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(This is a text summary of the He Said She Said podcast from August 23, 2005. This is a bi-weekly podcast that deals with a wide range of topic on Education and Educational Technology. The show’s host is Rob Reynolds and he is joined by Susan Smith Nash. The He Said She Said podcast is available every Tuesday and Thursday on Xplana Radio. Note: This text differs from the podcast and is not a transcript. Please be sure to listen to the podcast!)

She Said:

Podcasting is fun, exciting, dynamic, and portable. It’s perfect for e-learning, especially when it surges naturally from a course, and individuals start using it in a collaborative way, and the instructor uses it to accommodate different learning styles and to introduce a new way to let the mind organize and make meaning.

However, the same fun, dynamic approach to e-learning can be stripped of all its excitement and rendered into a barren, sterile wasteland of educational content by forcing it into an inappropriate instructional model.

Wrong Way #1: Require students to listen to the podcast while staying tied to a computer, rather than exploiting the functionality of the mp3 player ( Rio , iPod, etc.) I’m not saying that a well-made powerpoint or synched slide show is a bad thing, just that this superimposes a delivery mode that has little or nothing to do with the way that individuals are using the technology. Keep it portable.

Wrong Way #2: Record a 60-minute lecture in a monotone devoid of any memory markers, narrative structure, story, or dialogue. Do you want to bore your students and turn them off of listening to audio files? This will do it! (Unless, of course, you’re trying to create high-quality content-neutral, non-intrusive “white noise” that will effectively block out ambient noise.)

Right Way #1: Design your podcasts so that your points make connections with the student’s life and experiences, as well as with the course goals and content. Ideally, your podcast should result in enhanced student engagement – they will return to the course and post comments, refer to the podcast in discussions, and collaborate with other students in innovative and possibly unexpected ways.

Right Way #2: Podcast as knowledge-importer. Trigger thoughts and ideas to stimulate the students’ cognitive processes. Ideally, you’ll be helping them make connections to immediate knowledge and short-term memory, which will translate from working memory to stored, long-term memory. You’ll also help them organize the knowledge into categories in a way that facilitates retrieval. Finally, the podcast stimulates the processing of experience and construction of knowledge that leads to deep learning, the ability to make generalizations, and other meta-cognitive activities. The knowledge can then be used in problem-solving, synthesis, and cognitive model-making.

This is new territory, and I think that it would be quite useful to start doing a few studies of how people are using podcasting, and on learning efficacy. It may be that there are discipline-modified “best practices” for podcasting. Who knows – I think the key is to explore, but resist the impulse to be over-deterministic and formulaic until we’ve had a chance to do some studies, and to really probe this new opportunity.

In the meantime, I’m going to continue to do podcasts, even if I’m unconsciously or unwittingly being naughty and doing it all wrong.

He Said

I hate to admit it, but I’m in perfect agreement with Susan on this. I’m not a believer in 60-minute speeches by great orators who are speaking on topics I really care about, much less in lectures by professors to students whose interest is dubious. And, if you take the actual person out of the picture and make people listen to a disembodied voice in which they have little interest, well, I think that probably borders on cruel and unusual punishment. At that point you’re so deep into Plato’s cave you can’t even see the reflection of the divine.

So, when it comes to wrong ways to use podcasting in education, I think you want to avoid the following:

• Lectures
• Formal tone
• Anything over 10 minutes
• Lack of visual clues or auditory reinforcement

In terms of best practices, here is what I propose (also, listen to this podcast on the subject along with the accompanying example):

• 2-4 minutes is ideal, but no post should exceed 10 minutes .
• Use an informal tone and high energy. You’re competing with a lot of other memes out there.
• Provide context for every post/clip and always end with a review of what you have been saying.
• If possible, provide options for multiple learning styles.
• Provide flexible delivery options .

Podcasting is here to stay and used correctly it can be an ideal extension to any learning environment. Unfortunately, used improperly, it could suck every bit of life out of the learning experience.

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