Reflections on Educational Podcasting

Abstract for eLearning 2.0 Conference, Brunel University, July 6-7th 2011

2011-07-03T17:37:00.000+01:00

Enhancing the Student Experience with Digital Voices
Keynote for eLearning 2.0

This presentation considers how the student experience of learning at university can be enhanced through the academic and student generation of digital media in a collection of techniques that can be referred to as Digital Voices. Both spontaneous and carefully designed methods have been used in UK higher education, demonstrating how the recorded voice can be used to promote dialogic, learner-centred pedagogy. These approaches to e-learning accommodate the value students find in each other, in the people who teach them, and in those who are more peripheral, yet potentially significant, to the student experience of the curriculum. This aligns with the unique selling point of a higher education: the social, interactive and personally engaging experience it affords.

The value of our students’ relationship with the real world is also considered. In an age where employability and graduate attributes affect curriculum design, authentic connections between the curriculum and the world beyond university have never been so important; however, opportunities to experience that world through visits, placements, work-based learning and sponsored degrees are coming under pressure due to the current era of austerity.

The idea of Digital Voices addresses these dilemmas and this will be explored through examples of audio and video produced in higher education by academic staff and students.

Some key ideas are introduced that inform creative thinking about the opportunity. User‑generated content, celebrating Lo-Fi production, and the ‘red button’ ethos are three fundamental ideas that see a marked shift in education’s appreciation of digital media. Seven other characteristics will be highlighted that together indicate the difference between Digital Voice approaches and former institutional media provision.
A review of educational podcasting will establish the basis for considering innovative ways of using recorded audio and video, including a collection of media‑enhanced feedback techniques, digital posters, audio notes, and audio summaries.
The concept of media intervention will be introduced, proposing a shift from the broadcast of knowledge through recorded lectures to a mediated view of learning through orientation, motivation, and challenge setting, and supporting the learner’s reflection on their studies with media. Looking ahead, digital media’s relationship to mobile learning will also be presented. This paper proposes that what we once understood to be the formal curriculum, constrained by given times, places and expectations, has now changed. The richest spaces may exist in an extended understanding of the learning environment characterised by the asynchronous voices of tutors, students, peers, experts, ‘publics’ and others.
It is important to look at the challenges that may deter innovation. Colleagues will be asked to consider their own ideas for producing digital media and the difficulties they may face in realising them. Findings from previous Challenge Card exercises will be shared along with suggested solutions for supporting innovation. Participants will be presented with a set of design principles during the session and asked to use these to sketch their own ideas for using the recorded voice in and around the formal curriculum.

Screencast feedback

2011-02-09T15:38:00.001Z

Just a message to anyone who attended the JISC Digital Media surgery. Please do contact me if you or anyone you know are using screencast feedback. Or thinking about it. Every story is different and I am keen to share what we are finding out.
My slides will follow soon.

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Challenges

2011-01-20T22:12:00.001Z

I continue to use my Challenge Card activity in my audio workshops. In the last year or so I have collected several hundred cards from people who are interested in using digital audio (they're coming to my workshops) but nonetheless identify challenges that they will have to address if they are to move forward. The challenges include all aspects of institutional infrastructure provision: access to equipment, storage quotas for staff and students, management buy-in and leadership, network rights, distribution tools, mentors, training, local e-learning support, etc.
Some of the workshops have been media-enhanced feedback workshops and some more generally to do with digital media. I've been meaning to write this up into a paper but have several others on the go, but I really need to get this academic frustration in front of people who can do something about it. I have a workshop coming up for senior management in the sector in relation to the Asset feedback project so that will provide a good opportunity.
Peter Bullen gave a useful presentation this morning in Ulster in which he cited a presentation given by Anne Miller at the recent JISC Online Conference where she had outlined four stages to the adoption of technology enhanced pedagogy. Stage 3 is the one where people are interested enough to go to events and are enthused by new ideas, but nevertheless are not able to progress to phase 4 - implementation. This is why the Red Button opportunity is so significant ( see previous post) - the technology barrier and associated anxiety is largely gone.
I must follow up Anne Miller's presentation.

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Location:Langport Ave,Manchester,United Kingdom

Digital Voices in Ulster

2011-01-20T21:47:00.001Z

I have just finished running three workshops at the University of Ulster about the different ways academics and students in HE/FE are using the recorded voice to enhance learning. I played some examples of media produced by students, tutors and others featuring the voices of all of the above as well as professionals and members of the public. Probably my favourite piece of audio comes from the CIPEL CETEL and features a young women with Downes Syndrome talking about what it's like and the achievements that she is proud of. The point of the clip in the workshop is that I could write about what she said, and even transcribe it, but its power is in her voice, as you might imagine. The listener is able to make such a strong emotional connection with her. This allows me to talk about audio feedback and audio assignment briefing and the many other techniques that people are now using in the sector.
An important point in my workshops recently has been adaptability of the medium. Whether it's feedback or any of the other methods, every time I hear a story I am struck by how easily the medium has been melded to address the very specific context of the academic and their students. In part this is due to the highly granular nature of what people are producing, and in part to audio's role in affecting learning as much as 'delivering ' it.
I love demonstrating the 'red button' - four devices - what do they have in common? It is surprising how people don't notice the big red button at the centre of devices like Flip cameras and audio recorders. Even Audacity has a big red button, and this for me symbolises so much about why the time is right to pay special attention to Digital Voices right now. The smartphone, with apps like Recorder Pro, is the real killer app, so to speak. A large percent of attendees (perhaps 90%) told me they had a recording device with them. They were surprised to note this, but increasingly both students and staff have a way to record conversations in their pocket. And it's their device in their pocket (goodbye tech anxiety) And if they don't have a way of recording, the person standing next to them will have. More to the point, with the smartphone recorders, people not only have a recording studio of their own in their pocket, they also have inbuilt connectivity for the media they produce with the capacity to email or share recordings via wifi and Bluetooth.
A good day as usual and I just get more and more excited about what I see and hear.

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Mobile Reflection (MoRe) - collaborators wanted

2010-10-29T20:31:00.001+01:00

A model for facilitating learner feedback and reflection using mobile phone technology was presented this week at the Media-Enhanced Feedback event in Sheffield. The MoRe approach was initially trialled with a small group of dyslexic student teachers over a period of 8 weeks during the academic year 2009/10 within Success North, a Centre for Excellence in Teacher Training based at Newcastle College by Chrissi Nerantzi. It uses WordPress.com and iPadio.com as accessible Web 2.0 technologies, allowing tutors and peers to communicate asynchronously via phones, building up a reflective log. She says, "Findings show that participating student teachers did indeed deepen their reflections as the pilot progressed and found the whole experience very positive, flexible and enjoyable. These findings provided food for thought and I am currently exploring further interventions." More information can be found at the pilot study's website and a case study will be published on the MELSIG website shortly.
Chrissi, now at Salford University where she is involved in teaching on the Post Graduate Certificate in Academic Practice, is looking for collaborators who would be interested in developing and applying the model in different situations. She says her ideas for collaboration could involve others,

running a parallel MoRe pilot within their own cohort and then comparing findings with the MoRe pilot starting in Jan 2011 and throughout semester 2 ,or
setting up a joint MoRe platform and running a collaborative pilot from Jan 2011 and throughout semester 2 that would link 2 or more PGCAP/PGCERT HE programmes and their participants together aiming to establish a wider community of practice, or
exploring the MoRe approach within non-educational programmes to enable the development of reflective skills and comparing findings with finding of the MoRe pilot used within an education programme, or
exploring the MoRe approach within mono- and multidisciplinary peer observation/review processes in a specific School/Department/Faculty or across a whole university.

If you are interested in finding out more about MoRe (!) then contact Chrissi (c.nerantzi AT salford.ac.uk).

Media-Enhanced Feedback

2010-10-29T20:04:00.003+01:00

Audio Feedback has always been the killer app for audio-enhanced learning. It is the perfect and obvious marriage of digital audio to the pressing needs of education, most notable in what students have been telling us for years in the National Student Survey: students want feedback on their work. This has been said often enough and probably in every paper that has been published on audio feedback in the last few years.
Last Wednesday about 60 people from UK higher education converged on Sheffield for the Media-Enhanced Feedback event that I organised on behalf of the Media-Enhanced Learning Special Interest Group, and the JISC funded ASSET benefits realisation project.
Notice the use of the term 'media-enhanced feedback' - this is more than audio feedback. It embraces innovative approaches that include audio, video, screencast and mobile technologies. Indeed, the use of personal/class response systems can also be included in this, as was evidenced in a presentation by Steve Maw (HEA Centre for Bioscience)

A set of 'howto' documents was distributed on the day to those who attended the event and these will be shared online along with case studies produced by each of the presenters about their innovative practice. Most of the sessions and discussion was recorded in one form or another and all of these materials and presentations will be posted on the MELSIG and ASSET sites in the next week or so.

Infrastructure for digital media

2010-10-08T09:29:00.002+01:00

Susannah Diamond and myself are putting the finishing touches to our chapter on the capacity of infrastructure at UK universities to support innovation around user-generated media for learning. We have presented on this topic at ALT-C 2009 and a few other events in the last year or so. It's a relatively dry topic for me, but one that is absolutely critical. It is clear that there are great people out there doing great things with digital media. But this is despite inadequate infrastructure in their universities.
We are still keen to hear from people or institutions who believe they have got it right, or where they are still struggling to innovate with digital media. We are taking a broad view of what is meant by infrastructure and what is needed. This includes networks, storage, access to software and hardware, examples and case studies, training, support, strategy, educational development, etc. Anything that affects the capacity of staff and students to learn with user-generated media.
The topic becomes less dry when you start to think about what academic staff can do to influence change. To this end I've just been brainstorming a list of ideas and would appreciate your thoughts on this. So far my list is:

challenge perceptions of yourself and your capacity to be a change agent, or someone who can lead and influence change;
be clear about the pedagogic benefits of using user-generated media in your specific context, and more generally, so that you are able to challenge technologically determined positions;
actively seek to change local and institutional strategies and policies where they unnecessarily hinder innovation in this area;
collaborate effectively in developing techniques. If you work on your own you will not have the credibility of those you seek to influence, and it is likely that your ideas and evaluation will not be as strong;
develop and evaluate simple, low risk techniques. Understand what is specific to you and what is generalisable;
relate your ideas to existing institutional priorities so that your work is seen to contribute to the progress of the university and so that you can refine your thinking through institutional contexts;
find examples of what other people are doing at your institution and beyond;
share your own practice, and find examples of similar innovations, by:

submitting case studied to local and institutional LTA success story repositories, journals, conferences;
making available support materials, assignment briefs, examples and evaluation tools (etc) that you have produced;

join, or establish, local/institutional special interest groups on media-enhanced learning;
become friends (not enemies!) with people responsible for every aspect of the infrastructure. It is likely they are looking for someone who can help them make sense if it all;
invite external experts, including peers from other institutions (local and national), to help key stakeholders understand how other institutions value and support practice;
go for small victories within the big picture, but talk about the big picture destination at every opportunity.

Do you agree? Can you help me improve this?

Audio commentrary

2010-09-27T09:23:00.001+01:00

Just reading Nicola Durbridge's contribution to Bates' 'The Role of Technology in Distance Education' published way back in 1984 I think. This is the era of the audio cassette and the chapter reflects on why it was useful for UK Open University teachers.
Durbridge first discusses audio, appreciating how modulation of the teacher's voice distinguishes audio from the written text. She then discusses the cassette in terms that will be familiar to those interested in mobile learning.
At this time there was no Internet and so the cassette provided an important contact point for distant learners, connecting them to their teachers between their infrequent meetings.
The use of audio commentary is a method described here and one that I believe is still valuable. In the age of the DVD, where films come with bonus layers of commentary, it is surprising that more is not done by academics or students in creating commentary recordings on texts and situations. The use of audio feedback, as a type of commentary on student assignments, is used. However, much more use of audio, the MP3 recorder and it's pause button, could be made. Commentaries or reviews of academic texts by academics is an obvious way of encouraging student engagement with key texts. Student commentaries, that might be compared, on readings is also a simple technique to implement.
Is anyone using such techniques?

podcasting and woolly thinking

2010-09-24T17:28:00.003+01:00

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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Why all academics should use generic audio feedback

2010-09-24T17:27:00.044+01:00

This is a rather provocative title and perhaps it is there to provoke me more than anyone else.
I'm not going to give specific references to the literature on this as I'm on the move, but if you're interested in what others have had to say on the topic please do contact me directly and I'll provide you with useful pointers.
There is some debate about the value of generic feedback compared to what is called personal feedback - that which is directed at the individual. Of course there is also feedback given to groups and so the feedback is given more in response to the group's approach and product rather than the individuals as such.
Generic feedback's weakness, however, is usually thought to be in it's untargetted nature: the danger is that nobody believes it is intended for them or that if it was really important the communication would be more targetted.
Conversely, in an age where there is a widespread recognition of the need for formative feedback, a generic approach can at least be manageable and timely. When it is based upon a sample of student work, at least the feedback can be returned whilst the assignment is still relatively fresh in the mind of the students.
Obviously this is important where the cohort is large, especially where it is given in response to early stages of a longer piece of work.
The art of the generic approach is to make it meaningful to all who receive it so they will use it and learn from it. This means effort should be given to embed it well before it is used in anger. It's use is perhaps just part of a broader dialogic module ethos.
The student should also know what to do with the feedback, and instructions about the use of the feedback should be embedded in the language of the feedback itself. It is not just a list of points to listen to, for example. Instead the feedback is introduced to set up the expectation that the learner will respond, and each point is accompanied with a clear suggestion about how they can take action now and later.
Finally, each student should engage with the feedback - personally. Though it is a general message the individual listener needs to see it as personal - "How does this apply to me?" It becomes valuable because it is perceived to be personal.
So, generic feedback can be designed so that it becomes specific by not just telling the listener about what was good and what could have been better, but by comparing their own work to the achievements and weaknesses of others.

Digital storytelling, media and plagiarism

2010-05-21T17:45:00.000+01:00

Education has put a lot of effort into addressing plagiarism in recent years using e-learning technologies like electronic submission, Turnitin and Google. How does plagiarism relate to digital media assignments such as podcasts and digital storytelling?
I've been involved with running machinina assignments over recent years involving students making good use of virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Second Life. When does what they capture become their own work? Hoe much of the environment represented in their dork belongs to them?
Richer media, whether aural or visual, introduces not only new layers meaning, bit new layers of rights (and wrongs).
On the face of it. It is simple: students are instructed to acknowledge the work of others and to not pass it off as their own. But with text this is relatively easy to check. With audio or video it's not.
Self-plagiarism is another issue - what is to prevent a student from submitting the same work, or something very similar, for more than one assignment lead by different tutors. This just happened to me and it was only coincidence that led me to spotting what was going on.
From the student's point of view, he had not made the connection that you can plagiarise with media other than text. And anyway, there's a question as to whether reused footage represents a breach of regulation in this case. I think the best I can do, until I hear about other prople's experiences, is to advise students to avoid reusing their own work or that of others without clearly acknowing the source.
I'd love to hear about any work that has been conducted in this area.

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Location:Lambra Rd,Barnsley,United Kingdom

Getting messy in the cloud (and finding ways to get tidy)

2010-05-13T09:38:00.000+01:00

One of the ideas I keep returning to, and have used personally, in my consideration of educational audio is a-PDP. This is one of the mobile and opportunistic approaches that I believe demonstrates the value of the medium.
With this idea the learner autonomously records a note at the end of their learning day (a personal point in each learner's day when they make some disconnection from their studies). The learner simply answers the following three questions: "What have I done today? What have I learnt today? What am I going to do about it?"
The next day, perhaps as they walk onto campus, they spend five minutes listening back to their notes.
Periodically they return to their audio notes at a time when they have the capacity to reflect - perhaps once a week for half an hour on a Wednesday. They spend that time listening back and writing (yes writing!) deeper notes around what they have heard, focusing more on the actions they took or did not take and what they learnt by taking those actions.
With this scenario in mind, technically what happens?
This is partly based on the idea that most students carry an audio recorder with them wherever they go; the Voice Memo tool on their mobile phone. Last year we handed out about 60 mp3 recorders to students and when my own daughter started uni thus year I bought her a tiny 4GB recorder for about £35 too. So whether it's phones, Mp3 recorder, laptop, netbook, flip video camera, or whatever, students increasingly have access to technology suited to supporting a-PDP.
Turning from the idea and the technologies involved in capturing the learner's thoughts, where do these a-PDP notes go? And how? And this, as with other great ideas for educational podcasting is where things can get messy.
The simple answer would be that the audio doesn't go anywhere. It stays on the device used to create it and that it where the learner listens back as the later synthesise their immediate thoughts into more considered notes. However, this is not good enough for some who like the idea of using a portfolio. So far I have described a-PDP as being entirely autonomous and informal - it sits outside the formal, planned curriculum. But student Portfolios have been an important and ongoing focus for educatators in UK HE since Dearing. Attempts have been in place to see PDP and portfolio systems integrated into academic practice for some time. Therefore, sometimes PDP practice isn't private and autonomous. Sometimes there is a requirement to manage and reflect in public, or at least within eye shot of your tutor.
Evernote is a system I've been looking at recently (Evernote.com). It offers free accounts and a premium service too It allows the user to make, store, tag and discover notes in a number of media including audio voice memos. These notes can be made using the apps Evernote have developed for a good range of smart phones and operating systems. The desktop application has more functionality, but the mobile app allows the user to not only make a-PDP notes but to manage and develop those notes in written form too. My only concern is with relying on the service in the wake of Ning's service closure to free users. It looks like a fantastic tool, but should we risk putting our stuff there? PDP is a long term commitment that a learner makes.
I'm also seriously considering using it to store my personal research database of abstracts and quotes culled from what I read. How secure is it and how long will it be there? Can I get my stuff out of it if I need to and in what format?
With these caveats in mind, it seems like Evernote is a great tool for education and it's support for audio is particularly refreshing, where we are thinking about a-PDP or the other ideas that abound for the educational use of audio notes.

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Location:Denby Dale to Sheffield

Educational podcasting and diversity - How can audio enhance inclusion?

2010-05-06T17:11:00.000+01:00

I went to a really useful workshop at Sheffield Hallam yesterday organised by my colleague Manny Madriaga and presented by Mick Healey from the University of Gloucestershire. The workshop, 'Reflections on developing an inclusive curriculum', was as thought provoking as I hoped it would be in terms of my media-enhanced learning remit.
A couple of things in particular stand out, mostly because they connect to current themes for me. 'Variety' seems to be my word of the month. It's a response to the often silly suggestions about the way that people rationalise their use of podcasting; that it meets the needs of student's various learning styles. A much more useful way of looking at this, I believe, is looking at the benefits of variety in the way we engage our learners. In this workshop 'variety' was less concerned with 'mixing it up' and more to do with offering and supporting several ways of meeting learning outcomes and being assessed. By taking a more open approach to 'content' (and allowing for this in validation procedures) and by offering a negotiated assessment approach, we not only end up with a curriculum that is more meaningful and potentially more creative, but one that is able to address the diverse needs of our students and which makes the most of their differences.
By far the largest proportion of disabled students are those that declare their dyslexia. As has been evident in the work I have conducted with Anne Nortcliffe in Engineering and other colleagues in Art & Design, working with audio in various ways has clear benefits to dyslexic students.
I recently ran an assignment in Computing where the written form was patently excluding many students from demonstrating their true capacity. Given a variety of tasks that included writing a report, giving a presentation and making a podcast, these particular students, almost without exception, were comfortable and articulate in producing a group podcast. However, the written work was, in the main, startling to me. The presentations were also good but, to me, lacked the depth that was evident when just listening to the students.
What is more, the students had no training in making a podcast. Again this surprised me, but they showed how resourceful they were. All I heard about it was the podcast they submitted. No tales of woe.
I am conducting some research around this module and others and will hopefully give more useful reports on this experience elsewhere.
One of the useful outcomes of the workshop for me was the emphasis on difference rather than disability. This, on the face of it, sounds superficial and PC, but it's not. My story of the Computing students demonstrates that if we are really interested in supporting knowledge construction and assessing it in a meaningful way, then the needs of all students should be considered in terms of the way they are able to engage (not in terms of the way we engage them, for example).
I marked the podcasts last, and until I did I had felt quite despondent. There seemed to be little life and ownership of the assignment by the students until then. What I saw as disinterest in the subject was, to a large extent I think, a disinterest in the medium used to convey their knowledge. Now, part of the assignment was indeed about report writing, which is why they were asked to respond in several media, and there were some lessons to be learned by all about such skills with the marks reflecting this. But as an unintend consequence of that assignment I was able to directly observe how some media and methods inhibit learning unnecessarily.
The second point to reflect upon from Mick Healey's workshop was cultural diversity. And here I have just some fresh questions. Healey referred to research by Richardson (2008, but I need the full reference) that describes the attainment of ethnic minorities. Where 62% of white graduates obtained good degrees Black and Asian students are not able to do, literally, half as well. Either BME students are not as good as white students or we're getting something terribly wrong in higher education. What do you think?!
So for supporting diversity amongst ethic groups, how can audio help or hinder? There are patently some cultural considerations which, I have to admit, I am quite ignorant about. Then there are issues to do with the spoken word and comprehension: I do know from our Audio Notes work that International students appreciate being able to listen back to lectures because the accents of lecturers are often unfamiliar to them (another case for reducing dependence upon the teacher's voice alone perhaps..? Another case for variety!).
But there you go, my research agenda continues to mount up. How can audio enhance inclusion?

