TriCities.com reports that Northeast State Technical College is offering podcasts, an effort produced jointly by the school’s Technology Division and Department of Mass Communication.

The first podcasts feature discussion about business and technology. The TriCities.com piece mentions that the school is planning to offer video podcasts beginning early next year.

Here’s the RSS feed and the iTunes subscription link.

Just after finishing the previous post about OPML support within Thomson Peterson’s Edufeeds.com, I came across this post from Rafael Sidi (who works for Thomson competitor Reed-Elsevier) talking about his recent presentation on RSS and OPML. Looks like OPML may be starting to catch on with publishers. Rafael points readers to an RSS Labs tool that converts PowerPoint files to OPML. Cool!

Thanks to all of you who have contributed RSS and Atom feeds of your school’s content for Thomson Peterson’s Edufeeds.com, the directory of college and university feeds. The directory is pushing 900 feeds, and it grows each week. It’s time to give something back.

This week, the directory began supporting OPML exports of feeds in individual directory nodes, making it easy for you to begin subscribing to large blocks of feeds in the directory by taking an OPML snaphot and importing it into your feed reader (e.g. Bloglines). From there, of course, you can prune any feeds you don’t plan to scan.

I can think of several instances where this could be helpful. You could probably think of many more.

Let’s say you’re in library acquisitions and you want to keep up with acquisitions made by libraries around the world. You can browse to the Libraries-New Acquisitions node, click on the OPML icon, and in a short time you’ll be subscribed to (today) 111 feeds containing information about new acquisitions.

Or let’s say you’re doing research on podcasting in higher education. Browse to the Podcasts node, pull your export, and there you’ll have a nice set of podcast feeds to begin your work.

Happy Holidays from all of us at Thomson Peterson’s!

Charlie Melichar is looking for your help in identifying some good examples of engaging, interactive, audience-focused websites in higher ed.

The University of British Columbia is podcasting (site|RSS feed), with episodes featuring public lectures from UBC’s Talk of the Town series. (Link via Penmachine.com.)

Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, has launched a blog (here’s the RSS feed). (Link via Constantin Basturea.)

The New Yorker reports the broadening interest in syndicating Swarthmore College’s War News Radio (blog|RSS feed), a radio show and podcast designed to “rediscover the voices of real people” in Iraq.

Last month, an American expat who runs an FM station in Canberra, Australia, e-mailed the studio and asked for permission to rebroadcast the show. Carleton College has picked up War News Radio as well. And last week Goldensohn was preparing to send out a mailing to more than a thousand other schools, soliciting further interest.

Duke News reports that the university’s Office of Information Technology has added a feed to help keep the university informed about interruptions to technology services.

Edublog Awards 2005 announces the winners. I have to agree that there are some outstanding examples here. George Siemens, who was honored for most influential post, also keeps an exceptional blog himself (blog|RSS feed).

Paul Baker at Wisconsin Center for Education Research recently issues his 60th podcast, and with it comes an annotated listing of the first sixty.

A podcast interview on For Immediate Release last week featured Feedburner’s Rick Klau. It’s a must-listen for those interested in some of the advanced features in Feedburner (such as Feedburner’s capabilities in the are of helping you migrate from your existing feed to a Feedburner feed). As a result of hearing this interview, over the next week or two I’m planning to convert my feed over to Feedburner.

Podcasting News: Listeners 12-24 prefer their mp3 player to radio. (Link via Steve Rubel.)

University Business: Ken Smith’s article on blogging in higher education. (Link via Ken Smith.)

SignOnSanDiego.com: Cal State San Marcos business instructor offers podcast lectures of human resources classes (no link provided).

PittsburghLive.com: Cyber school envisions going international with podcast classes.

Skagit Valley College: First official podcast on “interesting programs, housing and how to get started at Skagit Valley College.” (Skagit Valley published a few podcasts last spring.)

University of Sydney has launched a group blog by students aimed at providing first-hand information for prospective students. (Link via Templatedata, via Karine Joly’s Collegewebeditor.)

Although the blog’s content has outstanding value for prospective students (more on this in a minute), I’m hesitant to share Karine Joly’s enthusiasm for the group-blog format for this particular purpose. Although this is not true of all group blogs, the way this group blog is presented diminishes the voice of the individual blogger and doesn’t offer prospective students an easy way to follow their favorite blogger without having to wade through all the other bloggers’ posts.

