College lectures on the go.

• Position: EDUCATION - Students use MP3 players - Brief Article

Podcasts--online audio recordings that can be downloaded onto an iPod or other MP3 player--are increasingly being tested as an educational toot. Now, every word of every lecture in a semester can be made available to students with access to an MP3 player. Students can replay the lectures anytime, anywhere. Until last year, Purdue University in Lafayette, Ind., provided Lectures recorded on cassette tapes, but they were seldom used. The university now offers podcasts of at least 60 courses, and the lectures have been downloaded more than 10,000 times this school year. Duke University in Durham, N.C., now makes hundreds of iPods available to students enrolled in courses that use podcasts. (Duke also hosted the first academic conference on podcasting in September.) At Drexel University in Philadelphia, all freshmen in the School of...