Audio feedback – asynchronous thoughts!

2010-04-01T10:14:00.002+01:00

I’ve just been going through my notes from a mini-conference at the University of Reading in relation to their Assett project on media-enhanced feedback. This meeting happened in mid-January and time has moved on rapidly, but I found myself needing to sort through files on my laptop and discovered a few gems including these thoughts from a presentation by Claire McCullough (UoR) who presented on "Talking about student’s writing".
She uses a written summary sheet and uses audio to add detail. This is the mixed approach that I have written about before where one uses each media to its strengths.
She notes that, as well as providing the opportunity to personalise the feedback, the audio allows for a greater sense of space to comment and to properly acknowledge student effort.
She also reports that, though it is easy technically it is tiring and emotionally draining. This is a useful and timely reminder for me as I am currently considering the emotional dimension of educational audio especially in relation to emotional intelligence.
McCullough’s research has analysed what is actually said by those providing feedback in this way. The most commonly occurring comment was about setting tasks, though she highlights the use of elaboration and the use of examples: ‘what I mean is’ ‘for example’. This is a richer layer of feedback often not evident in perfunctory written feedback.
She says that students have an awareness of having real readers of their work, yet there is a greater need to be sensitive: “it can hurt at that proximity.”
She suggests audio feedback begins by asking the student if they have got their essay or summary feedback sheet. This is an important point that isn’t made often enough. Others have noted the need to begin feedback with more administrative concerns, such as stating the name of the student, the assignment title and its status. This suggestion that the student should have their work with them before listening begins to create a picture of the student’s academic use of the feedback and takes design from pragmatic concerns towards its pedagogic purpose. I usually add that the student should be clearly empowered as a result of the feedback: they switch off the recording knowing what specific action they must take next. She also suggests that it is a good idea to vary your feedback approach and do things to get students to revisit it.
I like quotes from students. They don’t always fit in neatly to a research hypothesis, but are rich nevertheless. McCullagh offers the student comment, “If I feel good with the feedback I will be more ambitious.”
Finally, she proposes something else that I think is important and resonates with my own Corridor Feedback model (where students move out of the class room to provide feedback to each other on project work in a conversation facilitated by the teacher). She says ask students to compare their feedback with selected other students. This contradicts the assumption that many have that feedback should be a private affair between a tutor and a student. Obviously it depends very much on the context, but if a student can benefit from a piece of feedback then surely a culture of sharing feedback can result in a metacognitive dimension in which students are able to appreciate their own strengths and weaknesses and those of others and so lead to a more supportive and social constructivist dynamic if properly supported. There are obvious dangers here, but it may be worth thinking about the principle. Indeed, in the ongoing work that I am conducting with Anne Nortcliffe we have found that students often do compare their feedback informally and report the benefits of having done so.
I’ve been so caught up with other work recently that the audio feedback strand has been quite neglected in the last month or so. However, this is about to change for several reasons. I should note that I am just marking some assignments as part of a small teaching team and I have not tried to convince the others to produce audio feedback for each student on this occasion. This is not due to fear of their resistance, more that the tutors and the students are possibly over-exposed to audio in other ways and I think written personal feedback may have more impact on this occasion (though we have used generic audio feedback constantly and will continue to do so).

Voice: the new text

2010-03-22T16:22:00.002Z

This article on CNN asks "Is voice becoming the new text (again)?"
[http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/03/19/voice.recognition/index.htm].
I like the question and I suppose it echoes the one implied in the papers I produce including 'Reclaiming Mobile Audio', which I presented at the IADIS Mobile Learning 2010 conference this weekend, describing the mp3 recorder as the modern day pencil case.
The CNN article, however, is about voice control, especially in the context of small interfaces that are tricky to manipulate. But it reminds me of a problem I have identified in the area of student-generated media: the anxiety that is evident amongst many when it comes to talking into a microphone, especially in public.
Will the advent of voice control help to normalise talking into recorders? Obviously the general user seems to be oblivious of others when it comes to making phone calls in public (though appearances may be decieving. I hate making phone calls in public and I know I am not alone). Voice control is different because it involves the speaker talking to the device rather than a person at the other end of the call and this is similar to using the device as a dictaphone. There is nothing normal (currently) in this behaviour. I haven't noticed people using voice control in public as a matter of course and the CNN article points out that it's useful for times when it would be difficult to otherwise operate the device, eg when driving. I don't use voice control on my iPhone because I would feel like an idiot, but if this took off it's impact on the student's interest in recording personal audio notes could be significant.
I generally don't record in front of others unless I am demonstrating the technology or interviewing people. This is an issue that requires thought in order to ensure students feel comfortable to verbalised their thoughts. One of the take-aways from IADIS was the opportunity to think about the relationship between audio and instilling learner confidence. This dilemma relates to that, but is in opposition to my thoughts at the weekend about how audio notes and video notes can instill learner confidence. Hmm, a few ideas are all emerging at once here. More later on the recorded voice, anxiety, confidence and emotional engagement undoubtedly.

Location:B6086,Norton,United Kingdom

Harnessing audio found on the Web

2010-03-04T10:39:00.001Z

I have just found this useful site for people (e.g. teachers) who want to aggregate their own podcasts using audio resources that find out there on the Web. It's called Huffduffer (http://huffduffer.com/). There's no reason why those bits of audio should not be your own.

It says,"Create your own podcast - i.Find links to audio files on the Web. ii.Huffduff the links—add them to your podcast. iii.Subscribe to podcasts of other found sounds."
This could be useful for those who have not got a VLE tool for producing feeds, but still the main challenge facing educators is where to put their own audio. As mentioned previously http://www.audiotube.com/ is one place, but at some point I must get round to checking this out and putting a list here.
If anyone has any suggestions, please post them here.

VLE is still dead

2010-03-04T09:23:00.002Z

I've been listening back to Steve Wheeler, James Clay, Nick Sharret, Josie Fraser and Graham Atwell from ALT-C last September. A great debate on a serious matter handled with great fun (as would be expected from all named).
A bit late then? No, timely. Very timely.
This story illustrates one of the main benefits I see in educational podcasting, so please bear with me.
I was there (indeed I contribute at some point with a comment about informal learning).
Firstly, it was packed out - a lot of people couldn't get into the session, so the recording James Clay made had immediate and obvious value by extending access. And I think the audio captures the event quite faithfully. The humour and excitement comes across well despite the lo-fi approach to the recording.
Secondly, it was good to hear the arguments a second time. I heard Steve Wheeler (who presented first) after I had already heard everyone else (live some months ago). The context for my personal engagement with his contribution was different. And it will be different again if I listen to it a third or forth time. On a revisit the whole context for what is being said is changed for all sorts of reasons. For example, this morning I listened to the debate while walking the dog along the canal on a sunny spring morning and this contrasts markedly with being there in a stuffy room after lunch and highly engaged, to the extent that I made a contribution in this heady debate. I can reflect on the contribution I made as well as those made by others (Was it useful? Did it make sense? How did people respond?)
Finally (but very much not least), this recording becomes valuable for another, unintended audience: my students are developing PLEs as a framework for learning about mashups and professional identity; all of this debate is not only pertinent to backgrounding the concept of PLE, but of mashups in general too. Therefore, Clay's recording allows me to bring in authentic and expert voices grappling in a lively way with the student's topic.
I am writing this on the train and may not be able to link from here to the recording. You can google it. It appears on JC's 'elearning stuff' podcast and is titled 'The VLE is Dead'.
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Revision notes are go

2010-03-04T08:59:00.001Z

I have just set the first tranch of audio revision notes loose on my students. Though I posted them with Podcast LX to Bkackboard a day or so ago I felt it was important to scaffold their use. I wasn't actually teaching this week, nonetheless I realised that it was important to take five minutes to explain what they were, why they were there and, most importantly, how they should be used.
A lot goes on in the module's podcast feed. Unfortunately Podcast LX only allows you one feed per module - this basically makes it a dumping ground. Within the module site you obviously embed the audio materials in the pertinent places, but the feed gathers such audio together and churns them out sequentially. That's why good titles and description fields are so important. The description field should not only summarise the content, but why it is useful and how it can be best used. This leads to a metacognitive approach and so aids engagement and hopefully learner reflectivity.
Why audio? Having made outline scripts, why don't I just give the students the scripts? NO! The who point is to help the learner re-engage with their own experience. They are asked to build upon these barebones not by putting things onto their own words; hence the need to introduce their use. I will be evaluating this technique, however I am not sure how the students in this module will react. Many come expecting to do practical, taught work and are finding university particularly challenging. But maybe the audio method will hit the spot. We'll see later.

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Opencast Matterhorn

2010-03-02T12:03:00.002Z

I've been thinking a lot about infrastructure for supporting educational podcasting and I feel like it's time to get something in place. The Opencast Matternhorn project is geeting quite exciting with release of 0.5. This video provides a useful overview.

Further information is available on the Opencast site.

Planning audio revision notes

2010-03-01T08:51:00.002Z

I'm on the train producing outline scripts for my module audio revision notes. The framework of '5 things you need to know about [any topic]' is working well. I recorded some on Friday and feel that one or two sentences is more than enough to prompt recall of some of the learning activities with which the students have been involved. I went through the five points, then told the listener how to respond by listing and developing the points in their own words, then repeated the five points. I will evaluate this method later. Obviously the main concern for me is the extent to which people can just learn by listening at all. Hence the need to embed guidance in each and every note on expectations for their revision activity.

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Location:Gray St,Barnsley,United Kingdom

Running out of steam (radio)

2010-02-26T18:18:00.001Z

A colleague asked me the other “How long will this audio recorder last until the battery runs out?” I shuddered. He always asks very good questions, and this was no exception. We have many of these audio recorders around – we use M-Audio devices. The quality’s great, but we’ve had them for a year and a half. Some get used a lot more than others and like any device you do get the occasional failure.

I knew my colleague was about to go off and run a series of focus groups and I suddenly realised I didn’t want to make promises that could well come back to haunt me. How old was the recorder he had? When was it last charged? What condition was the battery in? What settings was he going to use? I feebly said “Keep an eye and an ear on it. If it’s been charged up it should last you several hours… take two! Have one as back up!” He dashed off and I dashed off to our respective meetings.

I haven’t seen him or heard from him since (which I take to be good news!), but this little story highlights how fragile confidence is in such matters – if the battery had failed on him he would never touch the thing again. He just wouldn’t take the risk. I know that, and I wouldn’t blame him. But part of my job is to encourage people to pick up such devices to realise how they can open opportunities. If I set out caveats to do with battery failure, for example, it really undermines the encouraging sounds I strive to make.

Suggesting the second device was probably a good idea to inspire confidence, but not the sort of advice that is realistic in scaling the use of digital audio.

Casting around

2010-02-26T14:00:00.003Z

I have spent the morning caught up in thinking about casting, one way or another.

First of all, I spent some time responding to an article in the Times Higher Education that reports on concerns about the practice of ‘coursecasting’ in HE – the practice of recording and distributing lectures. The concern is that it threatens the jobs of academics. Well, in this day and age you have to be careful about responding to such things too glibly, but given that, it is often said if it is possible to capture your lecture then you probably aren’t lecturing very well. If you feel threatened by such technology, therefore, perhaps you should look at what you bring to student engagement and how you bring it. Now, that does sound glib, but I recognise whilst many teachers may understand the value of their engagement methods, it is possible that managers just don’t get it. Above all, for me, the idea of recording lectures is just not very interesting to me – claims about the benefits of coursecasting to the learner have never convinced me. Students might say they like, academic staff might say they like it (or not), but at the end of the day it implies that teaching can be commoditised in a very simple way – but that simple way takes us back in time to the age of rote learning. No, we should be looking ahead to see how technology now enables students and staff to take more engaging, active and authentic approaches to learning and teaching.

Next this morning, I find myself making the audio revision notes that I have discussed already this week. Well, it all worked really well and I think I have a simple, highly engaging little technique that conveys essential concepts briefly and invites the student listener to develop what they hear into written words that are meaningful to them. So, on the one hand I am ‘casting’ 3 minute nuggets, but on the other I am building into that an articulated expectation for each learner to work with that recording in their own way – to make sense of it.

And as I write, an MP3 recording is winging its way up to Slideshare.net where earlier I had already uploaded a PowerPoint from the workshop that my colleague Susannah Diamond and myself ran earlier in the week at a regional JISC event on Pedagogy and e-Learning. The intention is to add the audio to the PowerPoint and so create a Slidecast. Something I’ve not done before, and something I’ve not been inclined to do before. It seems relatively straightforward, but isn’t this just a way of coursecasting? Do I think it is valuable? Well, err yes… I want to communicate (with Susannah) something about our work which includes an invitation for listeners to participate. But you know, this may cause me to get shot by stepping into the territory of the pedagogue! Oh, I don’t know. I suppose all I can say is, things are not cut and dried here, and at least I’m reflecting on what I am doing.

By the way there’s a useful tutorial from Mike Bogle at the University of New South Wales on using this technique: Excellent video tutorial about Slidecasting…

And this is the Slidecast from our session (quite easy to produce as it happens)

SupportingUser-Generated Media-Enhanced Learning

View more presentations from Andrew Middleton.

I can’t manage myself!

2010-02-25T23:13:00.001Z

I’ve been doing some work on ‘managing your online identity’ with some computing students. I have interviewed Careers staff for the module podcast on the subject, quoted some discussions from useful podcasts, and linked to online articles (eg).

The best advice came via EdTech Weekly (as usual) who, when discussing the topic in episodes 153 and 154, say that you should use your real name for professionally related endeavours of which you can be proud and for more dodgy things use another name. If there are stories out there that do not reflect so well on you, then you must outweigh them with good deeds (why do you think I blog and podcast! – to make up for earlier sins, obviously!!).

Or maybe I’m making up for the sins of people who share my name.

Doing a quick regular vanity search using Google Alerts I discover this week that I have,

Met with a state leader in Oklahoma;
Written a blog post on click mentality;
Taken some photographs of a hill;
Been doing something with Honda in track and field (very unlikely);
Done something with a bicycle in Birmingham;
Struggled to keep awake in the opening ceremonies of the Olympic games.

…And now of course Andrew Middleton has declared himself incompetent in front of the whole world.

Actually, this week, only a small number of these would be true.

I conclude, therefore, that if you have a really unusual name you should take a lot more care than if you have a name that is shared by others.

…Though it can’t be bad if people think I’m a fit young cyclist.

Beating click mentality

2010-02-24T12:18:00.001Z

I was listening to a discussion on my favourite podcast and the phrase 'click mentality' jumped out at me.
I'm sure I've heard it or used it before, but it's one those things where timeliness is everything. It coincided with some vague thinking I've been doing towards articulating the benefits of audio as an engaging medium. It helps to explain, perhaps more usefully, why 'the novelty factor' attributed to techniques such as audio feedback should not be dismissed. Actually, I would tend to ignore 'the novelty factor' as being a useful attribute to considering the use of audio; after all, once you've done it once it's not novel anymore, so where does that leave you and your students? However, the phrase 'click mentality' puts it's finger on something (so to speak!!). It is about breaking normal or usual engagement patterns to ensure that engagement takes place. Some people talk about this in terms of the benefits of 'variety' in pedagogy. This all ties into my regular use of the term 'the extended learning envuronment' where the various media provide the facilitator with a range of engagement tools. Whilst some talk about learning styles, I think this is problematic and too deterministic. The picture I have of addressing diverse students with diverse types of knowledge is one where there is a highly usable and diverse toolkit, containing a tool for every occasion - occasions which only become clear at the last minute sometimes.
Audio can be used to address the dilemma of click mentality or automatic thinking, by accommodating diverse pedagogical strategies.

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Location:Sheffield, United Kingdom

Audio fluency

2010-02-16T16:48:00.003Z

We talk about 'digital fluency' at Sheffield Hallam. It's what many would refer to as digital literacy, but the use of the word fluency is significant: it recognises that the digital domain allows the user of digital media room to use the information, media and technology so that it meets their needs. This isn't just a competence thing, it's about becoming confident with digital information as a user or producer.
I have been exploring, or playing with, audio for longer than is good for me, but at least I can describe myself as 'audio fluent'. I can almost sense when using it would be useful - and by this I usually mean when recording something would be useful. I have posted on the "ai crucible" blog about a couple of impromptu techniques I used yesterday in a post called "Just-in-time-podcasting." One method is capturing important class discussions, and the other is a technique that fits in with a Digital Voices technique I'm developing called "Call the Expert."
This morning I've been trialing another of the Digital Voices techniques: Audio Summaries. Together with Anne Nortcliffe, a colleague with whom I have written several papers about audio feedback and audio notes, I interviewed students who had captured summaries made immediately after this morning's lecture on database normalisation, presented by a colleague in Computer Science. Students were asked to use their iPhones to create audio summaries of what they regarded as significant talking points. These were then shared in their Blackboard module. I'll be following the audio exploits of these students for a while to see whether this has real benefits and turns into a habit, or whether they're just keeping us company. I think it went well this morning though.
Yet another idea from Digital Voices kicked off last week: Digital Posters - a screencasting technique, and I have several Digital Storytelling escapades about to roll out including one with an MA student who had contacted me because they had seen a blog post I had written on Digital Scholarship (not much audio in that, but you can see the connection, I'm sure!).
I'd been feeling I hadn't been pushing the Digital Voices work hard enough, but I've just noticed that people are coming to it, rather than it being pushed to the people, and that is probably how it should be.

Podcasting and accessibility

2010-02-04T12:38:00.002Z

I hadn't heard much discussion about podcasting and accessibility for a while, but it's come up in several contexts all at once. I sense that this is more to do with coincidence rather than any particular driver. However, it is an area where more work is needed, and probably in the form of case studies. I met with a very interesting member of staff here this morning, who is disabled himself and who has a profoundly deaf student. Because of his disability and other interests he wants to produce captioned screencasts. Personally I am dubious about this being the best approach or one that is scalable and cost effective, but we have agreed to explore this further and, whatever happens, I expect to learn something useful to build upon the article I wrote a few years ago for TechDis.

Finding out about Audio Feedback and other emerging technology-enhanced pedagogy using Challenge Card activities

2010-01-28T12:22:00.003Z

I received an email from Dr Mark Glynn who participated in the A Word In Your Ear conference on audio feedback held at Sheffield Hallam last December. He asked about the Challenge Card activity I ran during the day - he thought it was an approach that he could use and asked for some tips. This got me thinking - what had I intended and why did it work well? I thought I would attempt to document this, because as these things go, this was a simple activity and I have already run it twice since.

