Published in: Micromedia and Corporate Learning, Proceeding of the 3rd International Microlearning 2007 Conference, innsbruck university press, S. 221-234, ISBN 978-902571-09-0 TU Graz goes Podcast Martin Ebner, Walther Nagler, Anna Saranti WG Social Learning, Computer and Information Services Graz University of Technology martin.ebner@tugraz.at Abstract: This paper presents the first results of the implementation of podcasting in computer supported teaching at the University of Technology of Graz. It gives an overview on the state of the art activities on this modern field of educational experience. A comparison between different didactical settings of practice on base of evaluation data is given as well as perspectives for the future usage of podcasts for higher education. 1 Introduction “In a blog entry dated September 28, 2004, Doc Searls … discussed podcasting in some detail and noted that a Google search on “podcasting” brought up twenty-four hits. Searls went on to predict that in another year, the same search would “pull up hundreds of thousands, or perhaps millions,” of hits.” — Campbell, G. (2005) Today (2007-01-24) Google offers a result over 46.8 million hits for podcasting. Even very optimistic prognoses underestimated the enormous growth of podcasting. But why is there such a boom? The Web2.0 hype may hold the answer to this question. The buzzword “Web 2.0” and all its applications have caused a revolution concerning the way we work with the internet during the last two years. Emphasizing this argument it must be pointed out that “pod- cast” was chosen to be the word of the year 2005 in Great Britain (Gamböck and Pichler, 2006) and “You” was elected as Person of the Year 2006 by the Time Magazin (Grossman, 2006). Due to the fact that Web 2.0 does not describe new web technologies rather than a new and especially easier handling of the World Wide Web. The “user is the content” is often used as synonym for this trend. Considering this phrase in detail there are two very interesting facts: user and content are in the centre of all activities. This approach differs from technology driven approaches in the past. Nowadays web software becomes easier and friendlier to use so that the typical internet user can finally do what he/she has wanted to do since years: active participating. Tim Berners-Lee 1 has already suggested the so called “Read/Write Web” in 1989 which may now become reality. Needless to express that it doesn’t matter whether the content consists of video, audio or only text, the crucial factors are easy to produce and easy to publish to a large community. In this context podcasting means the distribution of prevalent audio files and nowadays often also combined with video data. In this paper the terminology of podcasting is explained and the way the Graz University of Technology uses this methodology as well as results of practical experiences, a discussion and future steps are presented. 1 http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html (last visit 2007-01-29)