Week 9, #21

Since my chief experience with podcasts has been watching and listening to those made by my son, who lives outside the United States, I enjoyed using this assignment to do more searching that is library-related. I had great good luck with Yahoo Podcasts; I searched "libraries" and found two treasures. One is an interview from NPR with the author Anne Lamott on how much there is in libraries: what a gem. The other is an interview with Keith Curry Lance from several years back, on his studies showing the positive correlation between the quality of a school's library and the students' test scores. The interview originally played on a program from Colorado called "Colorado Matters." I especially liked that the interviewer asked basic questions about the study and its significance, so that the audience would understand how important this research is. I think the library world always thinks of Keith Curry Lance as "one of us," but in this case the intended audience was the state of Colorado.
I found some "fun" results when I searched "reading" on Podcast.net. Included in my results were Bible readings, poetry readings and tarot card reading, not quite the context I had in mind. Goes to show exactly what I tell the students: the machine needs as much specificity as possible in your search terms, since it can't read your mind, at least not yet!
As with several of the other applications I've learned with these lessons, the challenge will be finding the time to do the searching, listening to podcasts and then working with students to create some of their own.