The Challenge Card activity worked as follows: delegates received two postcard size cards in their conference pack. One was headed Challenge Card and the other Tips. In the opening welcome session I asked delegates to respond to the prompt on the card: "I would like the Challenge Circle to address the following question that I have about the use of audio feedback:" The Challenge Circle was on the programme for later in the day. Or rather, circles - there were three planned to accommodate separate discussions on audio feedback and '...pedagogy', '...the student use of feedback', and 't...the use of technology'. The topics were selected based upon my previous experience of thinking and writing about rolling out educational media-enhanced pedagogy. Between the opening session and these themed discussion groups I arranged for the Challenge Cards to be displayed in the networking area so that people could mull over the range of challenges posted.
I saw the activity as providing a way to achieve two objectives:

the need for a diverse audience to articulate and set their own agenda and to begin to operate as an impromptu network
to make a collective statement to inform further research from all those involved.

Therefore, I personally saw there was an opportunity for the conference to help drive forward what I believe to be an important emerging area of educational technology-enhanced practice. Since the conference I have already used the technique twice more, so I agree with Mark: it seemed to work!
In terms of tips and thoughts on running such an activity, in no particular order:

I selected 3 different topics that I felt would embrace the diverse challenges with which people arrived, based on my own knowledge of the topic. I think this worked pretty well. There was quite an even split in the groups and in the challenge cards I collected back later.
I told people that the activity was important in that it would not only inform discussion on the day, but quite probably inform strategic change and innovation in the sector (I will be sharing all this on the website and in an academic paper and I hope others will draw upon it too).
The tip card exercise ("what tip can you share with others about using audio feedback?"helped to make it clear that this was not just an opportunity to moan, but to work constructively as a group with a shared interest.
Asking for just one challenge was realistic and helped to keep it focused. Equally I could have asked 'what do you hope to find out or discuss?', but presenting it as a challenge helped to keep them focused.
The card activity at the beginning of the day helped people to focus on the proceedings that followed and I hope it helped with networking during the conference: "So what was your challenge?"
The challenge boards gave people a chance to browse the things that were important to others.
The challenge circle discussion groups provided a first step to tackling some of the challenges (and as soon as I can find a bit of time I will share some of the outcomes from these!).
Finally, I transcribed the challenge cards at the earliest opportunity before I lost them and retrieved notes from those who chaired the sessions for the same reason.

I intend to use this information to inform development work at sector level (Media-Enhanced Learning Special Interest Group, JISC, HEA, etc) and to inform workshops I run here at SHU about audio feedback.

Thanks to Mark for asking the question. Time moves on and things don't get captured as often as they should in my life. It gave me the opportunity to think this through on my journey in this morning, and I hope it is of some use to others.

Changing Dave: Too Much Dave rides again

2010-01-06T23:37:00.001Z

Dave Cormier, who I listen to each week on EdTech Weekly, is having his third attempt at posting a video blog each day for a year on uStream. You might think this is narcisistic, and he would say that he probably agrees with you. However, I really appreciate the reason Dave gives for doing this and it is something that I have experienced through podcasting and blogging. And it is something that makes podcasting, and such things, valuable to our students I believe.

In ‘Too much Dave episode 2’ he asks,

“Can the medium work? Does it make sense to talk out over an extended period of time? Am I going to change over the course of that process?… I found a medium [podcasting/webcasting] and, instead of learning it, I developed in it.”

(He also talks about logging the many ideas he has, but though that is interesting too, it’s not what I want to pick up on here).

When talking about learner-generated media I often talk about articulation and the value of having to put emerging understandings into spoken work for an audience. But this notion of self-publishing is something I have thought about and personally experienced to some extent, but until now, have not seen it discussed. It will be interesting to see how Dave develops through his personal exploration – but I can promise him that I will be watching all the time. But that, I would guess, doesn’t matter too much to Dave. The idea of an assumed audience is just as valuable as a real audience, if not more so. This exercise in self-development requires a trust that should not be expected of an audience anyway: ‘let me try to put things into words and then forgive me, or at least bear with me, if next week or next year I appear to contradict myself.’

In education, where we have responsibility for others, the value of self-publishing in this way presents as many problems as it presents benefits. ‘It presents a dilemma’ is possibly the best ways of putting it: we know that tentative articulation in a public space presents a wonderful opportunity to learn about yourself, develop your self-efficacy and refine your conceptual knowledge; however, as a tutor, what right do I have to ask you to expose yourself in this way. Ethically, perhaps each learner, however young or old they are, has to discover the benefits of speaking (and indeed writing) for a digital public for themselves. But I would love to find some students who wanted to take the risk of talking to a global audience…

Do I really need to support you?

2010-01-04T17:20:00.001Z

Fundamental to everything I believe about digital audio and video is the notion that anyone associated with a university in the 21st century should be able to pick up the technology and run with it; the days of technical support should be over.

However, it’s day one following the Xmas break and three episodes immediately remind me that it’s not that simple.

Firstly, plans for the next PPP SIG (or Media-enhanced Learning SIG as it has been renamed) have been posted. As usual the afternoon sessions are parallel workshops featuring, amongst other things, the ever-popular hands-on workshop. Indeed at the ‘A Word In Your Ear conference’ that ran at Sheffield Hallam prior to Xmas I realised that we really needed a hands-on workshop there for people who were new to using audio feedback. Why? And why was I right?

Secondly, a colleague at another university sent me a paper to review in which he refers to the technologically capable student of today, and I find myself challenging that idea – I know many young students who are not particularly interested in such technology or media, and many more who are quite frankly clueless about how to use it and why it might be a good idea for them to do so.

Thirdly, given that I am currently snow-bound and nowhere near my place of work, I have had a rare telephone conversation today and, in attempting to describe what podcasting is and how this might be useful, I realised that I really did need to meet this member of staff face-to-face to begin exploring why it might be useful to her and what different technical approaches might be feasible.

Three little episodes that, together, remind me that ‘rolling out podcasting’ is still not a trivial matter, however much I know that it’s all about pressing the red button and using a little imagination, a touch of knowhow, and a dollop of blind faith and confidence.

Principles informing audio transformed pedagogy

2009-11-20T11:59:00.001Z

At the recent Podcasting for Pedagogic Purposes Special Interest Group meeting held at the University of Bath (10/11/2009) I facilitated a workshop session titled “Audio Transformation: Audio voices as catalysts in a refreshed learner-centred curriculum.”

The aim of the session was to involve those attending in discussing how audio might be used in a learner-centred curriculum. It drew upon the 176 ideas generated by participants at a previous SIG workshop, requiring participants here to critically review the ideas that had been generated.

In order to orientate participants at Bath I thought it would be useful to propose some principles: general statements of what we hold to be true and useful. These were discussed and modified and are presented below for further comment:

Students and teachers value the personal connectivity that the recorded voice affords;
Students learn by articulating their understanding to themselves and others;
Students value learning activity that is meaningful to them
Students can learn from independent and social enquiry and problem-solving;
Neither knowledge nor learning is static, resulting from negotiated and interpreted changing information;
Teachers value being able to make personal interventions in order to encourage, direct, and challenge their students in facilitating learner-centred pedagogy;
Recorded digital audio increases access to the voices of teachers, peers, experts and publics;
Recorded digital audio allows for engagement that is not constrained by time, place and traditional methods;
The act of reviewing information, argument and conversation reveals deeper levels of understanding.

How useful are these to you? Please comment.

Technorati Tags: podcasting principles education instruction teaching learning

Searching for the words – throw away the supplementary material

2009-11-11T23:49:00.001Z

I posted earlier about the most recent MEL SIG (PPP SIG) event, but I wanted to share with you something that I learnt today; something I’ve been trying to put into words for a while. Indeed I may have blogged about it before, but struggled to find the right words.

Much of the literature on podcasting talks about it in terms of being ‘supplementary’. This has always annoyed me, partly because in the worse cases it is true, but also that it devalues the diverse components and contexts of a learning experience. In my session today someone picked up on this whilst reviewing the ‘idea cards’ I had presented them with. In their response to one particular idea they also struggled to find the right word initially, but the word ‘complementary’ emerged eventually. That is right, I think. In a blended learning approach, the online components/artefacts complement (rather than supplement) what is offered in the physical space, and vice versa. If audio (or other online material) is worth having at all, then its value to the learner may actually be critical. It may be ‘just the thing’ and if there is any doubt about this, then it probably shouldn’t be there at all.

‘Supplement’, to me, suggests “You already know this but I’m going to give you this extra thing so you know it more!” No, ‘the extra things’ are there because they are possibly critical resources to one or more learners.

#pppsigbath09

Wisdom of the crowd

2009-11-11T23:42:00.001Z

I’m waiting for a train at Bristol Temple Meads following another very rewarding Podcasting for Pedagogic Purposes Special Interest Group event, this time hosted by the University of Bath. I’m feeling totally dazed – these events can be very intense and precious – in a good way. Even though a SIG event might look like a conference or even a training event, they are not. I think we do it very well in the PPP SIG: we get a keynote to set the scene, followed by someone from the region who is able to report on a particular topic or case where digital media innovation is being applied, and then we follow through with a menu of workshops and conclude with a panel session or plenary. Why this works so well is that it is a scaffolded approach, moving from recognised ‘expertise’ through to involving everyone in contributing to some very engaging sessions. The Thunderstorm (stand up for 10 minutes and tell us what you’re doing/why you’re interested) sessions are brilliant – a SIG recognises the value of all of it participant’s questions and experience and learns from listening and discussion what emerges.

At Bath Steve Wheeler kicked things off and did the perfect job. His slides are on Slideshare.net and hopefully speak for themselves.

Podcasting and the Listening Culture

View more presentations from Steve Wheeler.

We try to record whatever we can to distribute them on the PPP podcast, but unfortunately we didn’t record Steve’s presentation – everyone thought someone else was doing it. Another lesson learnt? The whole presentation is very useful, but look out for the baked bean tin video! A wonderful example of how a short clip of media can stimulate discussion! Amongst many topics touched on, Steve challenged the notion of learning styles (especially VAKs). A SIG like this can’t say that enough. (If you’re not up to speed on this look at Coffield F., Moseley D., Hall, E. and Ecclestone, K. (2004) Should we be using Learning Styles? What research has to say to practice London; Learning and Skills Development Agency). Steve also referred to Shawn Wheeler’s tag line: “it is important enough to say to the class, it is important enough for the class to hear it again… Say it again with Podcasting” (from the Adventures In Podcasting podcast which stopped casting in March this year). Oh yes, the derivation of ‘education’ is ‘educari’ – to draw out from within. Very nice. You can read Steve’s blog at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com

Martin Jenkins from the University of Gloucestershire was invited to talk about Digital Storytelling – a perfect topic for the SIG who have decided to rebrand themselves as the Media-Enhanced Learning SIG (MEL SIG). Martin is based in the Centre for Active Learning at Gloucester, a title that usefully indicates how we should think about media in the 21st century curriculum: media to facilitate active engagement. He talked about a social pedagogy – the collaborative activity of teller-listener relationships. Digital Storytelling is about the reflective or reporting student voice and uses the visual channel (photos, diagrams, video) to complement this narrative. He described how useful media-enhanced pedagogy could be in enhancing the learner’s voice and emotional engagement – something I may have said myself when talking about learner-generated media. The session was recorded and I recommend listening to and watching this (links to all recordings will be posted later in the comments to this post or found on the PPP wiki). I will watch this again as I have noted the phrase ‘compressed argumentation” – I like it, but to check how Martin uses it. To me it describes how the technology requires the students to be selective and clever in how they make their point, certainly something that applies to student-generated podcasting as much as digital storytelling. He has material on the HEA’s evidence.net from his funded work including a useful looking framework or two that I need to think about more.

The University of Bath (Geraldine Jones and Gabrielle Edwards) presented on a case study of Digital Storytelling where they have used it to stimulate student’s critical thinking skills. They talked about how they had assessed the stories made by students and the challenges they had found. They used a peer assessment model where half the cohort reviews the other half according to the specified criteria. They compared the student’s assessment to the tutor’s own assessment graphically – students are apparently a lot more generous or less critical! Assessing time-based products is challenging, especially when the cohort is large, and peer assessment looks to be a practical way of managing it (as well as constructive), so it is disappointing to find it hadn’t worked so well for them on first iteration. However, they are refining their initial approach in this year’s iteration of the assignment. They had used Voice Thread in this work and I should have asked about how they’d managed the licencing as when I contacted Voice Thread a couple of years ago they had a free licence for education in the US, but they told me they couldn’t make the same offer in other territories. Maybe things have changed.

Both of the presentations on digital storytelling highlighted the adverse perceptions of students at the outset of the assignment, but contrasted these with the positive responses once the assignment had been conducted. Again, something I recognise as a dilemma for media-enhanced assignments in general.

In this post I wanted to reflect on the SIG’s own approach to user-generated activity – the active sessions that recognise the resource we have at such events in the many people from the FE/HE sector who share a common interest and diverse experience.

I ran a session on Audio Transformation. This picked up on a session I ran in Warrington in June 2008 at which 70 people generated 176 ideas for how audio could be used to enhance the curriculum. I am desperately trying to reduce these wonderful ideas down to a manageable ‘50 Ideas for Educational Podcasting’. They will be published in Section 3 of Creative Voices, the book I am currently editing on educational podcasting. This afternoon the people who attended peer reviewed the initial ideas from Warrington – and indeed contributed some new ideas too. We then reflected on what they had liked about the ideas they had each been looking at in their groups and what they had not liked. The activity was intended to be a way to engage people with the adaptability of educational audio and I had difficulty in pulling people away from their group discussions. They seemed to appreciate the ideas I had put in their hands and were having some fairly intense, and I hope meaningful, conversations about what they liked or disliked; working out together what was good and possible with educational audio. Great. The thing here is that the people who attend are sometimes quite experienced with podcasting, but they’re sitting alongside people who have not started to think about it, so for me I witness a perfect example of the social construction of knowledge: ‘experts’ being challenged by ‘novices’ and vice versa.

We had thunderstorm sessions from David Gill at Swansea on how he is making brief archaeology vodcasts on field trips to Greece and Rome and how he values the technology as something that allows him to bring such sites back into the VLE and the lecture. He mentions the sounds of the insects as adding an authentic layer to the videos and how he appreciates the lo-fi user-generated qualities. Again something that can’t be said enough.

Carol Comer (Chester) presented on how she had run a student-generated assignment and the challenge of assessing such work. She noted how assessment was perhaps not so different to assessing other forms of individual presentation.

At last I saw Andy Ramsden (Bath) talking about his JISC funded QR Codes work – normally he and I are presenting in parallel sessions. The connection to podcasting (which I think he’s discussing in the Creative Voices book – where’s the chapter Andy?) is the way QR Codes allows the mobile subscriber to easily connect to feeds, avoiding the difficulties of entering long URLs with clumsy fingers on small screens.

The plenary was particularly useful. Several important themes and challenges had emerged during the day for people: accessibility and podcasting was discussed and again people were able to respond to the question ‘should I provide a transcript’ – the answer is probably not. Techdiss have a paper on their site somewhere that I wrote about this a couple of years ago that explains more, but it is also worth noting that ‘podcast’ is not so useful a word in this context, there being a massive continuum of formal – semi-formal – informal ways in which we would expect to see audio being used. Ethics and staff and student development is another topic – and again the SIG can pool its knowledge and thinking power in considering this important subject and in attempting to produce some recommendations on it. Again, the SIG benefits from the wisdom of its crowd – I hope an online working group will attempt to deal with this. If you have expertise or ideas or energy in this area then we need you!

I better stop here. For me PPP SIG – or rather MEL SIG as we are now – is the sector working together at its best. Something that I know the HE Academy appreciates in the SIGs it has seeded.

#pppsigbath09

Media-enhanced learning – the chicken, egg, cart and horse thing

2009-11-04T13:02:00.001Z

The the latest US ‘ECAR study on the undergraduate student use of information technology, 2009’ [p.18] reports that,

"Although more than a third of respondents reported using [podcast and video and audio-creation] software tools at least once per year overall [in their personal and academic lives], only 5.8% were using podcasts, 6.0% were using video-creation software, and 5.0% were using audio creation software in courses during the quarter/semester of the survey. These findings, similar to previous years' survey results, suggest that students are learning and using these technologies, but not necessarily for formal academic reasons."

Though the ECAR study looks at trends in 39 US higher education institutions, I think a UK study would show similar findings. Indeed, myself and Graham McElearney carried out a small scale study at our respective institutions in Sheffield this year, the results of which will be published next year in a forthcoming chapter about the student use of podcast feeds, and though the questions and methods were different, the student awareness of podcasting and their interest in using it academically are similar.

Following on from the previous post here (see Voice Paradigm), the news from ECAR again makes me ask “How does a medium that, according to a relatively small number of users, has clear benefits become accepted as a mainstream educational tool?”

The use of the word ‘formal’ by ECAR is particularly interesting and perhaps perceptive. In my work on student Audio Notes, an analysis of the uses for MP3 recorders that students told us about, there was a spread of formal, semi-formal, and informal academic applications.

Personally I don’t mind where the benefits are found, only that they are found and exploited by our students. It is interesting to me therefore that audio and associated devices are useful in helping our students to learn, even when that is outside of our formal provision.

To answer my own question therefore, it is perhaps more useful to look at the third of students who use such media as reported by ECAR, rather than the 5% or so that encounter its formal application. I would hope that the formal application escalates, but that will be determined by cultural and institutional factors, in particular the capacity of academic staff to innovate pedagogically. The barriers to formal innovation may be resolved somewhat by following the lead of semi-formal (unplanned outcomes associated with the formal planned curriculum) and informal (from beyond the formal planned curriculum and those directly involved with it).

Reference

Smith, S.D., Salaway, G., and Borreson, J. (2009) The ECAR study of undergraduate students and information technology 2009.Volume 6, 2009. EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research

Voice paradigm

2009-11-04T11:04:00.001Z

This week’s issue of the Digital Campus podcast (Digital Campus: 46 Theremin Dreams) got me thinking, as most things do, about digital audio and, more to the point, the role for the asynchronous digital voice in education.

As the episode title suggests, part of the discussion is about unusual interfaces – a Theremin is an early electronic musical instrument most noted for its difficult to control pitch manipulation and its therefore inevitably sci-fi sounding music. The instrument responds to the proximity and positioning of the player’s hands which don’t actually touch the device. Bryan Alexander, research director of NITLE, is a guest on this episode and discusses progress on the 2010 Horizon Report, which is likely to be released at the January annual meeting of the Educause Learning Initiative as usual.

The connection I made, in listening to this discussion, is about the leap of faith that is required by the abundant users of technology to change, en masse, the dominant interface or environment they use to mediate their collective interest. It might be argued that the Theremin is a' ‘bad’ musical instrument and therefore a bad example: not only does the sound it makes not conform with what is known, accepted and expected, its user-interface is radically innovative too and has not led to a sea change in the design of musical instruments since its invention in 1928. This can be compared to the wide adoption of the synthesiser, an instrument capable of creating similar sounds, but one that has a relatively familiar interface, even if that piano keyboard interface really does not make a lot of sense from a usability point of view. The synthesiser literally has a point of user contact that the Theremin does not have, and historically that has become more important than an interface that closely fits with the the natural functionality of the human user.

Bryan and the others in the episode discuss various other innovative interfaces as they speculate about the adoption of future technologies. Earlier in the episode there is some discussion about the e-book, a regular topic on this podcast, an emerging technology with obvious applications for education that also breaks the mould, albeit in a half-hearted way, of user interface . On the one hand you listen to such discussions knowing that the basis for the discussion is sound: that many of the interfaces we are stuck with are bizarre and archaic (the music keyboard, the computer keyboard, the door handle…) whilst realising that it is not a personal or even minority leap of faith that is required to find and adopt something that is more suitable, but a leap of faith and change of habit by the masses.

