College lectures on the go.

Podcasts--online audio recordings that can be downloaded onto an iPod or other MP3 player--are increasingly being tested as an educational toot. Now, every word of every lecture in a semester can be made available to students with access to an MP3 player. Students can replay the lectures anytime, anywhere. Until last year, Purdue University in Lafayette, Ind., provided Lectures recorded on cassette tapes, but they were seldom used. The university now offers podcasts of at least 60 courses, and the lectures have been downloaded more than 10,000 times this school year. Duke University in Durham, N.C., now makes hundreds of iPods available to students enrolled in courses that use podcasts. (Duke also hosted the first academic conference on podcasting in September.) At Drexel University in Philadelphia, all freshmen in the School of Education received an iPod this fall. Every course incorporates the devices, with students encouraged to record interviews during their field work and to maintain pod-cast blogs--or "plogs," as Drexel calls them. Some faculty members had worried that students would simply skip the classroom lectures and listen to the podcasts later. So far, this has not been a problem. William Lynch, director of Drexel's education school, says that another major concern was that students would use their iPods only for listening to music. "We weren't afraid of that," Lynch counters. "This age group carries iPods around all the time. It's part of their natural daily behavior."