podcasting and woolly thinking

I'm still reading too many articles on educational podcasting that praise or condemn it using inappropriate methodology. This applies to all learning technology, but obviously I tend to pay particular attention to those that deal with the use of digital audio.
I am not going to name any particular articles here, but I will say I have seen examples of this woolly thinking in mainstream, peer reviewed journals.
There are two things to highlight here: acquisition of the term 'podcasting' and the methodology used.
Perennial question: what do we mean by 'podcasting'? (feel free to replace 'podcasting' with your preferred learning technology as you read)
Podcasting is a technology, and one that is used in places other than education. Within education it's application is legion. Evaluation of a learning technology is only useful and of interest when it's very particular context is understood: who were the students? How many of them? What discipline, culture, topic were they part of? Who was the academic? What was their need, previous experience, expectation? What institution was involved and how well supported was the initiative by developers, technologists, services departments, strategies, policies and leadership? Pedagogically, did the use of technology complement, supplement or replace existing methods or content? Etc, etc
Describing such factors obviously takes a lot of work and makes presenting 'findings' tedious or complex, nevertheless I would suggest understanding the subtleties of a given context is critical in making any judgement. More important than this, however, is knowing what the word podcasting means to the writer. In reading between the many lines associated with usage of the word in the academic press (especially when it hasn't been made clear) it usually means 'distributing lecture recordings' or what I would call 'coursecasting'. Can we please pay more attention to describing how the technology is being used and avoid short hand assumptions? If someone at my university says "I hear students don't like podcasting?" my heart sinks. I think we know that many students don't listen to lecture recordings and that they should be regarded as supplementary. But this would not be the case with audio briefings or expert interviews, for example, that are distributed through a module's podcast. Or 100 other techniques that might be used by staff and students to make learning a richer experience. Some people (eg France & Ribchester) refer to audio feedback as podcasting. You might want to discuss that with them, but you can see how referring to the technology has little bearing in the value of what is done in a given situation.
While I'm griping, the second thing I want to mention is inappropriate research methodologies in discussing academic innovation where it involves technologies such as podcasting. In disciplines where quantitative methodology is common, an academic will frequently use quantitative methods to evaluate educational applications. This is very often inappropriate and lazy. Often sample sizes are too small, the subject being evaluated is emerging and I'll-defined, the criteria or measures are too precise to capture inexact behaviour and opinion. Qualitative methods, on the other hand, can be used to capture rich stories and diverse accounts. They make fewer claims to certainty and are more reliable and even generalisable. They often require more effort in terms of collating and interpreting the data, but immersion in such data usually is evident in the rich writing that follows.
So can we have more papers that talk about the nature of the teaching and learning experience as mediated by technologies and more qualitative accounts that allow the reader room to interpret what they read and so map findings to their own contexts?

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