If anyone can do it, Apple can do it. The company who are best known for their innovative interfaces and operating environments are likely to be the company who can change the hearts and minds of users of technology and media. As someone who has been a long time user of iPods, and as someone who has held off until relatively recently from buying an iPhone, I feel as though I have finally seen the light when it comes to usable mobile technology. The iPhone is a device that makes sense. I have been through several mobile phones over the years and loathed them all – I am not a phone person. The iPhone, however, is for me the ultimate usable mobile computer. I won’t go into that in detail here, but I will note that one aspect of this usability is its voice control functionality. Though voice control is not new a concept, its integration into a successful mass market application does signal a potential change in the mass perception of ‘digital voice’ – something that is important in my work of developing pedagogy around the asynchronous availability of learner, teacher, expert and public voices.

The idea of voice control helps us to normalise our perception of voice as something that can be used beyond those situations that are already familiar and reassuring to us: being physically co-located or being directly connected. It is relatively strange for us to speak into a device other than a phone, and for some of us including me, even that is relatively strange. The Audio Notes project we ran at Sheffield Hallam last year also showed a change that is encouraging: 52% of the 60 students who took part, of their own volition, regularly used the MP3 recorder devices we gave them to make personal notes. Furthermore, some of these students shared their personal notes and other recordings with their peers. I found this very encouraging; learning for me is about personal construction and articulation. This usually happens in our head and in education is often mediated by writing technologies, but I do believe that learning will increasingly and commonly be mediated through devices that can capture and store our voices in years to come. The spoken word allows us to try out our understanding and the recorded voice supports this, allowing us to be more tentative in our understanding.

The mass leap of faith, that one might call a paradigm shift or rather a paradigm extension, that sees the general academic user embrace the asynchronous digital voice interface and learning environment, still feels uncertain. However, it feels a lot less daft than the Theremin as its essential product is familiar and, due to the mobile phone and the advanced control interfaces such as those built into the iPhone, its user interface is growing in familiarity too.

photo by Nick J Webb 2008 used under a Creative Commons licence

Evil audio – isn’t it?

2009-10-26T16:01:00.002Z

Rant warning.

But it’s educational, so hold on.

Take a deep breath. Don’t pick up the phone. Don’t slam it down. Meditate. Meditate. Deep breaths…

On Friday I spent miles too much time working on a proposal, but it was worth it. The idea, I think, was very good. I won’t be specific here, but I left work with a buzz: everything added up to a very good project that would demonstrate further how digital audio was the perfect medium for engaging the learner, in a supportive and challenging way, at a critical point. We just had to put the suggestions in front of some academic staff who teach in particular atypical environments who would be willing to adopt the suggested techniques and become project partners.

Well, finding them wasn’t difficult because the problem we are trying to address is relatively well known. So I wasn’t surprised to see an email from my colleague saying that X was ready to take part. I hit reply - “Great” and moved on… then paused. I noticed that this invitation had taken place via email and academic X’s response was there. It was fine, and then I noticed a couple of things that made me go “AAAARRGGGHH!”

I don’t want to quote the email directly as it is email (i.e. notoriously good at getting people tied up in knots), but to paraphrase,

he has issues with particular technologies primarily audio;
audio is great for some students with learning difficulties
audio makes it too easy… it can be another form of watering down the system.. making it too easy.
he is also concerned about the legal implications associated with students using audio documentation of what the tutor says.

Let me elucidate a bit.

1. why would anyone have issues with a technology when they are being invited into a small project where one of the headline statements is about funding for consultation and support throughout the project – isn’t that a bit negative?

2. The second statement seems to blow both audio and disabled students out of the water in one fell swoop!! Sometimes audio does help students with disabilities and sometimes it really doesn’t. As with any technology the most important thing is to understand who is excluded by it and how this can be addressed. It goes without saying on this blog that audio has some uses beyond the occasional disabled student!

3. Audio makes it too easy – does it? Always? How? Why? Why not? Now that is just a weird statement (as I say it was written in an email, so I should shrug it off quickly). Firstly, if learning (as in students really are learning something meaningful) can be easy then isn’t that good? I’m surprised he didn’t say ‘it makes learning too much fun’. But the whole point of media-enhanced learning is that it provides another way of challenging students sometimes. Key words for me when I talk about media intervention are “challenging, orientating, motivating, and personally engaging.” What the hell has easy got to do with anything?!

3. (Continued…) ‘watering down’. Go on, say it. “Dumbing down.” (Probably used watering so as not to be accused of being prejudiced). Actually, I am stuck for words. Other than, I take that personally as an insult. You don’t know me, obviously. Let’s move on.

4. Why should he be concerned about the legal implications associated with the tutor using audio? Does audio make him behave against his better judgement?

All I can assume when I read a response like the one I received is that I am not sure I would trust some people with an audio project!

The real point of this post

Firstly, apologies to the tutor in question. I see the response was posted at 5:34 on Friday. Why are any of us in education still fixed to our email at that time on a Friday? I am with you there – we’re all trying to do a little bit more to make learning better.

But the real educational point is, the otherwise positive response to being invited into a technology-enhanced learning project reveals what I believe to be the assumptions that many academic staff have as they are faced with an invitation to use digital media, and in this case, digital audio.

Why isn’t it more common that the initial response is,

“Digital audio? I wonder how having this might help me to improve things?”

And remember, the person referred to in this post has just been invited to a potentially prestigious, career enhancing project.

Perhaps the answers to the questions raised here lie somewhere amongst the facts that the email was posted after close on a Friday three weeks into semester. Myself and my colleague notoriously work silly hours doing things like writing bids because we’re ‘driven’!, Audio, its design, management and BENEFITS are unknown to most staff, especially those who may be involved in an evaluation project like this. And if you’ve been around long enough, you’ll know that technology projects can be a headache even when the educational developer says “Things have changed. Look. You just press that red button!”

OK, life is just hard sometimes.

feedBACK

2009-10-20T13:14:00.001+01:00

Getting audio back and forth is the main challenge for audio-enhanced education. There are many approaches people use, whether they are students and academic staff: email, network drives, USB sticks, CDs (yes, there are one or two that will burn a CD). What other ways do you know about?

My ideal scenario is a highly usable approach to giving and receiving audio files. I think we are getting there rapidly.

There are two things I want to share here.

1. Usability of one-size-fits-all systems

I’ve just been self-observing (a strange process of trying to write meticulous notes as I go through a process – possibly scientific) of how I got screencast feedback to some students. Without going into too much detail, I take the word ‘feedback’ to mean ‘useful response.’ It is often associated with (wait for the big word…) ‘assignments’. Assignments can be serious things and it is important to have a robust method of handling the assignment. Hence, Academic Innovation at Sheffield Hallam have done a great job of designing and developing an Assignment Handler for Blackboard that really checks everything is as it should be, and delivers feedback to the learner in whatever form it needs to be. It even holds back the student mark until the student has engaged with the feedback. However, when you’re not doing ‘serious assignment’ feedback it’s not the right tool.

In the case I describe I needed to get some screencast feedback to a small number of students very quickly on a task plan (‘task’ being a small project that is not accredited but, nevertheless, highly formative). I would not be seeing them for two weeks, so an electronic delivery mechanism was needed and, as with project-based work of any size, immediacy of feedback is essential to avoid unnecessary learner deviation.

However, setting up and using our Blackboard tool just didn’t feel like the right approach for a small number of students conducting a task in four groups. But screencast video is relatively big, so I didn’t want to email it and I didn’t want to negotiate to have my VLE quota extended. In the end I used Vimeo as it allows you to upload video and assign password protection to it. I am not sure whether I should have done this, but it got the job done quickly. I’ll evaluate this with the students in the next week or so and think about what a Feedback Handler might look like – probably a drag and drop type tool that allows you to either drop students onto feedback files (feels too cruel!) or feedback onto students (also sounds cruel!). Either approach sounds good. It would also support students flinging feedback at other students. The system in which it operates (i.e. Blackboard) would recognise the interaction and create a record of it so that it could be traced and the feedback could be reviewed from time to time.

2. Usability – asynchronous iPhone conversations

The Voice Memo tool on the iPhone is great for recording feedback and other audio notes. It even lets you trim your recordings. It’s only weakness is that you can’t rename the files (as far as I can see) on the iPhone before you email them.

The Audio Notes iPhone app on the other hand allows you to rename and colour code the notes you make.

The whole usability question around audio feedback distribution seems to have disappeared – as long as you have your student’s email addresses in your iPhone address book: record > rename > send. Job done. The iPhone is the ideal MP3 recorder, useful not only with audio feedback but other requirements where normally an MP3 recorder would have been used. Even it’s capacity is much greater than the 4Gb m-audio device I’ve been using over the last few years.

ALT-C 2009 paper on audio feedback raises concerns

2009-09-16T16:36:00.002+01:00

Martin Hawksey @ MASHe has picked up on a research paper delivered at ALT-C (http://repository.alt.ac.uk/641/1/ALT-C_09_proceedings_090806_web_0207.pdf) by Sue Rodway-Dyer, Elisabeth Dunne and Matthew Newcombe (University of Exeter)that reports that "students have high expectations in relation to feedback; many anticipate the kinds of individual face-to-face interaction they experienced in school and are not easily satisfied by other ways of working. In addition, offering audio or video feedback that is supportive to learning in both affective and cognitive terms is not necessarily easy." In this case study it seems that expectations were not adequately met. It begs the question of how well addressed they may have been and indeed whether it is really possible and appropriate to address learner expectations.
It highlights how important it is to understand innovative educational technology as complex and therefore requiring design that precisely matches the situation in which it is being used. Unfortunately there will always be myriad perceptions of any given 'situation' and so design will never be perfect. We talk about 'podcasting', 'audio feedback' and so forth, but as we do so we use a careless and clumsy big brush. I just had a meeting with an academic and we got to talking about the A Word In Your Ear audio feedback conference on the way out.
I said, "I'm surprised you haven't submitted something for the conference, you've been using audio feedback haven't you?"
He said, "Oh yes, I tried audio feedback but it didn't work."
For me the interesting word there is 'it' - so audio feedback can be 'it-ified'!!? There was no sense in his response that audio feedback should be adopetd and adapted. We were walking out of a curriculum design meeting in which I had heard people talking about the unscaffolded approaches they take when under pressure. This idea of design and adaptation needs to be pursued...

Report from ALT-C 2009

2009-09-09T18:13:00.002+01:00

Taking a breather from a hectic conference. Podcasting has just about the right level of presence in the programme. I think everyone I have heard talking about educational podcasting has recognised that 'the subscription question' is a thing of the past. In other words, when we or our colleagues use the word podcasting they are comfortable with it and its meaning of asyncvhronous, downloadable audio that is most likely to be accessed alongside other materials in the VLE. The University of Leicester DUCKLING project this morning confirmed that that was how their students had used the podcasts and that is quite significant given that I think the University of Leicester's IMPALA project had recognised that there is something important about the feed itself. Indeed there is, but it seems that for the moment, education recognises the importance of the immediacy of the audio medium in connecting academic, student, expert and public voices.
Graham McElearney's session of their use of learner-generated podcasting was fine too and thankfully the user-generation of digital media has been recognised by Epigeum's educational video awards where I have ended up being one of the finalists!!! Don't hold your breath, but as a likely runner up, I am really pleased to see ALT and the sector recognising that digital media has come of age ie anyone can do it and it is a versatile and fertile area to explore.
We had a PPP SIG meeting last night - a great range of discussions over the hour including the identification of some important themes for us to take forward. Quite a small group of about 8 took part, but it allowed everyone to make a contribution. I think we have recognised that the SIG can develop understanding around the ethics of podcasting so we'll be looking for ways to explore related issues that will probably be primed in a podcast discussion in the next few weeks ie after ALT we'll need to spend some time at our desks getting on with our 'real' jobs. We should do more at a distance, though I think we all really appreciate the f2f ironically.
I've done two papers and a poster related to asynchronous voice - but all reports on what I regard as quite different projects.
Perhaps there will be more to report after tomorrow...

Twitter overrated

2009-08-05T13:11:00.002+01:00

Nielsen report that, in the US at least, young people are not fuelling the escalation of twitter usage (http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/teens-dont-tweet-twitters-growth-not-fueled-by-youth/).
Isn't this predictable? Is it, as we have seen with podcasting, that the more mature advocates can seen the benefits of it, but the masses don't evaluate the technology in the same way? There's one comment on the Neilsen post from a younger person that says Facebook updates suit them fine thanks very much. This resonates with responses I have had about educational podcasting: the VLE is where we expect our content.
Having said that, i'm getting more interested in using 3rd party providers for student generated podcasts. I really feel I need to evaluate the options now. Is there a facebook podcasting app? I can't believe I haven't looked! Let me know if you think I should be looking at any apps that students will feel comfortable with for publishing their own digital media content.

Profcast for Windows

2009-06-17T22:22:00.001+01:00

They’ve been promising a version of Profcast for Windows for years. It seems they’ve been busy in the last few months as they’re now on private beta 5. I always thought Profcast lloked like a good application – one of those that would make you doubt your conviction to Windows.

It’s not all there yet – they haven’t implemented some of the crucial features such as automatic generation of RSS and publication (which makes me wonder how far they have got). All the same it’s good to see that there’s an app designed for education that, when it’s completed, will enable the vast majority of educators to publish there own podcast feeds. The logo and the name say professor and lectern, but I’m thinking well beyond that little box. Hopefully you’ll see one or two encouraging posts on the subject here soon.

Design principles for educational podcasting

2009-06-03T09:49:00.001+01:00

I have worked through the 90 suggestions I have received having run my “What makes a good educational podcast?” activity at two national conferences. I’ve also reflected on my first draft posted in April and the comments I received then. Here are the guiding principles for designing educational podcasts that resulted from that. It should be noted, however, that as frequently discussed by me here and elsewhere, educational podcasting can take many forms and so many of these suggestions will not always be relevant,

The podcast should be short and well-paced
The intention of the podcast should be clear
A well-signposted and structured approach should be used
A hook to engage the listener should be used in the first minute or so
A conversational approach should be used in preference to monologue
The role and level of expertise of participants should be established
The content and style should be appropriate for the learning context
The ideas and discussion should be focussed, relevant and thought provoking
Listeners should be empowered to take specific action
Acknowledgements and references to source and follow up information should be available
The strengths and weaknesses of the audio medium should be taken into account
The production quality should be appropriate for the intended audience.

Each of these principles requires qualification of some sort – what does “short” mean, for example? Therefore I imagine these being used to inform thinking and conversations where they can be reflected on in relation to specific local requirements.

I would appreciate your comments, as always.

A Word In Your Ear 2009

2009-05-22T14:06:00.002+01:00

I am planning a conference to look at how audio feedback is being used in higher and further education. A call for contributions will be issued in the next week, once we're all back from the bank holiday. In the meantime, you can find out more at the website here.

Tw-audio

2009-05-21T23:26:00.000+01:00

"Did you know that you can play audio in Twitter – using http://twt.fm" - thanks to Alan Carr @darkhorseradio

Self-directed use of podcasts

2009-05-14T21:57:00.000+01:00

I've been reading this paper (Margaryan and Littlejohn 2008) about the so-called Digital Natives. It's got me thinking about student's self-directed use of online media. The paper mentions that in the two subjecxt groups considered 77 (61.1%) 6 (20%) respectively used Video/Audio Clips for informal learning, and that for Podcasts it was 18 (14.3%) 1 (3.3%) and for mP3 player 51 (40.5%) 7 (23.3%). I wondered what distinctions were implied in those categories. I conducted a survey in our learning centre recently of 50 students and I had about a 4% return on students who told me they used their MP3 player to play found learning material. I'm guessing in the paper referred to here a large percentage of self-directed informal use will have been YouTube videos (I interviewed a student today who was telling me how she valued being able to go to YouTube to visualise concepts). Then there's iTunes U of course - I wonder how many students are searching iTunes for materials? Or sites like Slideshare.net?
"Margaryan, A., and Littlejohn, A. (2008) Are digital natives a myth or reality?: Students’ use of technologies for learning. Caledonian Academy, Glasgow Caledonian University, UK. Report published 11 December 2008 . Available online at: http://www.academy.gcal.ac.uk/anoush/documents/DigitalNativesMythOrReality-MargaryanAndLittlejohn-draft-111208.pdf, last accessed: 11/5/2009"

Google Talk for Audio Feedback

2009-04-30T16:10:00.002+01:00

Thanks to Martin Hawksley for this:

Example of using voicemail in Google Talk for audio feedback from Martin Hawksey on Vimeo.
See Martin's post for a couple of limitations in the techique. All the same, the point here is we have audio recording devices wherever we need them. Some of the ideas I have had for using MyChingo are satisfied by this. I think Google are developing the voice apps too, so this option is not likely to disappear.

Designing Design Principles for Educational Podcasting

2009-04-21T13:06:00.002+01:00

I've had a think about the what was suggested on the Post-Its at Beyond Walls during the session that Graham McElearney and myself ran on Design Principles for educational podcasting. One thing to reflect on should be do we need or can we have design principles? Well, I hope I have phrased these ideas in such a way that they are generally useful. Some of the suggestions, such as the frequently metioned 'keep it short' principle, have been modified so that the design is not necessarily short, but concise, etc.
Anyway, here's a list of 12 principles. Your comments are welcomed.

Effective educational podcasts will usually present,

Intention and clarity of purpose
Speakers whose role and level of expertise is properly introduced
Ideas and discussion that is relevant and well articulated
An awareness of the learning situation or context
Invitations and challenges, or 'ways in and ways out', for the listener
References to, or acknowledgement of, related sources of knowledge
A hook that engages each listener
Conversational voices rather than formal monologues
Structured and well-signposted information, punctuated with music or audio transitions where appropriate
An awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of the audio medium
Information and ideas that are concise, well-paced and straightforward
Suitable clear production quality as appropriate for the intended audience.

Google knows the future's loud

2009-04-08T16:26:00.003+01:00

Just catching up on feeds and have discovered that Google are more than interested in a future that includes audio. According to this BBC tech article, voice searching is the way to go, and they're not alone. When mobility or GUIs get too small for finger-based input you need an AUI (audio user interface, of course!). Talking is always good - education will realise this very soon :-)

Design Design Principles - still designing...

2009-04-08T15:18:00.003+01:00

I finally managed to type up the remaining post-it notes from our session at Beyond Walls 2009. People were asked to note down one thing: "What makes a good educational podcast?"
Note: I don't agree with many of the ideas here, so don't quote me by mistake!!! Many I do agree with and, by and large there was consensus on some areas as noted in an earlier post here. I'll do a follow on post at some point on design principles - perhaps if we get a few comments on this post.
It would be interesting to be able to profile the people attending. I'll have a go, but please comment if you can help or if you have your own ideas to the question.
As with any educational podcasting event there was quite a mix. Here I would say there was a more than avaerage amount of system administrators and learning technologists. I am guessing that the technical backgrounds dominated the educational development and academic backgrounds. Much of the day's proceedings discussed the Steeple project, iTunes U, open source systems. Of the academic interest there I would say most of it came from Universities where Content and Lecture are very important words: Oxford University, Cambridge University, UCEL, Trinity, Open University (sorry if I appear to have thrown anyone from these institutions into a tiny, simple container - we know there's more to you than what I'm simplifying here!). Probably a better way of putting it is that I didn't hear too many people talking about podcasting the student voice - Lynne O'Brien from Duke, Cathy from Goldsmiths, Will Stewart from Bradford... Hmm, I guess I can even name them! That said, let's take a look at some of the ideas that were generated.

