Archive for the 'Podcasts and Podcasting' Category

Connected

Published
by
David
on February 28, 2008
in Higher Education, Interpersonal Communication, Pedagogy, Podcasts and Podcasting, Technology and What if . . .
. 3 Comments

As part of their Mobile Learning initiative, Abilene Christian University has begun a new program that involves giving iPhones to incoming freshman. With the iPhones and the software they’ve designed, an incredible amount of innovation is possible in extending the classroom and giving students access to learning materials that are both class-related and college-wide. Imagine having syllabi, access to research databases, and course readings available anytime with just a few touches! They also describe plans for the use of podcasting, hybrid online/in-class discussions, and instant polling throughout their “mLearning” initiatives.

This and other programs in their Mobile Learning initiatives are available on their website. They even produced a video entitled “Connected” which provides their vision of what it might be like for a student who has access to this powerful technology.

YouTube Preview Image

YouTube Preview Image

As you’ll notice in the video, the iPhones that students get are not restricted to educational use. Facebook and other social networking sites are accessible, along with general internet, texting, and emailing capabilities. You can also see how the technology may present particular problems for communication in the classroom and more generally between students and professors. For example, professors are texting students and encouraging online research during class discussions.

So, although their programs may have a lot of potential to change the way students learn for the better, I worry that they also risk creating distractions and promoting poor communication. How connected is too connected?

Inner Resources

Published
by
Jenny
on October 16, 2007
in Interpersonal Communication, Oral Communication, Pedagogy and Podcasts and Podcasting
. 2 Comments

I’ve been thinking a lot about aural communication lately, how, in classrooms, we oftentimes overlook the aural in favor of the oral.  When we do provide aural instruction, we couple it with visual instruction.  Write on the board!  Entertain!  Give the students something to look at!  I’m one of those old-fashioned educators–I bemoan the current trend of fashioning educators as clowns and spectacle.

When I hear a student complain that a class is boring, I think of John Berryman’s lines in Dream Song number 14: “and moreover my mother told me as a boy / (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored / means you have no / Inner Resources.’”

When I was in grade school, there was after-school training for competitions with other district schools.  If you won, you went on to regional competition, and if you won at that level, you advanced to state.  One of the activities I trained in when I was eight was a storytelling competition.  The task wasn’t to tell a story, but rather to retell a story that you would have just been told.  This training forced me to listen, to etch details in my mind, knowing that I would have to retell them.  When this became easy, I began to interpret what I heard, to make connections, to go above and beyond the surface of what was presented.  (I think this is why I didn’t do well in these competitions–even at a young age, I wasn’t keen on merely summarizing; I wanted to provide literary criticism as well.)

Somewhere along the way, (I don’t know when) I became a terrible listener.  I’ll sometimes just slip into daydreams when I’m at a literary reading.  I have to prompt myself to listen.  I have to concentrate.  When someone reads something aloud to me, I invariably begin to go elsewhere unless I try really, really hard to stay there in the passage.  I retain better when I look at the text, and I don’t think this is a good thing.  It’s probably something that starting happening by my being immersed in classrooms that coupled aural and visual instruction in the belief that children learn better this way.  I think it’s hurt me.

We let our students read aloud things that are beautiful, that should not be read aloud by fumbling, untrained students–Shakespeare for example.  (No wonder our students have a hard time listening!)  Why don’t we let them listen to trained actors on tape?  Or on an MP3 player?  I recently saw a news clip that showed MP3 players being used in public school classrooms.  I have reservations about a gadget, however, that allows us to pause and resume, allowing us the safety of getting lazy, of drifting off.

Perhaps students are bored because they aren’t listening or don’t know how to listen.  They’re elsewhere.  Perhaps they have no inner resources, or perhaps they have too many inner resources.

We train our students to be articulate, eloquent speakers, but are we training them to be alert, contemplative listeners?