An easy remedy might be to place hyperlinks in the nav section linking to a pseudo home page for each blogger, where one might find a photo and bio. Currently, there is a way to access an individual author’s posts by clicking on the hyperlinked author’s name in the blog post, but I wonder how many people would think to do this.

At the same time, the Sydney bloggers are providing some of the most potent and well-thought advice and information of any admission bloggers I’ve seen. Hats off to Sydney for recruiting some outstanding and enthusiastic bloggers. Take for instance one blogger’s Idiot’s Guide to Sydney Uni, which begins as follows:

Let’s get one thing straight: Sydney Uni is huge. It even has its own postcode. For the navigationally-challenged among us, let’s have a look at the most important places you’ll need to know about during your first few weeks.

Another blogger muses on his real motivation behind joining sports clubs while at the same time promoting involvement.

In terms of sport I’m in the Triathlon Club, and also the Tennis Club (I’m actually started my involvement through the women’s club, trying to impress some of the girls in it… that failed as soon as we started playing), where I have also made lots of friends (I actually play Rugby Union but I don’t play for Uni, I actually play against Sydney Uni, I didn’t feel right changing clubs, but in hindsight I would have been in a premiership side this year if I did!). I really love sport, and the resources available to you at uni are absolutely fantastic, so if you’re like me, give it a whirl!

So, to summarize: nice idea, exemplary content; the group-oriented presentation could stand some minor tweaking to promote the individual voices of these skilled bloggers.

P.S. I should add that I haven’t been able to locate the entry point for Sydney’s blog on the university’s website. I would think it would linked from the page for prospective students. (Perhaps this is about to happen.)

Folsom Lake College has expanded its syndicated offerings with another podcast (here’s the feed). The first two episodes in this podcast feature student interviews–one inviting students to join a new multicultural club, and another about registering for classes. It’s not the first time Folsom Lake has made news in these pages.

Anne Arundel Community College is planning to podcast. The article observes that the medium has “the potential to help traditional adult community college students as well. They may have to choose between attending a class, going to work or staying home to care for a sick child. In those cases, a podcast offers a good backup.”

University of Arkansas is offering an RSS feed for daily headlines. (At the time of writing, the feed doesn’t pass the feedvalidator.org test, so it may not work in your aggregator.)

Bowdoin College is podcasting, with the latest episodes covering projects completed with help from the Educational Technology group. Here’s the subscription page in iTunes. (I couldn’t find an RSS feed on the college’s web site.)

University of Illinois Extension is blogging. “the farm gate” is edited and authored by Stu Ellis. Here’s the RSS feed.

Collegewebeditor.com: Commentary on Iowa State University language program podcasts.

Indystar: Article on attitudes toward student use of iPods and other electronics in schools in the Indianapolis metro area.

A survey of more than 70 public and private high schools in the Indianapolis metro area showed that most do not allow electronics of any kind to be used during the school day.
Rather than trying to beat it, though, some educators are joining the hand-held technology boom, allowing certain personal electronics to come to class.

Last month I had the pleasure of giving a talk on podcasting and student recruiting at the AACRAO SEM 15 conference in Chicago, Illinois. It was fantastic to spend time with higher ed marketing, IT, and enrollment management professionals talking about opportunities in podcasting.

The presentation itself was a long-ish (~80 minute) vendor-track presentation that included both a hearty sampling of marketing-oriented audio and video podcasts from around higher ed and an overview of Thomson Peterson’s offerings in the area of microcontent and syndication.

I am providing the material in three formats. Because the visual aspect was very important to the presentation, I am not offering an audio-only podcast. The screencast will provide by far the richest experience; the PowerPoint slides and links are merely supplementary.

-Screencast (streaming only). Note: Recorded and offered in 1280×800 format; scroll down for player controls.
-PowerPoint slides (4M)
-Links mentioned in the talk

A special thanks goes out to Nancy Prater (Ball State University) and Jett Pihakis (University of California Berkeley Haas School) for providing behind-the-scenes information about podcasts at their school.

If you have any questions or feedback about this presentation, please leave a comment or email me directly at dan.karleen@thomson.com. If you were in the audience in Chicago, I would love to hear from you!