What makes a good educational podcast?
· Clearly thought through
· Clear speech
· Good production quality
· Short sentences
· Multiple voices
· A hook e.g. a strong story
· Chapterised
· Engaging and entertaining content
· Interesting guest voice
· Web addresses for future information
· 60 seconds to present ideas
· Thought provoking
· Invitations and opportunities to think
· The podcast should be easy entry and incrementally harder with each episode
· Good production quality
· Well organised content
· Provocative ideas
· Brief - =<15>

Use a bleep or other signal to signal new phases in the podcast

Media Frenzy - don't underestimate academics

2009-04-08T11:12:00.003+01:00

I ran another of my Media Frenzy challenges yesterday for a group of about 30 academic staff. Working in small teams. 'Frenzied' participants undertake a series of challenges over two hours or so, and then we talk about it. It's an opportunity for staff to make stuff with digital media and then to think about embedding such techniques in their own practice. Participants volenteer to take part so academics who are totally disinterested don't sign up (the frenzy is intended to work virally to catch more later). However, there is a real mix of those who 'like gadgets and technology' and those who just want to find new ways of engaging their students (of course, these groupings are not necessarily exclusive!). And that's how it was yesterday.
This is all about creating an opportunity for academic staff - one in which they can work things out together and inspire each other. We had quite a few techies on hand, but most of the time we were standing by. I think the topic of the weather came up at least once.
I suggest teams attempt to complete 3 challenges in the session - all teams managed this yesterday and did very well. Very, very well! The event starts off with a small ice breaker activity where team members do a skills and confidence profiling exercise - 'who's good at what?' There were one or two left behind afterwards I was clearing up and the odd thing I noticed, on looking these over (I don't usually want or need to see the profiling forms they fill in together), was how many ticks appear against each name for the various technical competences. There is a very good spread of skills out there - we're just not harnessing them properly. Even if they think their skills are better than they really are, these forms indicate unspoken confidence. I normally only ever hear abiout lack of confidence, because, as an educational developer the sort of questions I ask ellicit those modest responses.
So, it might be worth elliciting responses that help people to talk about the things they feel good about (as the profiling form does) in the future.

AudioTube

2009-04-08T10:44:00.001+01:00

A new home for audio education?

Educational podcasts: hosting, posting, ghosting and boasting

2009-04-05T12:19:00.001+01:00

I’ve been thinking a lot about the development of institutional infrastructure for educational podcasting recently, and in terms of assessment or evaluation of student-generated work, the value of publishing to a public. Having attended two events recently that have a bearing on infrastructure for digital media, I thought I would make one or two observations.

This is a very complex area in terms of technical infrastructure. The discussion can be simplified by considering educational podcasting in two ways: the recording and publishing of lectures; and everything else.

The recording and publishing of lectures is a specific activity and therefore institutions can relatively easily plan and develop and infrastructure around the practice. For the same reason the commercial and open source interest in this practice has been fairly active: PuMukit; SURFmedia, virtPresenter REPLAY, tegrity, echo 360, mediasite, vbrick. Each of these systems offers a slightly different technical take on the situation, but essentially work on the assumption that lecture-based content is central to higher education.

Some of these tools may indeed be useful for capturing non-lecture-based learning activity, and I would love to explore this more. Obviously some of these tools would work well in capturing student presentations, so perhaps setting them up in places other than the lecture theatre might be useful. There’s a cost implication and so if I was to do something along these lines it would be with virtPresenter which I saw in Oxford on Friday at Beyond Walls. I have subsequently had a closer look at this. It looks very useful, but as a non-network-techy person I don’t know what would be involved.

So that could handle the Boasting (students driven by presenting to a public! – sorry, stretching things for the sake of a headline here), posting and hosting aspects. The ghosting part of this is about the need (or not) to archive material. Again with lecture recordings it is clear that the reusability potential is something that is worth managing – if this was your inclination, you certainly wouldn’t want to be delivering, recording and storing the same lectures each year (can any lecture ever be ‘the same’ – I would hope not, but that’s another discussion perhaps).

Attendance at Beyond Walls 2009 reminded me that some institutions are focused in on the value of recording lectures to the same extent that I am not. It is worthwhile noting this difference and then recognising the need to avoid not tread on each other’s toes by dissing the various approaches – in both cases the institutional commitment to developing infrastructure is urgent and if each camp confuses each other’s message, then it’s not going to help too much in persuading organisations and institutions to invest in this important area. The difficulty is that, as I have suggested, technically the picture is a lot clearer for those interested in capturing and representing lecture-based scenarios. If we turn to student-generated materials and other less formal learner-centred pedagogies (and there are 100s of ideas out there), infrastructural requirements become a lot harder to define and develop. One aspect of this, and I’ll leave you to identify the many others, is around the supports of rights and ethics (a big set of topics – does anyone know where I can get a useful digest of this topic?).

Finally, it’s worth just throwing a few links into this post relating to the Beyond Walls 2009 conference held at Oxford University on the 3rd April 2009:

virtPresenter: www.virtpresenter.org
OpenCast Community: www.opencastproject.org/
Steeple Podcast Portal: www.podcast.steeple.org.uk/content/view/
Steeple wiki: www.steeple.org.uk/wiki/
Beyond Walls Conference: www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ltg/events/beyond2009

Technorati Tags: beyond09,podcasting,Steeple,OpenCast,lectures recording

Designing Design Principles session, Beyond Walls 09, Oxford

2009-04-03T16:29:00.001+01:00

We asked participants[ants for either questions or tips to share in our Design session earlier. Here they are typed up – and our flip chart notes.

Technorati Tags: beyond09 podcasting

Tip: Is your content suitable for portable listening? / Additional materials

Q: How do you decide which voices to us?

T: Important to introduce the topic - listener can't visually scan content

Q: how important is technical quality of ed podcasts? How much quality do you sacrifice?

T: Don't snuffle or breathe into mic: use fuzzies

T: Script the recording

T: Provide overview with timings

Q: How do you know if people really listened to (whole) podcast?

T: Have a list at end of day about

T: Important to introduce topic

T: Tell learners how to use the podcasts

Q: How can you count the words in a podcast?

t: a good edu pod: engaging query/challenge; directions for more info; chapters; level audio; duration; variety of speakers

q or t???: mics; portable recorders

Q: most on campus pcs can't run iTunes (effectively). How can we support on campus LAN users? Google Reader?

Flip chart notes from our session on Designing Design Principles:

- Keep short

- Responsibility to the voices taking part

- Conversation engages

- Represent different positions in a conversation group

- Knowledge - what form does it take in a podcast (don't assume teacher-centred)

- Editing other people's voices - take care

- Editing - don't go there!

- User producers where ever possible

- Quality - love lo-fi

- More voices : more colour/texture

Is podcasting a purpose?

2009-03-27T10:50:00.001Z

HEFCE have released a very useful update to their 2005 e-learning strategy. It reflects a more sophisticated view of learning technologies, including podcasting. However, the following paragraph caught my eye and demonstrated the lazy misconception of learning technology that this paper sets out to address!

“It is clear that technology is used for a variety of purposes: e-assessment, e-portfolios, podcasting, blogs and wikis were all highlighted as tools supporting learning and teaching.”
[p6]

I may be overly picky, but I wouldn’t describe any of the listed technologies as purposes – they are tools or technologies, and though the sentence indicates that the tools are used for ‘supporting learning and teaching’, it still feels wrong; I read it as comparable to a sentence such as ‘the building supports learning and teaching’ which might make more sense if it said ‘the design of the building supported learning and teaching'.’ You may think I’m wrong or too pedantic, but it’s a question of emphasis. This is important when you know that ‘doing podcasting’ is meaningless, it is how one is making use of the technology that is all-important. I think it is important to highlight this because if we are to find the academic innovation that is supported by such tools, we have to think about how we can best apply them to meet our particular contexts: they don’t give us pedagogic solutions, they enable us to devise appropriate methods. Podcasting is not a purpose, it is a generic term for a technology that offers educators more ways of enhancing learning and teaching through careful design and application.

Ref:

HEFCE (2009) Enhancing learning and teaching through the use of technology: a revised approach to HEFCE’s strategy for e-learning, 2009/12. Higher Education Funding Council for England

Technorati Tags: educational podcasting,strategy,HEFCE

YouTube EDU… another iTunesU problem for educational media

2009-03-26T23:17:00.001Z

These big US tech companies do seem to believe that the lecture is the be-all-and-end-all of academic practice. I suppose I should be excited that Google have released YouTube EDU, but given that the directory is stuffed full of online lectures my heart sinks.

I’ll take a closer look now and perhaps find some more creative ways we could make use of it.

Technorati Tags: video,youtube,itunes,google,educational podcasting

Time for audio?

2009-03-23T11:33:00.001Z

The BBC Technology blog explains that audio's time has come! Rory Cellan-Jones explains that it has been easier for people to post video than audio – until now. Yes, if you’re not concerned about editing your work, but just getting it out there, then that’s right. YouTube is wonderfully simple and I have pined for a decent audio podcasting site, one that will store your media rather than just allow you to link to it (like Blogger). There are a few – I use Podomatic with Alan Carr for the Podcasting for Pedagogic Purposes podcast, for example.

The BBC post usefully lists one or two others: Mixcloud (currently in invite beta mode and designed really for musicians) and Soundcloud (designed for music sharing and constrained to 5 tracks per month for the free non-pro account).

AudioBoo looks interesting. A very new product, but I can see this could fit in well with my student audio notes project. Somewhat similar to Gcast perhaps. Very much an iPhone app at the moment… but apparently very much in development.

Technorati Tags: audio mobile iPhone

Audio feedback research

2009-03-23T09:54:00.001Z

I just thought I’d share a link to Clare’s blog. She’s carrying out research on audio feedback.

Technorati Tags: audio feedback

Habits change

2009-03-15T07:54:00.002Z

Having move out of Sheffield for 8 months to a place 1 hour away by train, and now back into Sheffield (a 45 minute walk to work), I have observed something about the habits of those who use mobile technologies for learning.

On arriving back in Sheffield, my interest in listening to podcasts has risen again. The one hour train commute (2 hours a day) provided me with a useful time for writing on the laptop, not one that I found useful for listening to my iPod. I really enjoyed that working space and found that the train commute was usually painless, and strangely, being immersed in a throng of other commuters it was a very peaceful place, one which allowed me to focus on writing.

But it wasn’t particularly a good space for listening to podcasts, at least fnot or me. The noise of the commute (which didn’t affect my thinking capacity) made listening difficult. Then there is the visual distraction aspect, in particular on a crowded train, the eye contact problem – where do you look? Or rather, who do you look at?

Now I’m walking to work again I find myself immediately investing my time and money (I just received my new 120Gb iPod classic) in podcasts. On my return to Sheffield I now walk down the busy Ecclesall Road, alongside the noisy busses. This means I have the volume up louder than it probably should be. Nevertheless, in terms of productivity, other than listening to an mp3 player there’s not much else you can do when walking (though I have been known to read an academic paper or two, but this is not to be recommended!).

I think most people considering educational podcasting now recognise that, in general, podcasts should be in the range of between 5 and 15 minutes in duration in order that the listener is engaged and remains interested . But for a 45 minute walk I really want a 45 minute podcast, or perhaps a couple of 20 minute episodes. So my listening habit determines what I listen to and the way it is designed.

I suppose the simple point I am making here is that we cannot expect any group of learners, en masse, to listen to podcasts whilst travelling, whatever their means of transport might be. A personal decision, based upon a number of personal conditions, will determine this. Even if we supply listeners with things that make it more likely for them to listen (e.g. an mp3 player), there a still a number of factors and personal preferences that will mean they are either uncomfortable or unable to listen. If we recognise the personal conditions that may affect and dissuade many from listening on the move, is there a similar range of personal factors that will determine people from listening in static, more controllable situations? How realistic is it to expect any group, en masse, to listen to an educational podcast of their own volition?

Tec

hnorati Tags: mobile learning,podcasting,learning

(Even) More things we need to understand about educational podcasting part 3

2009-03-13T11:33:00.001Z

Those of us interested in educational podcasting, especially where the value is in listening, rather than making, need to understand more about learning from listening. Given the mono aural channel used to engage the listener what do you do with the visual channel? Should you shut your eyes for best effect. Many pieces of research on educational podcasting have confirmed what I have found at Sheffield Hallam, that students do not in general listen to education audio on the move – or in deed want to. They listen instead at the computer by accessing the podcasts directly from the VLE. However, how much attention do they then give the audio? If they are inevitably distracted by other information, what does this mean for the design of educational audio? I would guess that it means the audio has to be highly engaging and brief. Even demanding. Recorded lectures, for example, don’t seem to fit this bill.

Martin Doe presented a fantastic session at a recent Podcasting for Pedagogic Purposes event in Leicester, a recording of which will be posted to the PPP podcast as soon as it’s been edited and OK-ed.

Slides from his session (Distractions from Podcasts) are on the PPP SIG’s wiki and cover a research exercise he conducted as part of the masters degree he is studying with the OU.

Technorati Tags: educational podcasting,cognitive psychology,learning styles,listening

More things we need to understand about educational podcasting part 2

2009-03-13T11:13:00.001Z

Assessing student-generated podcasts – Having just worked my way through 50 pieces of student group work I have some strong views on this, but I’m sure these will tone down with the passing of time! Let’s say, it’s quite time consuming.

However, more work on the assessment of student-generated digital media work needs to be done. I am not aware of any literature that sets out to hit this one on the head. On 2 March, however, my colleague Louise Thorpe presented an Educause webinar on the subject (http://net.educause.edu/eliweb093).

My views (condensed as far as I can) are that if we introduce student project work into the curriculum we do so because we recognise the engaging, perhaps authentic, framework that it creates. Essentially a project is an opportunity for the learner to engage with a topic in a way that interests them within the constraints of a brief. The benefits are that they are motivated, and so open to learn. The selection of resources they choose to encounter, use and discard (whether people, events, literature, media, etc) is a meaningful process. This process is made even more meaningful if their own exploration and construction runs in parallel to group members who together select and negotiate. In doing this they are engaged through authentic argument and not only develop their knowledge, its application and synthesis (and possibly/hopefully creativity), they are learning about themselves and the way they work with others and learning about how they need to develop socially in order to be effective.

Therefore, assessment should not be concerned with the products of project work, in this case the student-generated podcasts.

However, why would the students engage in making the product if they did not believe in its potential value, especially the value assigned to it by their tutor? After all, the currency we use in education is ‘the mark.’

So, my question then is, what other value systems or currency can we use if we decide that we do not want to mark product and evidence of process. Secondly, if we still have to mark evidence of process, how do we do that?

The answer to the first question is that the value of the product is found in the social context. In my recent assessment the publication of the podcast to a publicly accessible podcast feed to create ‘a gallery’ of the student work was a useful device (though I have not completed the evaluation to confirm this assertion yet). Knowing your work will sit alongside that of your peers hopefully drives the project, but also knowing that this work will be judged by those who encounter it is important. Before posting the work however (the students could not do this themselves on this iteration of the module) I felt I had to listen to the work and to also give students the option not to publish. This was to protect them. If I recognise the real learning value comes from the process the product can still be dreadful without adversely affecting the learning. But students don’t need to be encumbered with dreadful products, which cannot be irradiated. On the other hand, where students are pleased with their work they should be encouraged to take pride in it. Many of the students told me how proud they were that they had achieved the task of making the products.

The answer to the second question, how do we assess the process?, is that first we have to find a way to capture the process. I think this is exactly what many others are doing. Individual students need to be involved in recording the whats, hows, whys, of the process using a reflective blog or diary, and then should probably synthesise this into the assessed reflective essay. I know some academics who are prepared to assess the blog entries, but the synthesis of those entries (using either stated themes or user selected themes) is useful. This is what we did. However, I’m not convinced that students were properly engaging with the reflective blogging during the module. We didn’t check as we wanted the students to own this private reflection process, however I think we should have checked – it’s just so important to ensure they are going through this metacognitive process.

Technorati Tags: podcasting,student-generated,assessment,evaluation,method,audio,media

More myths and realities

2009-03-13T10:07:00.001Z

Myth: Recording lectures is a good way of incorporating new technology into my teaching

Realities:

The myth implies that new technology is a good thing per se. It can be helpful, but at the end of the day tech is just tech in just the same way that cars are not good things or bad things – it is how we use the technology that is critical.
Recording ideas, concepts, arguments, examples and the theoretical substance to support further discussion and revision is undoubtedly useful, but it is likely that there are more effective and productive ways of doing this, often involving the student voice.
Listening to lengthy monologues is not engaging. Though students may be reassured to know that having a recording of the lecturer means that they are not dependent on interpreting their hand written notes, whether many of them really use the facility and find that it is usable is questionable.
Amongst academics who continue to use lectures the best of them are either exceptional orators or make the most of the social opportunity by engaging the students in ways that are not easily recorded or relayed through the recording.

Technorati Tags: lectures podcasting recording

Myths and realities about the use of digital media in curriculum design

2009-03-12T10:20:00.001Z

I wonder if anyone can develop this or would like to challenge these ideas. I have been asked to suggest some myths and corresponding realities with regard to the use of digital media to enhance digital fluency in learners.

Myth #1: Students will welcome the opportunity to engage deeply in assignments that incorporate the use of digital technology

Reality:

Digital technologies do extend the range of ways in which we can engage students and promote deep learning but this choice is not always a good idea. It can confuse students, it can create tension around the equivalence of options and can add to the workload of the academic in terms of offering support and assessment;
Assignments need to be properly scaffolded so that the strengths and opportunities of particular media are properly understood and exploited by student producers. E.g. if using audio students should be guided in understanding how this can be used to involve voices in their work (opinions, ideas, challenges, etc);
Key academic skills include the arts of editorial selection and critical analysis. These can be fostered through the learner production of media, but without guidance student digital media production can highlight lazy thinking;
Some students will welcome the opportunity to express their ideas and their research in new media, but some will find it particularly challenging. As learners, they may be uncomfortable with putting their voice to their ideas! This can be a useful experience, nonetheless.

Myth #2: Providing the option for the student production of digital media recognises that students have different learning styles and preferences.

Reality:

Advocates of digital media frequently cite learning style theories as a reason for offering a range of media in their teaching. Many of these theories are academically dubious (Ref research Becta, Demos studies, others?);
Students can learn more effectively when they are engaged beyond their comfort zones, especially where this is properly supported by tutors or peers. The conversation *around* media is often more important than the knowledge conveyed by the media itself;
Incorporating digital media into the curriculum does help to introduce varied diet, and variety can stimulate learner engagement.

Technorati Tags: learning styles,digital media,digital fluency,literacy,learning,preferences,teaching

More things we need to understand about educational podcasting part 1

2009-03-08T13:25:00.001Z

I can see this is going to run and run as things occur to me.

Reusability and repurposing – If educational podcasts can be thought of as the production of learning objects in any way, then their reusability needs to be considered. I am slightly dubious about the significance of this as, for me, a great strength of digital audio is the currency of the voices it brings to the learning environment. Gilly Salmon in the IMPALA book Podcasting for Learning in Universities, raises the subject of reusability and she stressed its importance again in the keynote she did at Leicester for the Podcasting for Pedagogic Purposes SIG on 24 February.

As someone with a history in reusable design (it was the subject of my Masters dissertation) it is one thing I have contemplated in terms of educational podcasting, but that I don’t think is particularly helpful. It is so easy to re-record chunks of audio I don’t know why you would consider doing it in general. There is the issue of storage I suppose – if the topic I do next year is very similar to the topic I did this year then why not repurpose that? Yes, repurpose it, but don’t reconstruct parts of it.

There is also the issue of the resource where the value isn’t in its currency, but in the access it provided to a particular voice. So the need here would be to ensure that you have a good system in place for managing source files and uncompressed edited material.

I think there is perhaps more of an argument for repurposing (using the same material in different contexts i.e. the same material without the need for re-editing or republication).

So this comes down to a question of design and is a question worth exploring – how can (should?)

Technorati Tags: reusability audio podcasting repurposing

audio knowledge objects be designed for repurposing? And there are principles that I won’t list here, but essentially involve removing context specific references and designing the object so that it can be embedded amongst other context rich material.

At this point it starts to get quite technical and I find myself asking ‘Am I prepared to advocate such an approach in my staff development role?’ Oh God, it’s complicated enough…

Still, something that does warrant further consideration.

Things we need to understand about educational podcasting

2009-03-08T10:31:00.001Z

As someone who spends too much time thinking about educational podcasting I firmly believe that it’s potential is as a mainstream educational tool. The basis for this is that the means of production is highly accessible (if different to the way we are used to operating) and, most importantly, audio is a highly rich and intuitive media.

