A week or so ago, we wrote about reports that changes to curriculum in grade schools in the UK would forsake “studying things like the Second World War and the Victorians in favor of Twitter, Wikipedia and podcasts.”
A review of, and updates to, the country’s centrally-proscribed curriculum would have meant requiring student fluency in social [...]

Apple Insider reports that Stanford University will be publishing a video podcasts and slides from its “iPhone Application Programming” course via iTunes U beginning this week.
Official, for-credit enrollment in the class is limited, but the public may “audit” the class via podcast for free. Required “school supplies” for the class include an Intel-powered Mac, and [...]

From the YouTube blog yesterday came word of changes to how the video site announces updates and new features.
“[A]fter watching you guys take to the forums and Twitter to discuss what else has changed, we figured more frequent, casual “release notes” would be good to publish as well. That way you can get a broader [...]

The Guardian reports that UK primary schools may soon dump studying things like the Second World War and the Victorians in favor of Twitter, Wikipedia and podcasts:
The proposed curriculum, which would mark the biggest change to primary schooling in a decade, strips away hundreds of specifications about the scientific, geographical and historical knowledge pupils must [...]

Computerworld’s Mike Elgan has posted an interesting opinion piece, in which he calls podcasting “the most underappreciated, underutilized media ever”:
Podcasting is the most underappreciated, underutilized media ever. Some people never try it. And many who do wind up giving it up unimpressed. Too bad.
A new study (Lecture Podcast Listeners Outperform Class Attendees) found that students who [...]

A recent psychological study has found that students who listen to class lectures in podcast form actually score better when tested on the material than students who heard the lectures in person.

Bad science?

Or is podcasting the future of education?

Google video site YouTube today announced a number of new options for content creators and consumers who want to “take their videos offline.” The site has entered into working arrangements with several “partners” to allow sharing their videos “universally” and away from an Internet connection.
Citing an interest among some of their content creators to share [...]

Popular children’s program “Sesame Street” is celebrating its 39th year on the air with a move into Internet media, a Reuters article reports.
The public television show, which debuted in 1969, is broadcast in 140 countries, and now will also be available on Hulu, YouTube, and via the iTunes Music Store, according to Sesame Workshop [...]

I recently discovered that the University of Oxford offers quite a few interesting podcast series. I was looking for some resources on Beowulf for one of our children, but was pleasantly surprised to find an incredible variety of topics presented in podcast format.

Some of the 99 podcast feeds offered:
refugees and forced migration around the world
philosophy [...]

Edutopia, a project of The George Lucas Educational Foundation, has announced that it’s now offering free downloadable video podcasts on iTunes U (iTunes link), a dedicated area of the iTunes Store that offers free education audio and video.
Here, Lucas discusses his thoughts on visual learning and education:

Edutopia is now offering on iTunes U its Core Concept [...]