Podcast on Wikipedia

In the wee small hours that I've been spending with my newborn son, I've been enjoying a number of podcasts that I've downloaded on my iPod. The other night, I got a kick out of the first podcast produced by George Mason University's Center for History and New Media (read about their other projects here), which covered Wikipedia. The podcast, known as Digital Campus, aims to be:

a biweekly discussion of how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching, and scholarship at colleges, universities, libraries, and museums.

In the Wikipedia discussion, one participant mentioned how he requires his students to write a new entry in Wikipedia themselves or to substantially edit an existing entry. By so doing, the students get first-hand experience in how knowledge is constructed in this popular resource.

The podcast participants also discuss whether "the launch of Windows Vista has any significance, ponder the rise of Google Docs as an alternative to Word, and cover recent stories about Blackboard’s patents and their social bookmarking site, Scholar.com."

Podcasts are not only a great way to pass the time when you're pacing back and forth at 2 am with a sleepless baby, they're also perfect for long subway commutes and treadmill time at the gym. Other library-related podcasts I like:

Library Geeks

Hosted by Dan Chudnov, formerly at Yale, now at Library of Congress, who you may know as the man behind the now-defunct JAKE project, which offered an open-source directory what databases had which periodicals in full text. My favorite episodes include the one he did with Tim Spalding from LibraryThing and on the one on Zotero, the free reference citation management software.

Talking with Talis

Covers library 2.0 issues. Hosted by ILS vendor, Talis.

Open Libraries

Hosted by Jay Datema, the technology editor at Library Journal