However, I have been carrying out some work on the infrastructure that needs to be in place in order to enable a mainstream engagement with the potential, and there are a lot of holes that need to be filled. This is essential work if the simple technology is ever to be in a position to instil confidence amongst those who have not yet touched the technology. Undoubtedly I will blog about that work soon.

There are other holes in our understanding – that is the understanding of academics, educational developers and students that will hold back, and even jeopardise, progress in revealing the potential of educational podcasting. I thought it would be useful to start noting some of these here.

Rights – how does the law view educational podcasting? This is a question that came up in a barcamp held at ALT-C last September. Though the law is the law, and podcasting is governed by the same laws that affect production of any content and its performance, there is clearly uncertainty in the educational sphere of what this actually looks like. A good set of guidelines is needed. ‘Copyright, Performance and Ethical Rights in Educational Podcasting’ would be a suitable title if anyone feels like writing such a document.

Content – How do we talk about the audio that is conveyed in educational podcasts? This is a strange question and one that I find difficult to articulate. In my own work, I advocate creativity in considering how podcasting can enrich learning. To put it simply, this highlights that podcasting is simply a technology platform and that what happens on that platform is open to whoever is using the technology. To look to the extremes, a recording of a lecture may represent the ideas of some, whilst the sharing of student-generated notes might be an example of another extreme. In these two (of many, many) examples, the role of the audio is quite different. Indeed there are multiple roles for each content depending on who the user of that content is.

In the first example, the tutor user may see the content as a nutritious feed of information or as a way of ensuring that every student has access to events that have been and gone. They may even think that the content has a role in different contexts (next year’s teaching, marketing of the course, supplementary material for related modules, etc). For the student the same content, if deemed at all accessible by them, may be considered a potential revision source; a substitute for the note-taking they would rather not do in lecture; the be-all-and-end-all of knowledge they will need in order to pass their exams.

In the second example, of student-generated audio notes, the primary purpose is as part of an autonomous learning processes where the making of the note is itself the central learning mechanism. There is further use, potentially, in that the learner may revisit and reconsider their notes. Then this content might be shared reciprocally with other friends or cohort members, formally or informally. If shared the content takes on another role, that of a constructivist social measure: ‘how does my thinking compare to their thinking’?

In both cases, and all those in between, content is very complex.

However, many of the ideas I have about educational podcasting do not relate to podcast content in this way. The making of podcasts can be enough. The delivery of content is a by-product to the really important aspect of learners learning by making – this is known as articulation in authentic learning (Herrington and Herrington 2001) and is related to Constructionism (Papert 1986).

Vygotsky and Kozulin (1992, Thought and Language. 6th Edition. MIT Press, p.219) note that "Thought undergoes many changes as it turns into speech. It does not merely find expression in speech; it finds reality and form."

Selection, negotiation and decision-making all require deep engagement from the learner in this process. This the point in the process of making content that really intrigues me, whether that articulation is independent or collaborative. The content production is important, as without the expectation of authentic delivery, the reason and motivation for learning conversation and construction would be impotent. This creates a problem for the assessment of learning therefore, as I have recently discovered in assessing 50 pieces of audio group work. The students expect you to assess the end product, whereas, as tutor, you are really only interested in assessing the learning that came out of the process. Assessing that learning is relatively straight forward (for example, we required the submission of reflective essays), but should the tutor discard the podcast products from the assessment process? We didn’t. We felt obliged to recognise the creativity and technical competence evident in the work. There was quite a long process involved in listening back to the products in order to do this, it should be noted (50 x 7 minutes). However, perhaps the value of product in this case is adequately reflected outside of the assessment process. In our case, we produced a student podcast gallery (i.e. a module feed), and that was connected to an expectation for mutual communal responsibility.

So, content is as complex as what is meant by educational podcasting itself.

Creativity – creativity is another aspect of educational podcasting that really needs to be explored. There are two aspects to this (nothing is simple of course!). Creativity in curriculum design, and developing creativity as a graduate attribute. Both of these subjects require (and will have!) chapters written about them. But as things stand we understand that digital media upsets the norm and that upsetting the norm can be a creative process.

What are the other big gaps we need to explore as we develop a better understanding of the potential for educational podcasting?

Podcasting and beyond

2009-01-02T13:03:00.003Z

I've been looking at digital audio from an educational perspective for what seems like a long time, and compared to others I suppose it is. My interest first began when I appreciated that when considered in its own right, not tied into a multimedia platform, it could be remarkably simple to work with. This belief in its simplicity has remained key to my interest, recognising that its simplicity offers an opportunity for all. Shortly after my initial development work around the notion of Digital Audio Learning Objects (DALO) the concept of podcasting emerged; others in education took more interest in the medium, but perhaps often constrained by the technical package that presented itself: media as a delivery mechanism and the notion of feed; two powerful characteristics of the podcasting concept. However my interest in DALOs resulted in an attempt to create taxonomy of sorts - I was interested in considering the categories that might exist for educators working with audio, and this interest necessitated in thinking beyond the delivery of the tutors voice.
I get a sense that educational podcasting this year will do two things: it will disappear for those who have not attempted to push the boundaries; it will result in some very creative and valuable applications for those who consider what can be done with more voices in the virtual spaces that we have access to.
I have just submitted a paper that I've been writing for some time on the creative view of educational podcasting. In writing it, and indeed in working with others on educational podcasting, I have attempted to reconcile the use of the word podcasting. It is a technical word and, in that technical context, it does describe the use of an RSS feed to push media to subscribers. Even though there are many educational applications for this specific use of the technology there are far more applications for the recorded voice that is not dependent on the subscription model. So, it could be argued that talking of podcasting without the feed component is wrong, but clearly, in my experience, podcasting as a word has become understood as a very general thing - probably if you asked most people they would say they understand it to mean online media. Others might add 'downloadable' to that. Some might say that it refers to just audio, but others would argue that it encompasses video and even pdfs, too.
It's at this point, as an educationalist, I ask: what is important? For me, and I hope others in education, what is important is that we recognise that digital media became easy to use a few years ago, so now we should be asking "What can we do with digital media?" For me, my interest remains predominantly with audio because it is so point-and-shoot. Having said that, the advent of the Flip Mino and other instant point-and-shoot video cameras that plug straight into your USB port, is tantalising me. But for me, there's enough to do with audio and I need to resist the temptations of video. Video doubles the channels of engagement, and whilst this can be extremely valuable, it can add a layer of complexity that deters some from using it.
So this year digital audio innovation will continue to drive me. I am just beginning to reflect on the delivery of an 'audio-centric' module in the last semester where I have used audio in many ways. Perhaps it was only natural that I did given my long-term interest and a degree of fluency that comes as a result of that interest. In this audio-centric module I have had the opportunity to test and prove a number of things, and realise things that had not occurred to me until I had the opportunity of tutoring on the module in question. For example, I have spent quite a lot of time thinking about 'models' and 'approaches' that can be neatly applied to education. Though I can identify several models (especially around audio feedback) in the module, the reality is that I used the module podcast channel in many ways: there were tutor conversations, student classroom discussions, student questions answered for the benefit of all, tutor guidance, tutor team discussion of the assessment criteria, summary conversations following lectures, and last, but not at all least, a student podcast gallery (the presentation of student audio assignments).
The point of the module, and this post, is that once one dismisses the constraints presented by the technical explanation of podcasting, a whole world of opportunity emerges for the creative teacher who values the learning voice - whoever it belongs to.
I say whoever, but I might even say whatever: I've realised that there is only so much I can read, whether on screen or on paper. By using spokentext.net I can now listen to writings. Though I have written about this before, I have not really had the time to try things out. At the moment I am really impressed with how Spoken Text works and the quality. Ironically, bearing in mind what I have written here, it is the fact that Spoken Text allows you to create a podcast feed of its recordings that really makes the difference for me. The quality of the automated voice, and control over it, is also important and impressive for a service that is free. I can see that this service will be valuable to some students.
I am putting academic papers through the Spoken Text tool. This is different to working with a written paper in a number of ways; ways which highlight the difference between the spoken and written word perhaps. Listening on a mobile device means note taking is not realistic; references get over-looked; I can't underline bits that I want to take another look at; I can't easily skim-read the article; I can’t easily return to certain passages. However, it seems valuable because I can 'read' papers that might otherwise be neglected; I have the original text, so I can review it and search for key phrases I have heard if there are passages I want to revisit or if I want to check out the references.
I keep a database of quotes and notes from academic papers organised according to keywords. I can perform a search and copy and paste the results, which may be extensive, into Spoken Text, and listen back to get a new sense, or new perspective on what others have written. I think I'll try this next.
The reason I'm talking about Spoken Text in this post is to simply emphasise that there are always new ways of thinking about audio in an educational context, whether from a technical or pedagogical perspective.

ALT-C ARG

2008-11-08T19:45:00.002Z

I have written a piece for the ALT Newsletter entitled ARG @ ALT-C x PPP SIG available at:
http://newsletter.alt.ac.uk/e_article001230547.cfm?x=b11,0,w
It describes how I ran an alternate reality game at this year's ALT-C conference to engage delegates in the Podcasting for Pedagogic Purposes SIG.

Performing academic work

2008-11-08T19:24:00.003Z

I am very slowly working through 170 ideas for educational podcasting that have been submitted through an activity I ran for the Podcasting for Pedagogic Purposes Special Interest Group. Part of the idea generation activity I designed was based upon people responding to each other's ideas in finding new approaches - ideas breed ideas in other words.
Now that I am reviewing all of these even more ideas are ocurring to me. And I hope as others come into the wiki to help with the review process, more ideas will ocurr to them too.
Someone had suggested using podcasting as a platform for student submitted poetry. This is probably quite an obvious, and very useful, idea for using podcasting in an educational context if you are a poetry teacher. But my interest in reviewing the submitted ideas is in asking, how can the specific suggestions be applied to other contexts? In this case it raised an idea that I thought I would share here:

It makes me wonder whether we can look at audio as a way to perform academic work, and whether there might be value in doing that. If academia is so much about reading and writing, what happens when a student is asked to read their work aloud? What can be learnt by reading aloud, for other people, what you have written? Reading scripts is difficult if you wish to keep your audience engaged, so what happens to the quality of academic writing, therefore, if you are asked to write to heighten the work's readability? It must affect the work, but how? I normally review my own writing many times before submiting it. I don't tend to read it aloud in this process. It's not just reading it aloud that's got me interested, it's reading it aloud in a convincing way. Acting it almost. Audio provides a way of mediating such an activity - my question is 'does reading aloud improve learning?'

If you would like to contribute to the review of these ideas, and suggest your own, please contact me by leaving a comment here.

Design-based Learning and educational podcasting

2008-09-30T20:24:00.002+01:00

I spent much of the day working with a colleague who is leading on a joint paper on Design-based Learning. I won't go into the detail here - save that for the paper - but the process of writing together has really helped me to refocus on not just Constructionist theory associated with student-generated podcasting models, but the theories associated with authenticity, autonomy, activity, and in particular creativity. Other ideas that help me to explain why DBL needs to be considered more relate to Social Constructivism and Communal Constructivism. None of these are exclusive, and if there's one idea that became clear for me today as we've been writing, it is that the complex weaving together of all these theories makes it much harder to write about than do!
Our paper relates to a Digital Game-based Learning multidisciplinary design simulation we ran for a couple of years, but as I am currently embarking on several initiatives that involve students designing and constructing Digital Audio Learning Objects, a lot of the same thinking finds a useful place.
Undoubtedly more on this thread to come over the next few weeks as I run the audio initiatives.

Sketchcasting

2008-09-07T22:37:00.003+01:00

I like this. More drawing than writing would be better. Strangely I tried to do something like this with Software Engineering last year where capturing diagramming' notes was the goal. I would like to see students drawing and talking - very revealing to themselves I suspect. See Sketch.basement for more:

...And many voices

2008-09-05T10:23:00.004+01:00

"And many voices" is the final piece of the puzzle in the ARG I have organised on behalf of the Podcasting for Pedagogic Purposes Special Interest Group for the ALT-C conference that runs for most of next week. The answer is being spread, hopefully, amongst my social network even as I type. Please do whatever you can to share this answer further.
You can find out more about PPP at the SIG's wiki http://podcastingforpp.pbwiki.com/

I'm looking forward to next week - it will be busy for me and even though I write and present quite a lot these days, it will be the first time I have presented at ALT-C on educational podcasting strangely enough. I have done sessions on digital audio learning objects before, but not used the P word. Having said that my own paper is 'Beyond podcasting: creative approaches to designing educational audio' in which I try to break through some of the confusion over what is meant by podcasting in an educational context, in particular highlighting approaches from the Closer! pilot at Sheffield Hallam University where the positioning of the digital media has been as a 'media intervention.' That is, the media does not perform a didactic role, instead it is used as a trigger or catalyst to promote learning by seeding and informing active student engagement in a blended context.
I hope to meet many people next week and this will be helped by the SIG event we're running on Tuesday evening (17:10) where Alan Carr will be demoing various techniques and Andy Ramsden will be co-ordinating a Thunderstorm - multiple 5 minute presentations given by people attending the conference who are 'doing something with podcasting.' Hopefully we'll get condensed versions of some of the audio related short and long papers aswell as impromptu stories from people who are not presenting in the main conference. If you're at ALT-C next week take part in the ARG (good prizes), look out for the SIG session on the Tuesday evening and my own session at 11 on Wednesday. I look forward to meeting you.

TASI to support audio development

2008-07-03T11:19:00.003+01:00

I note that TASI (The Technical Advisory Service for Images) are now moving into the realm of audio. They have sent out this message:
"TASI is a JISC Advisory Service. For the last ten years we have provided advice, guidance and training to the UK further and higher education sector on technical issues relating to digitisation and digital still images.
From Summer 2008, we are expanding our remit to include moving images and sound."
They are surveying users about the redevelopment of their website (http://www.tasi.ac.uk/) so presumably it will take a little time for the audio dimension to appear there.

New posting - time flies

2008-06-23T10:11:00.004+01:00

I've just posted a recording from the Blended Learning Conference session I did on audio feeback models. This is the first episode that I've posted since March! I knew it was a while and I'm not unduely concerned as the podcasting project that drove the previous 60 episodes or so is long finished, however it did surprise me. My intention has been to keep the podcasts coming, but without the need to adhere to the schedule that I had established during the project - about one every two weeks.
The lesson here, for me, is: unless you keep to a schedule of some sort, and plan ahead, it's not really going to happen. It should also be noted that I am publishing several other podcasts including a personal one on walking the Pennine Way, one for the pilot I am running at work, and I am contributing to the Podcasting for Pedagogic Purposes podcast too (ie I'm not being idle!).
My first love is the LTA podcast however, so I think I will reinvigorate this and plan to do 1 every two weeks from September onwards. We'll see.
The latest episode is a bit of a disappointment in that it is mostly a recording of me spouting on about audio feedback (some great ideas, honest), though the last 10 minutes do capture other people's ideas. I hope these are audible enough.

100 Great Ideas for Educational Podcasting, PPP SIG 3, Warrington, 11 June

2008-06-20T17:04:00.004+01:00

If you haven't taken a look at the PPP wiki here's the link: http://podcastingforpp.pbwiki.com/
This special interest group has taken up quite a lot of my spare capacity (joke) recently and is a very interesting initiative in my view.
The main challenge faced by the SIG is its sustainability as the initial HEA Pathfinder pump priming runs out. My main response to this dilema came in two sessions I ran at the third SIG meeting: one that discussed Communities of Practice and Hub and Spoke models that kicked off the day with Alan Hilliard from the Uni of Herts and then a session called '100 Great Ideas for Educational Podcasting - the book!"
For me a SIG is a group with a shared special interest (well that is more or less the words from SIG in a slighly different order). But it's important to spell it out because I believe that for the SIG to be sustainable it needs to recognise its capacity in the numbers of people who have expressed their interest - about 140 who have made some commitment to PPP so far and about 70 who turned up to SIG3. Well if you just take the 70 who turned up to the one hour session I ran in the afternoon that's 70 hours worth of work - how much would that cost? All those people generated several ideas each for the book. Well over 100 ideas and, perhaps most importantly, an understanding amongst all who took part that educational podcasting can be so much more than idea number 1 (podcasting lectures). Indeed, I said that that idea was too old hat to submit, so we'll see what we have got. I've been carrying the slips of paper around in my rucksack all week and have not dared to open them given my other commitments. But I can't wait! If I hadn't felt the urge to share this with you I'd be hammering away at the keys getting ready for the next stage in the process which will be network review (like peer review, but involving the whole SIG network through a wiki). In the meantime there's a lot of reading and typing to be done.
So how does the book relate to sustainability of the SIG? Well, despite the promo for the event, this book won't just be written in one hour. This is going to take ongoing engagement from all contributors over the next few months. So I think we can bridge from this funded start on into the future.
We have another Steering Group meeting coming up in early July. I guess we'll be reviewing ideas for next steps there. One of the next steps will be a stall at ALT-C in September. I would like to think we can drum up a lot of ideas for the stall that will make it a high profile centre of gravity at the conference. I see podcasting as being very active educationally and I think it will be great to be able to demonstrate that to all ALT-ers. I keep saying 'flash mob' and 'bar camp' in the steering group meetings and I think others see it this way too. Podcasting does seem to attract its share of mavericks, or at least people who think outside of the box. Very exciting...

Read Write Pod

2008-05-08T12:33:00.002+01:00

I'm about to move house and this means that I will most likely find myself behind the steering wheel for a couple of hours each day rather than on a bus seat. I use my commuting time, whether I'm on the bus or walking, for listening to academic podcasts or reading journal articles. I don't know how I am going to fit the reading of journal articles into my day if I am going to be driving.
I had an idea the other week that if I could find a really good text-to-speech software I could create recordings of the articles and play them back in the car. The question is, will the synthesised voices just drive me mad?! (and if so should stick ghastly warning signs in the back window 'podcast listener on board'?)
In an attempt to find out I came across Odiogo. You may have noticed that it is possible to now subscribe to this blog as a podcast. Look at the sidebar on the right for that option if you are reading this (obviously if you are listening to this don't as you won't see it and presumably you've already found it). I listened back to several posts on my way to work the other day. It was quite listenable - I was quite impressed.
Now I'm trying to find a suitable text-2-speech tool for converting any document into an mp3 file. I've found a few but would welcome suggestions.
Finally, it occurs to me that this approach might be useful to students in many ways too who need to revise from either their own notes or handouts produced by tutors. The technique is also useful as a proof-reading tool to overcome the word blindness that makes it difficult for someone to proof read their own work. If you can get a speech synth to read your work, you'll spot the errors - both typos and grammatical errors.
More to do here, but I think I'm onto something. If you have any thoughts or experience I'd love to hear about it.

Hosting (student) podcasts

2008-05-07T00:15:00.002+01:00

We use Blackboard to host podcasts produced by academic staff (using Learning Objects' Podcast LX building block) but at the moment we have no easy way for students to distribute podcasts. This video offers a few options using Web 2.0 services:

Benefits of Podcasting for Pedagogic Purposes

2008-04-18T11:45:00.003+01:00

I participated in the Podcasting for Pedagogic Purposes UKHE Pathfinder project special interest group meeting yesterday, hosted by the University of Hertfordshire in conjunction with the University of Chester. I'm on the steering group of this short funded intiative. There is one more event planned which will take place at UoC on 11 June either at Chester or Warrington. So, come along and bring a friend!
Those who attended yesterday told us that they valued the establishment of the SIG and would contribute beyond the funded initiative to ensure the SIG remained as a focus for support and innovation. However, this is a big challenge. When asked, none of the 30 or so people attending proposed a successful model of sustainability, even if there was a desire to see this happen. The only way this can happen, in my view, is if people accept a little responsibility for generating dialogue and appreciate that there is no expertise in this area yet and so all contributions are valid and useful.
I ran a session with Alan Hilliard from the University of Hertfordshire that attempted to offer an illustrated survey of what is happening in UK HE. The diversity of 1 minute clip samples was immense, and therefore encouraging to me. I must say, as you'll appreciate if you've read this blog before, I loath the words "podcast" and "lecture" when they appear next to each other. This is a personal thing and I recognise that this provides a way in for many people to begin to consider the many of pedagogogies that can be supported by the technology. Hopefully the illustrations triggered more consideration of the opportunity that podcasting specifically, and digital media in general, can offer us in higher education.
As the clips were presented (with useful commentary I hope) the audience were asked to note the benefits educational podcasting brought. I have transcribed the post-it notes, and the feedback can be found here:Benefits wiki page.
This was the first session of the day and people were encouraged to generate ideas as they listened to/watched the clips. I was dissapointed that so many of the ideas were about teacher-centred approaches, especially as the clips had been catagorised under Tutor, Student, and External voices.
Maybe I'm in a world of my own (!!!), but my mantra is "new technology offers us opportunity to change what we do." This means moving away from the lecture.
[I'm trying to connect to http://www.slideshare.net/ where I have upoloaded a presentation tagged with education, podcasting, PPP, but it's down at the moment].

