One of my recent experiments in binary invention has been
the development of a podcast with my colleague, Joel Jonientz. Like most of
Joel’s ideas, the podcast began with a simple premise: “Let’s talk about
interesting topics.” Obviously, that wouldn’t help us stand out in the
podcasting marketplace and it wouldn’t do much to provide an editorial voice to
the end-product. But Joel’s motivations were instructive: he thinks academics
are most interesting when the talk about things beyond their academic
interests. For academics, that probably sounds flattering. For non-academics,
it’s probably evidence of the suspected egotism of the academy.
All that said, we call our podcast Professor Footnote and
the more we’ve thought about it, talked about, and explained it to colleagues (or had it explained to us),
the podcast presents some interesting scholarly possibilities.
1 It trains us in a new practical pedagogical mode
It traffics in the politics of discussion
3 It remediates scholarly work
