There's an insidious movement afoot that I think needs addressing. It has to do with the propensity for academics to re-define terms contextually. We see it all the time in academic writing when the author includes a paragraph early in a paper wherein the terms used in the article are defined using phrases like "for the purposes of this paper the authors define TermX as ..."

When those definitions conform to a recognized reality which may not be well established in the field, this practice serves to enhance the understanding of readers who may be unfamiliar with certain constructs. When those definitions serve to re-define that reality, the practice runs the risk of re-defining important ideas out of existence by substituting an alternate reality for an existing one.

I'm talking about "podcasting."

There is a movement afoot to re-define the term "podcasting" to mean "any digital archive of audio or video content" and the justification for that is that "it's what is commonly accepted as the definition in our field."

The problem is that it's wrong. I don't care what academics are calling it, it's the wrong definition. We've been fighting this problem in distance education for a long time by being saddled with a definition of the field (Keegan's) which is based on a survey of "what institutions were doing and calling DE" and then combining the most common practices in a kind of diagnostic list.

This "we don't know what it is, but this is what people are calling it" just doesn't wash. Arguably there needs to be some consensus on the nature of the critical characteristics of a thing, but when those characteristics are established, we owe it to the field to use those legitimate characteristics as definition rather than seeking to redefine the thing using some other characteristic.

In the case of "podcasting" we do a dis-service to the field by conflating "instructional audio and video" and "podcasting."

Specifically, by redefining instructional audio and video as something new -- as "podcasting" -- we sacrifice the decades long research base of the use of audio, film, and video resources for instructional purposes. Further, we sacrifice the potential of podcasting as "distribution of content via the enclosure tag of RSS."

These are not trivial issues. In the first case, we are placed in the position of spending valuable and scarce resources on research into established constructs and in the second we give up the opportunity to investigate the power and value of the tool to search, mix, blend, recombine, and repurpose content for delivery in a mode that is designed specifically to deliver high-bandwidth content over low-bandwidth connections -- a critical consideration in distance education in poor and/or rural contexts.

The argument that basically holds "that's what all the cool kids are doing" cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged. It leads inevitably to the response, "If the cool kids were all jumping off a cliff ...?"

Stop the madness. Podcasting is an established term. It does *not* mean the use of digital audio and video. It refers to a delivery mode, not a content type.