Death of privacy - give 'em enough wire and they will hang themselves.

2008-03-14T12:15:00.002Z

Another in this morbid series. Couldn't resist:
In EDUCAUSE Review this month (vol. 43, no. 2, March/April 2008) Bruce Schneier says,
"The death of privacy has been predicted forever. . . . Simson Garfinkel wrote a book. Robert O’Harrow wrote a book. David Brin wrote The Transparent Society. You can go back to 1969 and a book by Jerry Rosenberg: The Death of Privacy. We’ve been saying this for generations, but it turns out it’s not necessarily true. Technology might limit privacy, but just because cameras have been invented, that doesn’t mean naked pictures of you appear everywhere. We are a nation of laws, and laws protect us in places that technology doesn’t."
However, as promoters of educational podcasting, we need to be aware that podcasting, mass amaturisation, Web 2.0, student generated media, and so forth have many implications for us as responsible providers of learning. There is an urgent need to educate our students and staff about responsible podcasting for example. How to protect themselves, not necessarily just from litigation, but from being impulsive and committing themselves and their private construction of knowledge to fixed positions that may come to haunt them later. And this applies to the people we interview or involve in our recordings. Good podcasting practice therefore requires context. If you are brainstorming or thinking aloud you need to make this clear. If you are quoting another person you must be careful about representing their intention as much as their words: editing is more than choosing juicy sound bites. This may require the development of journalistic skills relating to editing.
I like the phrase 'Mass amaturisation,' but I suggest being a digitally fluent amature does not propose that we negate responsibility and promote ignorance.
If our students get this wrong the repercussions may well be drastic and long lasting. Educational podcasting raises the need for a re-evaluation of core skills: being responsible to ourselves and those we encounter need to be part of digital fluency.

Death by... scripting

2008-03-11T20:25:00.004Z

I feel a series coming on... in this 'Death by...' posting I share some thoughts on killing an interview.
I'm often asked whether it's a good idea to script a podcast and my answer is a loud "No!"
I can't read a script well, so that may colour my opinion somewhat, but the value of podcasting to education is in the sharing of the voice and developing a connection, as a listener, with that voice. The best podcasters are expressive talkers - not necessarily fluent, but at least full of energy, empathy or excitement (and probably other things beginning with e).
However, what I would recommend is outlining, especially before embarking on a discussion. If everyone taking part is aware of a direction for the conversation they can confidently make contributions around that agreed structure. Often in education the planning process itself provides the best learning opportunity with the resultant product often little more than a minor product of the collaborative learning process.
I had an odd experience yesterday as I prepared for the podcast I posted on digital storytelling - a conversation with an academic about a personal experience that had led her to digital storytelling. I hadn't met Julie before, so before jumping into the recording, which I had arranged by email, it was important to share a bit of background. Inevitably, and this has happened before, I realised that the backgrounding being provided by the respondent was powerful and should really be recorded. However, in this case, the topioc was sensitive and it was more important to agree that certain details could be shared in the recording itself. I was quite emotional by the time we'd done the pre-interview bit - the background story was very emotional.
Eventually the record button was pressed and we both knew that retracing the same ground was going to be difficult. In the pre-interview I had noted some keywords and I had reminded Julie that it was OK to pause and to take time out. In reality interviewees don't go for the pause option but it instills confidence. The interview was valuable and I think it is engaging, but the experience reminded me that the fresh, 'live on air' feel can really inject a dynamic into discussions that rehearsing, planning, and scripting can all kill off. We both had to work at refinding the essence of the original conversation that had a quality of finding connections over shared interests and common ground. Good conversations, especially dialogues, are joint explorations. If you've already explored the terrain once then it's not likely to hold the same fascination the second time around.

Death by screencast - or - towards creative screencasting

2008-03-06T09:35:00.006Z

I probably ought to post this on our creativity blog but I think this has a strong connection to my views on educational podcasting.
I've been on my PowerPoint fast for over a year - use anything, but don't use PowerPoint, see what changes... Nothing against PowerPoint per se, just I know what I do (and I know what others do) as soon as PowerPoint starts up. It is such a usable interface that it doesn't challenge you to chisel away at your ideas - it is very much about presenting ideas in a clear, structured way. PowerPoint is a fantastic planning tool, but the trouble is you start planning and, before you know it, you've turned up to do your session and you're projecting your plans and your script on the wall for all to see. How weird!
By the way, not only is PowerPoint a great planning tool, for podcasters PowerPoint is specifically a great storyboarding or outlining tool around which conversations can be driven.
Well the fast is working - I've used various technologies to enhance the sessions I run at conferences for staff development. And I've run sessions where there has been no need for the planned use of digital technology. My sessions tend to involve other people's voices as much as my own, even where I've been presenting a paper. That's no big deal, but for me it helps me to work on engagement.
I've been submitting several abstracts for conference papers recently and several of the educational conferences I am submitting to ask presenters to submit their PowerPoints beforehand! What? Why?!! Shouldn't conference organisers (and some are) be promoting more interactivity in their session. OK, PP doesn't have to mean death - but it certainly helps!
So, you've heard of Death by PowerPoint:

bullet
point
after
bullet
point
read
by
the
presenter
in
a monotone

What can be worse?..

Death by screencast. (I've seen this so many times but inspired by seeing an example here yesterday.) It's the same problem, captured and glorified. And what can be worse than that? Death by Screencast+ (with captioning "because we have to comply with accessibility legislation" - captioning bullet points - why? Something is wrong here.). OMG. Give me a hanky.

Let's not go into the creative use of PowerPoint - there are fantastic ways of using it (eg as a game platform). But let's consider:

New Technologies, new opportunities and creative attitudes

Take Camtasia Studio as a starting pointing - we can capture the screen and add a narrative. We can annotate this. Zoom in and hightlight parts of what we see. Once you've got your mic connected just hit the red button. That's the technology.

So why, with such an accessible and versatile tool, would you consider capturing just one voice and just one screen? Anyone heard of Windows? Anyone heard of conversation? Why does it have to be more than 30 seconds long?

With this technology we could be discussing pictures, diagrams, telling stories, giving feedback on assignments, setting challenges and puzzles, commenting on dynamic data coming in, discussing technology supported reflective practice,...

And we could be distributing these student and staff generated media interventions through a podcast feed. (I knew I was on the right blog).

iPhone U

2008-02-29T11:34:00.004Z

Apple have announced iPhone U - I suppose it had to happen. All of a sudden we see the potential to make the shift from delivering knowledge to engaging with it socially. (Strange, this article does still talk about getting class presentations on your device... oh well).
They're running a Duke type initiative with students being handed iPhones and iTouches.

Losing ownership of your recording

2008-02-28T14:51:00.002Z

Losing ownership of your podcast recording is a topic that I don't think I have particularly thought about. This came up twice yesterday in the Podcasting for Pedagogic Purposes event. Andy Ramsden reminded me than some lecturers draw upon evidence from their own research in progress and therefore may be constrained in using that evidence publicly.
The second mention was from an interesting presentation by Stephen Gomez from the University of the west of England. In fact he made several points that I have not come across before - he mentions that once a podcast is distributed the author loses control over the media - it can be share and proliferated without their knowledge. In the spirit of open content I see this as a non-issue, but I recognise that this is very important to some people. He made an interesting analogy relating to tracking: when he asked his students who had used his podcasts many more hands went up than the system tracking records showed. He took this to mean that some students were downloading the podcast files and distributing them to the friends, just as in a lecture some students will ask for 5 copies of the lecture notes so they can share them out with their friends. (My, perhaps cynical, assumption was that the students said they had listened because they didn't want to be pulled up for not listening).
He has developed a system now that streams his chunked media objects and allows users to create playlists within the web-based tool, and if I remember correctly, they can comment on and rate the media too (a la YouTube) - but the media objects are streamed and not downloadable.
I wrote my Masters dissertation on digital media learning objects so I really like the idea of these short bits of 'content' (and I think this can be quite varied in his own teaching). I like the idea of the rating and commenting too. I would love to see an example of his web app being populated by students - in our student generated media work the idea of the collective knowledge pool is never far away and this web app might facilitate such an approach. As I say, I don't get the concern over closed content though, so I would go with downloadable and take away content.

Podcasting for Pedagogic Purposes inaugural meeting, Chester, 27 Feb 2008

2008-02-28T13:19:00.002Z

I attended this meeting in Chester organised by the University of Chester with the University of Hertfordshire and funded by the HEA. In December 06 myself and a number of other people tried something similar, so it will be interesting to see if the funding helps or hinders this attempt to establish a UK FE/HE podcasting network and Special Interest Group. The good news was that several faces from our aborted attempt turned up for this and it was good to see them and other familiar faces. There was a big turn out and I gather there was further interest.
I still believe a UK network can be really useful. Podcasting is odd: there's a little but significant technology hurdle and a wide landcape beyond that to experiment with new learning tools. However, the hurdle always seems to obscure the wide landscape so most people struggle to imagine what can be done beyond recording the lecture. I was reminded of this again today, yet there was a healthy number of people (tagged 'experts' bizarrely for the day) who had started to explore the landscape.
Robin Johnson of Manc Met proposed such a network could generate case studies and I totally agree. The activity results in usable products and provides a good opportunity for learning together. The things that inspire 'the novices' at SHU are case studies or the models I post to our pilot site. Such things really clarify what exists beyond the hurdle (I'm loathed to call it a barrier - it is usually quite possible for people to get over it once they have an exigency to do so).
I ended up speaking so much yesterday. I hate this, it's my worst trait, but a lot of the comments and questions I heard really didn't seem useful so I found myself suggesting things that hopefully will help people avoid some of the pit falls that I have dealt with over the last few years as noted in this blog. Again, I had moments of self-doubt and courage when the 'experts' break out group were asked to feed back. It was so obviously an opportunity to demonstrate how podcasting can be used to facilitate conversation (rather than to just deliver knowledge), so I jumped up and did one of my spontaneous 'let's make a podcast' workshop exercises. This is a useful model for any classroom where the presence of the recorder promotes an intense and focussed summary of learning. The expert group ironically had been the only group of the four not to have made a summary recording of their break out in the break out session itself. Hopefully I demonstrated some of the main points: podcasting works best when multiple voices are involved (I ran round the room seeking out the expert group members to comment on the headline points), it is accessible (recorder was ready and primed in my bag), it focusses the minds of those taking part (the experts were surprising calm and ready to take part when put on the spot because the discussion had been prepared in the break out, easy and accessible (just press the red button!), short (it only needs to be short because the detail was better captured on a flip chart and the learning happens in the minds of those present and taking part not in the delivered information), etc, etc.
Otherwise the rest of the day was either weirder or more normal (whatever your perspective). there were a couple of good presentations including one by an academic who is chunking his teaching into streamed media objects. I must find out more as this resonates with an approach called Audio Notes I developed with a colleague in Engineering a couple of years ago - but this is much more sophisticated.
I hate discussions that get caught up on the semantics and when someone said, "Shouldn't we agree on what we mean by podcasting?" my heart sank. But they were dead right. Podcasting is just a technology. Why would we want a network to discuss a technology? So why was it of interest to people here, and what did they think 'podcasting' meant? There was one (very good) presentation on audio feedback by Derek France - but audio feedback is not podcasting in the full sense, ie including the subscription method of distribution, serialisation, etc. But because audio as a learning media is new to many people 'podcasting' is often used to describe anything involving digital audio. There was a surprising amount of talk about video too, so digital video is encompassed in that catch all word for many people too. That's OK, but when you need to discuss the technology and/or the pedagogy there needs to be a shared understanding. Educational podcasting (Podcasting for a Pedagogic Purpose?) is too complex an area to allow for misconception through imprecision. It was suggested a steering group produce some terms of reference.
It was good to meet Alan Carr (Mid-Cheshire College and Dark Horse Radio) as I have subscribed to his music podcast for some time. I've also heard him on One Minute Howto discussing how to avoid death by Powerpoint - one of my own hobby horses. And his blog features pictures of Anthony Gormley's Crosby Beach artwork - a favourite topic of mine.
The student voice is so important to understanding the potential of digital media and podcasting. We need to understand who 'owns' this and who wants it, and whether 'it' means subscription, monologues, making the stuff, etc, etc. I hope the group manages to involve students in its thinking - and this may require HEA money. I do mean 'involve', not just 'ask'.
(On the otherhand, I also have an idea that I don't think I've blogged in depth yet, that Educational Podcasting needn't be seen as belonging to technologists, students, the future, or anything in particular in order for education to become interested in it. If it has an educational use, then Education must shape it to suit our aspirations (if not needs) and learn to call it its own. We must quickly connect podcasting to the progressive pedagogies we understand. In other words, it doesn't matter whether the students use it or not - does it provide a valid channel for what we shouild be doing in Education?
I think the idea of a network that carries out joint research is useful - What models can we devise? How do they integrate into the curriculum? How does the curriculum change because of this? What models work? etc
The next event is at the University of Hertfordshire in April. I think we're going to get a chance to determine the agenda through a wiki, but I hope it is mostly going to be about working together to devise case studies and models and to peer review them perhaps. If each person turns up with a recording of a conversation with a student from their place this group could in one fell swoop generate more data on the student perception of podcasting than has been done so far. With 40 people attending this group can achieve a lot quickly - collaborative case study (or scenario, or model) generation looks good too.
Andy Ramsden, now at Bath, was Twittering this on his mobile - I just had too much to say. I'd like to see his Twitter feed but can't find it. And Graham McElearn at Sheffield suggested doing an ALT workshop together - I think that would be really useful.

Lecture casting

2008-02-26T12:15:00.003Z

Here's an interesting post (http://edtechatouille.blogspot.com/2008/02/lecture-capture-for-masses-with.html) about lecture casting with Camptasia Relay from Technsmith. I use Camptasia for screencasting so it's interesting to hear how they're developing it.
I'll have to take a look at this as soon as it becomes available, not of course because I am at all interested in lecture casting, but because I am interested in usability that allows anyone to capture and post little learning moments. This sounds cute but it fits in potentially with some of my ongoing bandwagons - user production, and small scale media interventions rather than didactic, passive media spouting.
One comment at the beginning of the post echoes something that I've mentioned here before - the ability to control the speed of playback. I do a fair amount of research interviews and playing them back at 1.5 speed can be just as effective as slowly playing them back. In Windows Media Player this can be done by selecting Now Playing > Show Enhancments.

Production values - keep it lofi

2008-02-04T20:55:00.000Z

I may have written something similar before so excuse me if I am repeating myself. One of the most exciting things about educational podcasting is that anyone can do it. They may not know it, but I know it - anyone in HE can podcast. They have access to the technology and the technology is simple. OK, for those who haven't tried it the barrier may seem insurmountable, but for those who have, the main challenge quickly becomes how they are going to use it rather than how it should be made.
So it was slightly bizarre to be jolted into a reality that I have not had on my own horizon for a long time. I heard a professional educational podcasting consultant from the US being interviewed on an ed tech podcast that comes out of a US HE institution. In this interview the consultant said that he knew production value is important because if you listen to the top 100 podcasts in iTunes the audio quality and production values are high on all of them.
If podcasting has potential in education it is because of its ease of production. This offers accessibility therefore to any would-be producer, whether they are staff or student. Furthermore, as with blogging and other Read/Write Web activities, one of the beauties of podcasting is that it lives at the thinnest tip of the 'long tail' - it is an activity that is economic to extreme niches!
If you are looking for valuable and effective educational podcasting I suggest you don't look in the top 100 of iTunes where production has been designed to engage the masses. Instead seek recommendations or use your academic search skills to unearth the obscure podcasts recorded using hand-held recorders in the corner of a shared office after hours and instantly released.
Forget high production values. Do what you can to get it sounding OK, but above all just hit record and capture and immediately share what is important.

Navigating long recordings

2008-01-18T13:16:00.000Z

I think audio always works best when it is concise and well focussed. However, this can't always be managed. At the moment I am interviewing academic staff about their experience of educational podcasting and sharing their experiences back to other pilot participants through a pilot podcast. The interviews are lasting from 10 to 50 minutes and they cover a lot of ground. They're being distributed in the Blackboard VLE site set up specifically for the pilot group.
Firstly the way we have set up Blackboard means that we are experimenting with a limit on the size of each file so these interviews need to be broken up. Secondly, as I do a final listen back before posting, I have a text file open to note the time and change of topic (often signalled by my own voice asking a new question). These notes get posted as show notes - convenient for this group who tend to listen at the PC.
I have suggested before that similar timings can be added into the recording almost as an audio menu. This can be useful if you are revisiting the audio (eg as a student for pre-exam revision) but it gets a bit complicated. On a mobile device it would require a lot of scrolling back and forth, though it does support people who may access the audio without a way of reading accompanying show notes.

Responsible educational podcasting

2007-09-27T10:33:00.000+01:00

I attended the 'Streaming and handheld technologies to support students with disabilities’ course run by the BUFVC in London this week. My main reason was to get some insight into what other people might think about responsible podcasting (accessible design, copyright, defamation by student podcasters, etc). This was unreasonable of me because the course did not specifically target the needs I had in mind, but it was the closest event I've found.
As discussed here before, one concern I'm particularly keen to bottom out is finding strategies for supporting students with hearing impairment of varying degrees. Undoubtedly for some students with mild deafness podcasting or recording of learning events can be a bonus, if done properly, allowing them to revisit what was said. However, for those students with severe or profound deafness we need to decide whether we can manage to use podcasting at all, and if we do what methods we can employ to offer equivalent access to learning.
I got the sense that no one else is really asking this question. For me it's essential to have strategies in place for supporting accessibility - I can't afford for academics to have automatic negatives responses to all of the creative opportunities that I believe this technology offers on the basis that one day they might have a deaf student.
Apart from anything else I also see creative educational podcasting as a realistic point of entry to creative approaches to learning, teaching and assessment in general. It's critical therefore that I have a sound response (no pun intended, by why not?) to this question.

Assessing the value of educational podcasts

2007-09-24T15:18:00.001+01:00

'Educational podcasting is good' may be a sentence of only four words, but it is one that is very hard to say. How can we prove that educational podcasting is effective and that it makes a valuable contribution to student learning?
A colleague of mine involved in the Closer! educational podcasting pilot here commented that academic podcasters at a recent learning technology conference she attended were turning to their assessment results to find out whether podcasting was a good thing. Her own take on the use of audio is that there's a lot more to it than can be measured in an assessment. I totally agree. These things might be evidenced in assessment results but audio seems to be particularly strong around the edges. By this I mean its value, in general, is not as a didactic medium. It's value is felt in the social construction of knowledge in community building, showing empathy, taking different perspectives, emphasis, conversations and by generally facilitating learning, etc..
If this is correct the only way of assigning value to the podcast is by asking students what difference the course podcast made to them through techniques such one to one conversations, individual surveys, focus groups or simply class-based discussions.

The Fading world of podcasting?

