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Ed Radio

Jun 09, 2004
Commentary by Stephen Downes

So anyhow, today was another busy day, with only a short time available to produce the newsletter. But instead of producing the newsletter, I did this. James Farmer, you see, had this neat idea to record Ed Tech papers. It was well received, and so he started today, recording Educational Software and Learning: Subversive Use and Volatile Design by David Squires using Audacity, a free sound recorder.

Well, I harvest his feed (and many others) in Edu_RSS, and I didn't like the idea of merely producing a tape, so I tweaked Edu_RSS to produce a SMIL file, which can be played as a radio station on your computer. It is not without its glitches - James's recording won't play for me, for example. But it works. So I won't say that I've shown it can be done professionally, or even well, but I've shown it can be done: using an RSS harvester to automatically create a niche web radio station.

Any advice, suggestions, examples of actual working SMIL (or other) files would be appreciated. In the meantime, Ed Radio will continue to broadcast new MP3 content daily as long as people create it. So, bloggers, dust off your microphones, record a paper or just your thoughts on the subject, get it listed in a feed harvested by Edu_RSS and be part of some instructional designer's background noise.

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