Grammar Girl

Published
by
Mikhail
on February 5, 2007
in Language and Podcasts and Podcasting
. 0 Comments

For a few months now, Grammar Girl, a.k.a. Mignon Fogarty, has been podcasting away on grammar issues and other writing concerns. Her weekly “Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing,” according to a recent CNN.com article about Grammar Girl, have been downloaded over 1.3 million times since she started producing the podcasts in July. Her tips are entertaining and useful as well — take a listen — the latest podcast is on the age old question of when to use “further” rather than “farther.” You can also download or subscribe to these free podcasts (there are 39 to date) through the iTunes music store if you are so inclined.

Teaching Carnival 3 & Audio Responses to Student Writing

Published
by
Kate
on November 28, 2005
in Blogs and Blogging, Pedagogy and Podcasts and Podcasting
. 1 Comment

Academic Blogger Scrivener has recently compiled entries for the latest Teaching Carnival (#3) on his blog Scrivenings. In case you haven’t come across a blog carnival before, it’s a collection of entries from various blogs on a theme, and here the theme is teaching in higher education. Scrivener also offers links to TC2 (in October) and the original one. One of the nice things about what they’re calling an “ubercarnival” is that it moves from host to host. (Now where is that umlaut key when you need it?)

Entries in Teaching Carnival 3 range from practical and theoretical issues in the classroom, to pedagogical styles, dealing with tricky classroom dynamics, and much more.

I followed a link from TC3 to a post on Steven D. Krause’s blog about using audio to provide feedback for students on their written work. The key, of course, is not only whether it’s useful, but whether it’s efficient for faculty. Daniel Anderson, a commenter on this post, suggests that recording brief audio files was easier for him than writing feedback on papers.

Krause’s TC3 entry led me also to a Kairos article by Jack Wilson on the theory and practice and consequences of sending such audio feedback to students: Perception Is All: Using Audio Files To Reach Across the Divide. Though Wilson describes the technology from the perspective of a distance ed professor, he also reminds us that in a sense, “All education is distance education.” Among other things, Wilson argues that his audio feedback both increases a sense of community and closeness with his students, helps reach students with different learning styles, and offers a lasting record of the comments for both professor and student.

Learning in the Age of Podcasting

Published
by
Nida
on November 14, 2005
in Podcasts and Podcasting and Technology
. 4 Comments

The “Education Life” supplement of the New York Times on November 6 had a short article about the use of iPods as instructional technology in American colleges. Podcasting lectures, that is, audio-recording lectures for students to download on their iPods, or other portable players is becoming increasingly common in universities nationwide, starting with the well publicized case of Duke University. Last year, Duke gave its entering students free iPods with which they could listen to lectures whenever and wherever… that is, not in the classroom.

One of the main arguments in favor of podcasting in academia is that it makes it easier for students to just listen to the lecture and participate without getting frantic about taking good notes. However, it is also feared that students will increasingly desert the classroom if they have auditory access to what is going on in the classroom. Podcasting does not seem radically different from lower forms of technology college students and faculty have been using for decades, such as tape recording lectures, or more recently, posting lecture notes on Blackboard. All these practices aim to facilitate learning. However, I wonder to what extent making learning “effortless” leads to better learning. There are already online debates about the use of podcasting in college in several blogs expressing different opinions about how this tool could be most effectively used. While I see great value in these aids, especially for students with disabilities or for those juggling college with a number of other responsibilities such as parenthood, full time work, etc., I also see the risk of mass producing higher education. For our purposes, I wonder how it would affect what we are trying to accomplish as writing and communication fellows as it changes the nature of classroom interaction.

Because it is a recent development in instructional technology, I did not see many evaluations of its impact on learning. Duke published an evaluation of its iPod initiative in June 2005. While it seems like students just loved using their iPods, the evaluators admitted that “the extent to which having access to lecture recordings improves student performance, impacts class attendance, or enhances students’ course experiences remains unknown.” That is, we don’t know if it actually does what it is intended to do.

Well, this might be the cynicism of a technophobe who never made the move from a Discman to an mp3 or an iPod… Does anybody know any research evaluating the impact of podcasting or similar technologies on learning?