When I was an undergrad, my “intellectual conversation crutch” was bringing up something from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. After moving to Chicago, that crutch morphed into inserting something I read in The New York Times or New Yorker.
Now? “I was just listening to a podcast about that…” is something I say with annoying frequency.
Thankfully, I’m not alone, as I notice many other people parroting back something they’ve recently heard in a podcast. But even though it feels like most of us are listening to podcasts, and most of us are learning interesting things from podcasts, I still don’t see podcasts as a top option when faculty are designing online courses. Why might that be?
For as long as I’ve been interested in 
Digital story telling is an instructional practice that is used to tell stories by using computer-based tools. For example, individuals or groups may tell a story by using a variety of multimedia such as audio, graphics, voice, text, and video. For centuries, many people have learned messages from stories that were either passed down orally or written in a book. We now live in such a technological advanced society that learners can now comprehend an intended message by using technological products of the 21st century.
I’ve always loved Rube Goldberg’s drawings. They lent a certain sense of the absurd to everyday tasks, creating a ridiculously complicated machine to handle something most of us could do without even thinking about it. Like many young people, I also delighted in building machines similar to Goldberg’s, using every toy at my disposal to produce something that, let’s be honest, may have been more satisfying to design and build than to actually deploy most of the time. A few hours’ work for ten seconds of payoff? Not a big deal, when you’re a kid.
In 2017, consumers were frequently on the receiving end of bad news: 
