Many hiking trails are described by paper-based
guides that provide information about the history and natural features
found along the trail. While such paper-based guides are handy
and informative, they can become outdated, need to be restocked when
the supply is exhausted, and may become litter when discarded.
The emergence of new technologies, especially associated with
podcasting, provides an opportunity to replace paper trail guides with
electronic versions that can be downloaded to an mp3 player. Over
the past year, we developed a podcast guide to a hiking trail in the
Kirby Park Natural Area, which is an 80-acre riparian urban forest in
Wilkes-Barre. That guide consists of twenty image-enhanced
podcast episodes – each focusing on a single station along the trail or
on a species of note. The podcasts, created using GarageBand
software on the Macintosh OS, have been uploaded to Wilkes University’s
iTuneU website and are publicly available. Representative podcast
episodes will be presented. The results of a user survey
concerning the podcasts’ effectiveness will also be presented and
discussed.