Accidental Pedagogy

Non-use of podcasts

Even though I am on the editorial board of the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT) I got the link to this article on podcasting from Stephen Downes. The authors look at a single geoscience class where lectures were supplemented by audio podcasts of the lectures being made available afterwards through the course management system.

They found that relatively few students made use of of the podcasts mostly because they didn't see the need to do so. When they did they did so because events such as a transportation strike meant that they had missed lectures. Although it is a small case study this confirms my suspicions that students don't listen to podcasts. In this case there also seemed to be a fairly high degree of confusion among the students about how they could access the recordings. A third of the students in the class didn't know that you could download the recordings either to a player or to a computer or flash drive.

In general terms I think that there is a real problem with using technologies like this simply as a delivery mechanism. It's ok as far as it goes and it does add to convenience but its certainly not innovative and doesn't do didley for student learning. If we really want to get serious about podcasting as an innovative and transformative medium (and maybe we don't) we need to explore creative ways to do it. This could include:

• Students creating podcasts themselves as a meaningful part of the curriculum
• Podcasts replacing lectures or simple content transmission (with seat time being used for more interactive activities)
• Podcasting being used where audio is important rather than text eg language instruction or music based courses
• Podcasting as part of a larger multi-media essay produced by students
• Podcasting or making digital audio as part of a research methods course and creating digital audio of interviews

Creative podcasting

Last Friday I went to a Technology Across the Curriculum workshop being run in the Composition Department here at George Mason University. I heard about a number of cool things going on. One of these was a reminder of the wonderful work being done by Jessica Matthews here in the Comp Department. Last year she did a great project with students writing scripts for podcasts and then producing those podcasts as part of their comp course. She talked about one especially good one where the students did a podcast of a mock trial for a student accused of plagiarism. They did it in a mock Judge Judy sort of format with the "faculty" accuser and the student "defender" and lots of crowd noise.

A great way also to teach students to think critically about plagiarism plus her whole project is a neat example of a way to do podcasting that is creative and not just faculty dumping content into a podcast which seems mostly to be what happens.

IBM report on games and learning

IBM has a report  out on how massive multiplayer games can help develop good leadership skills that corporations would do well to pay attention to. The report is very very thin and although they are at great pains to document their methodology (and hence their research legitimacy) there are few insights beyond a few anecdotes. This seems to be a problem that affects a lot (but not all) literature on gaming. I wonder if this general lack of quality is a consequence of the sort of breathless wonder that we all seem to have for gaming in academic technology. Its so new and cutting edge that we are forgiven from actually having to say anything substantive about it. Maybe I am just grumpy because it's Monday.

This report from Carnegie Mellon on podcasting (widely referenced on a number of blogs) was much better and will likely prove to be helpful for a number of campuses.

Podcasts on grammar

Ok, maybe I was wrong, maybe people do listen to podcasts. Apparently even podcasts about grammar.