Many years ago in a galaxy far, far away Oxford University launched on ItunesU. Here’s the screenshot from BBC ceefax that night.

Podcasts are Thing 14 of our 23Things and I am getting nostalgic again.

Here’s a case study  by Terese Bird of how we approached podcasting at Oxford.

And here’s the Oxford podcasts site (outside of ItunesU).

I’m on there, here’s my podcasts and ebooks. They include a recorded talk about my research on the student digital experience and 5 years of blog posts available as an ebook.

In April this year I was delighted to welcome one of Oxford’s top podcasters, Dr Emma Smith to keynote at OER16.   I first met Emma around the time we were launching  Oxford on ItunesU. She is a Fellow of Hertford College and  Professor of Shakespeare Studies.  She was one of the first academic colleagues to  champion the use and creation of OER at University of Oxford through her involvement in the Jisc funded Open Spires and Great Writers Inspire projects. Her OER licensed lectures reach an international audience and she continues to produce, publish and share cultural resources online.

After some early Jisc funding in 2009 Oxford’s podcasts collection quickly became one of the largest growing collections of openly licenced university lectures online.  Oxford podcasts have published nearly 10,000 thousand audio and video items. 50% of this content is CC licenced.  It includes 6,000 individual speakers and presenters. More than 23 million episodes have been downloaded. 10 million episodes have been streamed.

Emma was one of the first of the Oxford podcasters and the first major contributor to record podcasts herself. She has published 48 episodes which are part of 7 different series. Her biggest successes are ‘Approaching Shakespeare’ and ‘Not Shakespeare’.

Approaching Shakespeare has had more that 500,000 thousand downloads and regularly features in the itunesU global top ten.

Emma’s podcasts are only a small part of her work, but whenever I hear discussions about open academic practice I think of colleagues like Emma at Oxford who share so generously, but always with a wise, and enquiring eye to what might happen as a result.

Writing this post is reminding me of the connection between podcasting,  recording and lecture capture…..ing,