The death of podcasting: greatly exaggerated

I had to chuckle when I read this item at Podcasting News:

British-Russian online audiobook publisher AudioBooksForFree says that “Podcasting is Dead,” predicting that in the next five years downloading, podcasting, P2P and other forms of on-demand delivery will be superseded gigantic compilations of thousands hours of digital entertainment in one single and relatively cheap boxset. The company specializes in massive compilations, which they describe as GigaBulk products. These are gigantic compilations of digital entertainment - music, audio books, films, e-books, ring-tones and games - on various types of media .....

The article is quick to point out:

[while] giant compilations may offer a great solution for delivering content in bulk, they don’t address many of the functions that podcasts currently offer, including frequently [sic] updates, ease of publishing, customizable content downloads and on-demand use.

Not to mention the creative artistic, social and business communication that podcasting technology has enabled. Its about the creativity stupid.

OK. A publisher is making hyperbolic claims to promote a product. Never seen that before. But the piece got me wondering about a less talked about technological advance; the ability to store more information in smaller devices. Right now we can carry several gigabytes of information around on our key chains. Before long -- and I suspect not too long -- portable gigabytes will become portable terabytes. What will be the implications of that?

I have heard some confidently pronounce that soon we will be able to carry the sum of human knowledge around in our pockets. While there are clear problems with this claim (from which "great libraries" does this knowledge come from? How does decide what is knowlege and what is froth? What about the exponential growth of new knowledge production?) the larger point is still true: we will not have to hold as many facts in our head because the facts will be immediately retrievable.

Of course we do not need mighty miniature hard drives to achieve this. George Siemens (Connectivism), Stephen Downes (Connective Knowledge) and others are already making the case that what we know exists more in our networks than in our heads. The hard drive may give us better sourcing of some information. And it will be possible to compile core knowledge in one place in the form of a massive encyclopedia. The network, then, will do more of what it already does: provide terrain for creative application and interpretation of that knowledge.

What are the implications for education? The function of education to move information into long term memory will become less necessary. Information search and assessment skills will be as basic as reading and arithmetic. Such skills should be basic to our education now. But beyond that, the emphasis will likely move toward situated learning: applying knowledge in specific contexts, figuring out how to get things done in this situation, how to creatively meet new challenges and how to make current experience meaningful. The past will not fade, facts will not become fuzzy. Each will be alive as raw material for making the world.

This all sounds obvious to me but when this is compared with current emphasis on memorizing core knowledge so it can be regurgitated in a standardized test I see how far we are from this creative approach to education.