2007-09-21T21:16:00.000+01:00

It seems that all my podcast subscriptions have gone quiet. I went out this morning and had nothing to listen to! It feels a bit weird. I mostly listen to podcasts produced by educators of course. I expect people are feeling a bit dazed by getting back to college after the break. I'm getting despate and subscribing to non-educational casts! Goodness - I might learn something new :-)

Podcasting as a semi-formal Learning Environment

2007-09-19T14:17:00.000+01:00

In this post I consider where podcasting sits in the eyes of students and academic staff in terms of its degree of academic formality and in terms of relative perceptions of familiarity with the technology involved.
The many new and emerging digital technologies of recent years are not necessarily 'owned by', or even of interest to, the Digital Native. It would be a mistake to assume that students, even young students, are familiar with technologies such as podcasting or blogging. If they are familiar with them it is likely that they do not think of them as technologies per se, eg as tools for blogging and podcasting. It is more likely that they are familiar with the badges or brands (MSN, Facebook, etc.) than terms such as 'social network', 'podcasting', or 'blogging'.
Young adopters of such trend applications are also likely to use such media in a limited way as is generally the case with their use of ICT and they will discover and learn how to use the applications by watching or listening to their peers rather than by reading through manuals, help systems or by being formally trained. This also helps to explain why Web 2.0 technologies are valuable: they have limited, useful and usable functionality.
So my question is if students have a limited engagement with such technologies and academic staff also are unfamiliar with the technologies (as generally seems to be the case in the communications I have), then is anyone ever going to really adopt such technologies?
The UK literature on student familiarity with podcasting (in any context) is limited (please tell me otherwise). This is why I am currently surveying our student body at Sheffield Hallam about their awareness of and engagement with digital media. I need to know how many of those students we see with their ear buds plugged in really are listening to podcasts as opposed to music. My guess is the percentage is minimal, but I won't find out until later in October.
So I believe articles that begin by saying 'I am going to podcast my lectures because so many students have iPods' are making a massive assumption that all, or even some, of their students would be interested in listening and sufficiently familar with the technology.
One question I do hear people asking more and more at conferences relates to ownership and use of student devices and spaces (we could call them Student Owned Digital Environments [SODEs]): can we expect students to integrate their academic work into their SODEs? Quite frankly the answer to that is "No, we can't expect it," but we should also regard a student's academic enrolment as a committment they have decided to make to themselves and not to the university - they have chosen to be a student and all that it entails and so being a learner is as much a part of their life as what they do with friends in leisure time. In this respect academic work is not therefore something that need necessarily be excluded from social networks, MP3 players and other SODEs - but the decision on whether to use a particular student-owned device will be made by the student, not the institution.
Educational podcasting therefore is situated is a no man's land unfamiliar to all stakeholders and the learning environments in which they operate.
This sounds like a hell of a problem then?
Well, no it's not so much of a problem. What we are seeing is the emergence of new learning environments that are useful to education. Podcasting is a learning environment that should be owned by education, and not the students, nor the academics. Podcasting is a wide open common ground technology and its educational application is still emerging.
In my work examining the educational application of digital audio I am also convinced that this media occupies a wide open common ground (independent of podcasting technology). Here the strength of the media is in the nature of its formality: it is neither formal, nor informal. Educational digital audio finds a valuable role across the range of that continuum, but especially helps to engage (when it is used well) when it appeals to students and staff by breaking down the barriers that exist in formal academic settings, yet offer focus, structure and leadership that may be fuzzy in casual or informal settings.
The real value of digital audio podcasting will be found in the semi-formal educational settings described here, not in attempting to replicate existing environments (eg the lecture theatre) and pedagogies (the lecture, the presentation, etc.). The setting is new and requires new, imaginative approaches in order to enhance the learning experience.

Student metacognition around the value of ideas in user generated content

2007-09-12T13:15:00.000+01:00

If promoting student centred pedagogies and the notion of user generated content do we (all who are involved in the academic process) need to be aware of and recognise and state when the learning value is in the making process and when it's in the product?
[Note: now I've written this the obvious response seems to be academics ought to be aware of where the learning value is and this should be expressed in assessment criteria at the very least]
For example, first let's take Design students working on a group assignment podcast. The tutor has asked the groups to create 30 minute podcast episodes which capture the group analysis of the design brief as they verbally generate options and ideas. The episode and the processes it captures will then feed into the assessment. Later each student will create a product in response to the brief and this work will make up the remaining marks.
The value of the discussion is immense if the most is made of the opportunity: the constraint of the podcast format and the resulting pressure to generate ideas together is a technique I have successfully used. The presence of the recorder in this situation introduces a formality that promotes a healthy degree of process awareness - metacognition. One is aware that they are operating within an agreed structure and that they are expected to perform or behave according to the norm of the 'radio' format. How important is it that the students know about the learning opportunity before they immerse themselves in it? Will having a metacognitive view of the process impact on it?
If ideas are generated in this group activity (and I hope they are!) how are contributions recognised? The answer I think is that the group is acknowledged as much for the ideas as for the facilitation of the idea generation. There is an equal value in that interdependent situation. After all, groups have dynamics and understanding that, and its value, is an important lesson.
In a different assignment the students may be required to collectively build a repository of key concepts as podcast recordings that replace the lecture programme previously offered by the tutor. The recordings become artifacts that can be used by other students. This pool of learning objects (ie content) has immense value - but only if the learning objects manage to successfully address their intended learning objectives. Therefore the value can be in the artefact produced and the pool of content, whilst the making process provides a lot of opportunity for each individual.
How much does it matter if the student in each of these situations just engages on the basis of, "My tutor said do this so that's what I'll do"?
This is a bit of a ramble, but...

Vulnerability

2007-09-11T17:10:00.000+01:00

John Byrne of Business Week is discussing his podcast with Rob Walch of Podcast 411 this week. He puts his finger on an aspect of podcasting that I find useful - the notion of vulnerability.
This sounds, on the face of it, like a negative attribute. However it reinforces one of the strengths of audio that I have noted elsewhere: its capacity to bridge the formality and informality of learning contexts. A podcasting tutor becomes human and approachable and the ideas perhaps become accessible.
Appearing vulnerable is not something that will get all academics racing to the microphone, however it does provide an opportunity for those with large cohorts to establish something of their 'real selves' that may otherwise be hard to do.
For the student podcaster the issues are somewhat different, but the opportunity exists in using the tone of voice to express the degree of confidence or certainly that they have for a particular idea. In other media, such as text, this would have to be expressed explicitly, and quite frankly is not something that many students would consider expressing at all. Given the medium of audio, such otherwise intangible attributes are implicit.

Feed Me!

2007-09-08T21:17:00.000+01:00

I publish my podcast using two separate feeds. Following a short summer break I return totally refreshed and brain-wiped, struggling to remember the finer details of publishing. Or at least wondering why both feeds are causing me some head scratching.
The hand-crafted XML feed file I publish to the university server has resulted in podcast item #51 appearing at the bottom of my episode list ie well before podcast episode #1 in the listing! At least in iTunes. Elsewhere it seems OK, but as a large number of my listeners use iTunes this is a shame. (I realise that my listeners are using a vast array of podcatchers having scrutinised my stats for the first time - maybe the subject of another post...).
I also publish my podcast here on Blogger. Google has bought Feedburner, and had already acquired Blogger, and now they are merging into one big thing - but perhaps not in a totally seamless way. I have just fixed my Feedburner feed after tweaking one or two things at Feedburner and also on the Blogger post itself, where I notice that there is now an option to include an enclosure link (as well as the optional link field that has been in Blogger for quite a while) when editing a post.
So if you're having a few problems podcasting from Blogger take a look at this option and also have a look at Settings > Site Feed where I think there is a new field to fill in. Sorry I can't be precise about a solution here. I just rattled my spanner in a few places to get it ticking over. Please leave a comment if you believe you can shed further light on any changes to Blogger/Feedburner/Podcast feeds.

iTunesU in iTunes

2007-07-30T21:43:00.000+01:00

iTunesU has come to iTunes. 7.3.1.3. I don't think it's been there before but I may have missed it. This surprised me. I've been particularly underwhelmed by iTunesU so far, but this was when I understood it to be something without a public face. I'm still not that clear about how it works as the participating institutions are still based in North America. Given that I'm in the middle of launching the Closer! pilot at Sheffield Hallam this is useful as I can show my academics what others are doing with podcasting, though my guess is that there will be a fair amount of lectures amongst this. That will be interesting to find out for me.
Here's a screen shot of iTunes with iTunesU.

Skype call recording success finally

2007-07-18T21:05:00.000+01:00

I've not posted for a while on this blog as I'm working mamouth hours but felt I had to drop in to say I finally had success with recording a Skype conversation for the podcast. I won't go into the technical frustrations I've previously encountered other than to say I have been thwarted by dodgy soundcards and admin rights and who knows what else. I haven't given it much thought over the last 6 months or so.
But it's not just technical stuff that gets in the way. Why would I want to record an interview using Skype? Because I want to test the technology on behalf of my academics before recommending the approach to them. So then I start to conjur up a picture of 'an academic' and realise the tech savvy academics are going to work this out for themselves whereas the others are going to have to be handheld through the process and then their respondents/subjects are going to have to be handheld through the process in all likelihood.
I listen to tech savvy geeky podcasters doing this day-in and day-out, but how confident is Joe public with Skype and VOIP in general?
The numbers using Skype around the world are massive, but I haven't thought that, as an educational developer, I needed to loose too much sleep over this. Much better to work it out as the need arises.
Well, the need arose today. I needed to interview an academic for a joint paper we're doing for a conference. Even though we work for the same university I am busy, she is busy and we just can't be in the same place at the same time. And you know what? It was not me that suggested Skype it was my writing partner! OK she is a tech savvy software engineering tutor and I have done a fair amount of work with her around the area of digital audio so I knew this was the perfect opportunity to iron out whatever technical problems I've had in recording calls in the past.
I have a professional version of Pamela on my laptop and I have had it working in the past. So today I upgraded it and Skype and used the Skype Lady or 123Echo to check everything. I enabled everything in Pamela and Skype to ensure all outgoing and incoming calls would be automatically recorded and I checked the privacy options in Skype to allow Pamela to record the Skype conversation.
But no - I couldn't get it to work. :-(
Then I remembered that Skype now comes with the Pamela extra (a lite version of Pamela). I tried that version of Pamela and it worked! Why one and not the other I do not know. It seems to suggest there's something odd about the way I have configured the professional version of Pamela. Anyway I recorded two interviews with my colleague and I was very pleased with the way it went. The quality was fine. I hope to release both of these interviews in podcasts soon.
It was a bit of a joke getting started actually. As I wasn't sure whether I'd be near my PC I had given her my landline number and asked her to give me a ring whenever she was ready. So we were both on landlines and I then called her to check that Skype and Pamela were both doing what they were meant to. Having confirmed that, we put the landline phones down and made a new Skype call which was recorded. It made sense at the time. The point is interviews are precious. You do need to check your recording equipment is working. We must have been talking for about half an hour. You don't want to have to repeat that.
I interupted the interview early on as her headset was picking up a lot of breathing. Normally i wouldn't interupt an interviewee. In this situation I realised it was better to do that and ensure that the breathing noise was minimised. Perhaps the lesson here is to spend a few minutes with your interviewee just warming up and looking out for problems. The other difficulty I had was that I was on a wifi connection. Though I didn't lose the connection in the first interview the audio briefly dropped out a couple of times. In the second interview (I made a separate call to ensure that the first interview recording was in the can) the wifi connection (and therefore Skype call) did drop. This was not a major problem with this interview, but I think I would advise others to warn their interviewees that if the call drops it can be picked up again and to expect a call back.
Anyway, I am generally pleased and it meant I could be where I really needed to be today and get the interview done.

NLP and more on Drifting

2007-06-14T13:38:00.000+01:00

Following several conversations, some of which are happening in the Facebook rendition of this blog, I am making some progress on this topic. Take a look at wikipedia for more or do a Google on NLP (neuro-linguistic programming): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming. Though this isn't directly related it is another important topic to consider when we think about students learning from podcasts. It may even be safer or more useful, I wonder, to think about students learning with podcasts when we think about the design of educational podcasting. I am interested to understand what else is going on when students are just listening. How does split attention theory affect the design of podcasts?, etc.
If you want to see this blog in my Facebook, I render it there in my Facebook notes. So make me a friend. Also note the Educational Podcasting facebook group I set up a short while ago is growing in membership, so please join us.
I'm not sure where this link will get you, but it should point at my Facebook notes:
http://sheffieldhallam.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=2367583582&ref=mf

Drifting - cognitive theory

2007-06-11T17:10:00.000+01:00

I'm trying to find the right word or phrase for something that I call 'drifting'. It's that moment when you're listening to a podcast, or someone in real life, and something that is said sets you off on your own trajectory. What is this called?
Here are some words that have sprung to mind, but don't really do it for me yet:

gestalt
synthesis
framing
schema
assimilation
interference
congruence/incongruence
construction

Have you got a better way of expressing this?
In podcasting it's quite an important concept to understand I think. If teachers surely set out to engage students one of the ways they expect this to happen is by talking to them. But surely once engaged we then expect them to begin making sense of what they are involved with. When students enter the 'making sense' process they are lost in their own world. This may be momentary or it may be for such a long time that it is hard for them to reconnect with the conversation or collective train of thought.
Let me know if you have any ideas.

Closer!

2007-06-06T22:29:00.000+01:00

There's just so much to report at the moment and I'm not getting the chance.
First, the LTA podcast project didn't celebrate it's first birthday on the 17th May, but should have done. Too busy. So that means I've been podcasting for 2 years - and I'm still passionately in love with it!
The Closer! project (the what?) kicked off this week. One project's over and the next begins. Closer! is the pilot I'm setting up to evaluate the PodcastLX building block for our Blackboard system. Everything I've learnt from the Podcasting for LTA project all of a sudden pours into the Closer! project to inform best practice. It feels good.
There's loads of interest from academics around the university. All the work I've been putting into discussing how audio can be used to enhance learning all seems to be adding up to some great responses from those submitting proposals to take part. The Closer! initiative will of course demand its own community podcast! I'm looking forward to documenting the experience of pilotees as they plan and then roll out their educational podcasts.
I submitted a list of 10 points to the JISCMail podcasting list this week that propose criteria for good educational podcasting. I took this list into Monday's workshop and have also promoted them in my most recent podcast, so I won't repeat them here. I was surprised when I came up with the list how many of them were not about podcasting per se, but about integrating content properly with other learning activity. But it felt right.
I'm also putting together a guidelines document on legal issues such as copyright and ethics. I had thought of not bothering as when I originally thought about this some months ago I realised the uni had all the information there in other contexts. Why would podcasters need their own document? Well, it came up in Monday's workshop and I thought 'let's do it and let's find out if staff and student podcasters need a new spin on these issues'. So I'm creating more work for myself but it's a useful exercise and I've asked two of my colleagues to help think about it too.
I've also produced a guidelines document for students who want to find out about podcast aggregation. This evening I rediscovered Podnova - it looked excellent - and I must go back and make sure this is included. I think web-based aggregators are the way to go as far as making recommendations to students, unless they specifically own an iPod, in which case iTunes makes sense.
At the workshop on Monday I also demoed audio editing live, following through with a post directly into the PodcastLX building block. It couldn't have been simpler.
As I say, so much is happening. I must make more of an effort to record what's happening especially as Closer! gets underway.
Oh yes - why Closer!? Well for a start it's turning out to be a wonderful name. It takes the focus right off the technology and places it directly on the pedagogic application. The rationale for the 'brand' is that innovative educational podcasting is about bring the learning community closer together. If that is your design starting point (my theory goes) then you're not going to get distracted by silly ideas like recording mamouth, monologue lectures.

Assessing student-generated podcasts - how?

2007-05-03T14:13:00.000+01:00

I'm posting questions all over the place today. Here's another for my blog.
I am convinced by the educational opportunities of educational posting, especially those produced by students. How do we go about assessing these?
I have some ideas, but how about you? (I'll respond later)

How do people access podcasts?

2007-05-03T11:21:00.000+01:00

Please let me know how you and/or people you know access podcasts. Please leave me a quick comment. If you know of any literature on this I'd also appreciate any links.
I sense that most people actually access podcasts via their PC rather than by mobile devices? Is this correct do you think?
Should a university offer aggregation software (eg iTunes, Juice, etc) as part of its default managed desktop software?

Not everybody likes podcasting!!!

2007-04-27T21:51:00.000+01:00

I've been carrying out some work with a colleague on the use of audio feedback. Initial findings suggest quite a few directions for further research. I'm very impressed with the approach adopted by my colleague which I'll go into in a later post.
Even though the audio is quite brief and should be very useful in that it is targeted at small groups of 3, some students just don't like it! Well of course that's not really surprising is it?
So the point to this post is that, like good audio feedback, even the best, most interesting, most useful podcasts will also be resisted by some students. What does this mean to us?
It probably means that we need to consider how important it is that each and every student listens to the podcasts we find or make? And how would this affect the effort we might put into making the podcasts? If they are optional what else might we have to produce?
In my previous post I noted that another colleage had also had mixed success with an audio project - it must be that time of year! In that I suggested the need to integrate the audio, to clearly and confidently communicate its role in the learning.
And maybe this is the point: if we belive audio does have something valuable to contribute we should stand by that conviction and properly integrate it by making other learning activities richer by its proximity. It may be new to our students, and they may not be familar with accessing the technology, but if we believe it is valuable we must not allow them to opt out without good reason. We should keep it simple and we should support them, and more than anything, we should normalise the use of media that they may not have ben used in the context of learning before.

Post Script

We're not alone in finding dissinterest amongst some students. Look at these finding for example from Cara Lane at University of Washingston:
"the majority of student respondents listened to fewer than 50% of the podcast recordings, a notable number of respondents (20%) indicated that they listened to 76% or more of the recordings." (Lane, C. (2006) UW Podcasting: Evaluation of Year One. Internal report by Office of Learning Technologies, University of Washington. Online at: http://catalyst.washington.edu/research_development/papers/2006/podcasting_report.pdf, last accessed: 26 April 2007)

How to promote audio usage with students

2007-04-26T15:56:00.000+01:00

I had an interesting message from a colleague today who reports back on his use of digital audio learning objects. I supported him a while back in developing audio objects that may help his students engage in research methods. The result was a series of research methods case studies in the form of digital audio learning objects.
The evaluation showed an apparently mixed success. He tells me that most students did not access the audio. They didn't think it was important. However, those that did thought they were good. Finally (and bizarrely - research don't you love it!?) most students (whether they had listened or not) welcomed similar approaches in the future. OK so there's plenty of scope for further exploration there, but this is very interesting.
It may suggest that media such audio is perceived as unnecessary, optional or as extension material even when it has been offered as being clearly valuable by the tutor. This makes me think that, as with other materials, it may need to be clearly integrated and its use expected and even required. There may well have been a high degree of caution, on the part of the tutor, in over-promoting these assets or in depending upon them. It's a new technology for him and a new technology for his students, so a healthy degree of caution sounds like a good idea. However it needs to be noted that the caution may have dissuaded some from using the resource. (I really don't know this first hand BTW).
I think that this year's work will have given him the confidence to be more assertive next year and maybe confidence can be developed by having a contingency plan.
I have noticed in other projects (not audio related) over the years that tutor confidence and the degree of intergration of a resource into the course can significantly affect success.
So my feelings here are, this sounds like a great start and one that can be built upon. And I really congratulate this academic for going the extra mile. (It seemed relatively easy too).
The learning points for me are: think about making audio integral and be confident in promoting its use; if you are not sure about its technical relibility for whatever reason, have a contigency plan;
Contigency plans may be: do what you did last year; get the students to recreate the audio experience (or their expectation of it) and discuss how this compares to what you weren't able to deliver; get transcripts of pre-recorded audio (you may have to in order to meet the needs of some students anyway).
This makes me realise that digital audio learning objects (whether in podcast form or whatever) are 'objects.' That is, they can be 'talked about.' Their scope is known and contained. So an audio case study, as in this example, has many charcteristics that can be discussed at arms length. This allows people to be constructively critical. Delivering similar experience through live performance, for example, may confuse the benefits of objectivity characteristic of recorded audio material.