Students with iPod headphones and a bounce in their step are usually jamming to favorite tunes, but now they might be swinging to the rhythm of a campus lecture by Ralph Nader '55 or Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Princeton has made audio recordings of public lectures like theirs available in podcast form on its WebMedia site. The archive contains over 800 files dating back to 1998 and includes lectures by many prominent guests.
Streaming videos of campus events have been publicly available through the Princeton WebMedia website for years, but the University wants to "leverage the technology" of podcasts to make the lectures more easily accessible, Office of Information Technology (OIT) director of academic services Serge Goldstein said.
The lecture videos "don't have as broad an audience as they could or should have," he said. The video files can't be saved, but the podcasts can be downloaded onto computers and then loaded onto iPod or other portable devices.
The videos and podcasts are meant to benefit the public more than students and faculty, Goldstein said. "I think the bulk of the people interested in this material will be people outside of the University," he said. "It's not primarily targeted at students per se."
Tim Nunan '08 said he thought the podcasts impractical for students on a busy schedule. "The lecture format is, when you think about it, not ideally suited to rapid consumption," he said.
But podcasts of academic guest lectures and course materials could be useful to student research, Nunan said. "If I were writing a paper ... it would be particularly useful, say if there were upper-level history courses or upper-level English courses" on the podcasts, he said.
Princeton records few course materials, though. Some introductory science course lectures are put on Blackboard and others recorded at faculty request, Goldstein said. But he noted "very, very little demand" from faculty or students for recorded course materials.
"I do not anticipate that that would grow in any significant way," he added.
Some students do plan to download the public lecture podcasts.
"I see myself, in the future, definitely having that sort of thing on my iPod," Sophia Echavarria '09 said.
"I really think that this is the type of thing that students will take and tailor to their own interests," she said, adding that she might use the podcasts to listen to lectures she intended to go to but missed. "You can't be there every time something awesome happens."
The University began encoding the video recordings into MP3 format after receiving requests from viewers who had slow internet connections or wanted to listen without sitting at a computer, Goldstein said.
OIT will update the podcast site with recordings of future lectures and events as long as speakers give permission, he added.
Though preparing the video file takes a few days, the podcasts are made "almost instantaneously." Podcast subscribers will receive notification of new material after a few days, he said.
Goldstein estimated that about 100 recordings of campus events will be added each year.
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