Podcasts on Energy Surfacing
Submitted by Shawn Reeves
2006-02-23 18:35:48
Time to get modern with your research on energy. Here's the new routine:
Go to the nearest computer; fire up world-famous iTunes or some other podcast downloading program; check out the "feeds" below or find your own; subscribe to an entire feed or just download one session; burn a cd or port the recordings to your favorite audio player; and listen.
Some podcasts are merely broadcast-radio shows put in downloadable form, such as National Public Radio's Living on Earth. Still, that's nice of them to make it convenient to listen to their programs on your own schedule without messing with a radio, a timer, and a tape recorder. Other podcasts are made especially for the format, such as the Energy Smart News (a nonprofit sponsored by Energy Industries).
feed://www.loe.org/podcast.rss
http://www.energysmartnews.org
Also from public radio, Science Friday (produced by Samanna Productions), the weekly show, is available as a podcast. They even have a page explaining how to obtain podcasts:
http://www.sciencefriday.com/audio/index.html
You might have noticed by now that I've listed shows both specific to energy and broader. This is where this tool becomes useful. One of the beauties of the format is that you can easily cut a list of all shows down to ones that contain keywords, such as "energy," which whittles the 147 Science Friday shows down to seven, or "oil" (3 podcasts). For this, you use an xml/rss capable browser to view a list, and the browser presents the different ways to cull items.
Another relevant show, OurCoolHouse -- Energy Efficient Home Design, is run by two homeowners showcasing their efforts at building a very efficient home. Their web site describes many aspects of green building and use of renewables:
feed://www.ourcoolhouse.com/podcast/rss.xml
http://www.ourcoolhouse.com/
Some programs work with these feeds when using the feed://... syntax, others the http://... syntax. You can experiment if your first method doesn't work.
When surfing, look for these symbols:
, 
, or 
.
If you find another energy-related podcast, let us know by sending us a note or posting in our forum:
http://energyteachers.org/ETOFeedback.php
http://energyteachers.org/forum/