you to listen instantly or download the podcast for later use as well as locating podcasts and picking up new episodes. In a way this is way of syndicating podcast information via a mobile phone. At present the service requires an unlimited data carrier plan so may be an expensive choice for educational user and restrict access. However, as most of the podcasts are available and can be downloaded to other portable devices, this does provide a further choice for the mobile learner.

Podcasting and the PDA

The Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) has become of ineterst in educational circles as it provides a more flexible approach to using educational resources and material.

A recent post on The CLC Blog provided some useful insights into how podcasts can be used with a PDA, using a piece of software to "read" the content of RSS feeds.

With more educational podcasts published on the internet every week, a wider range of potential uses for podcasts within the portable learning environment provided via the PDA. Unlike the ubiquitous iPod, for example, the PDA integrates many other software tools and facilities for the learner to utilise and aslo offers some exiciting possibilities for learning anytime, anywhere.

Some schools and City Learning Centres (CLCs) in the Uk are undertaking trials with PDAs with their students. It will be interesting to see how many make use of podcasts with PDAs.

Could this be the future for podcasting?

I have just posted an entry on the RECAP blog about podcasting to mobiles. This is deliberately vague at present whilst more research is undertaken on the feasibility of using this infrastructure for educational podcasting - after all there are more people out there with mobile phones than iPods!!!

One of the clear advantages of using the mobile phone infrastructure is that the finacial model is already accepted worlwide. Folk already pay to receive text, photos, data and to access the internet. The billing system is in place and robust. This is not to advocate that access to universal education for children and young people should require a fee at source - but it may be an interesting avenue to explore for particular "niche" markets - like teachers for example.

Nowadays, there are an increasing number of services that are being launched to provide the ability to upload podcasts or take the content of an RSS feed and stream the podcasts on demand. More details of these later.