Bookmarking Podcasts

One of the things that I really love about blogging in education is that every single reader can comment on any part of a blog entry. When responding to the work of their classmates, my students can choose to focus on a specific paragraph, sentence, or phrase. They can highlight this part and then comment on it. This usually leads to a very focused and thus very productive discussion. This is currently impossible with podcasting (audio files in general, for that matter) and, in my view, limits its potential in education. Oliver Wrede agrees and makes it very clear that podcasting is not likely to have a big impact on blogging. Audio files, he states, cannot be quoted. In other words, it is impossible to interact with podcasts in the same way that we are currently interacting with text. I can include a link to a podcast but I cannot point out (or in any way isolate) a specific part of the file.

I've been thinking about possible solutions to this problem and came up with my own ideal scenario:

(Click image to enlarge)

My technical expertise is rather limited but this solution would definitely make me embrace podcasting as a viable educational tool.