Podcasts for Educational use

1 teacher and two university lecturers in the room. Mmmmmm..

Technologies challenge traditional ways of transmitting knowledge.

Last October, he’d just got into podcasting. A friend had a big contract with a south london borough for remedial education. The borough decided they had too many unemployed uneducated kids. So they got loads of hardware and software (even quarkexpress and adobe!) equipped a room with state of the art stuff. Big opening ceremony – everyone there. had a phone call saying kids didn’t turn up for the lectures in this hi-tech wonderland.

Looked again – it’s just another classroom – nice carpets & cool kit, but still a classroom and these kids are those who rebelled against classrooms. That model of encouraging people to learn doesn’t work for a significant minority of kids. Milverton said give ’em ipods so they can hang on the corners pretending to listen to music, but really listening to a maths lesson. Not taken seriously – now closed the facility. An illustration of how difficult it is to get established professionals to accept what’s new and experiment with stuff.

Took 5 years for department to take web-authoring seriously. The kids came and the rooms were full, because they saw the future, they’re smart, they know what’s coming. Now very few are even using blogs (x-warwick)

Getting in touch with community nurses – difficult to communicate with people who for some reason don’t want to turn on their phones. Aaaah podcasting. So much could be done with simple cheap technology in the NHS, but instead they pour money down the drain on ERP systems and the like.

Teaching children of refugees to speak English. Some kids aren’t so good at face to face learning. Podcasts great for re-inforcing. Big problem encouraging teachers to deal with children in the context of a culture that kids understand.

Delivering instructions to learners – it’s a one-way thing, so this is a bit of a barrier (or at least a weakness) You can’t have direct feedback and that needs to be dealt with.

What about people selling audio files of lectures? Nothing new. Same as when newspapers panicked about losing advertising revenue and just dumped same content onto the website. Didn’t excite anybody to just see a facsimile of newsprint. Important not to just reproduce in a different media – look at how to create something new and interesting out of it.

Podcasting the next big thing for training? A company saved 30% of training budget that was previously going on cd and dvd burning. But also the ability to encourage people to create their own space and feel included. Tagging as a form of knowledge management, allow people to create their own environment and subject area communities.

Large-scale experiment at Duke University – gave everyone an iPod (discounted from Apple) Review showed that it was used for recording lectures, but also sharing their own comments about lectures, students learn more from each other than from their lecturers! Learning also accelerated by creating their own learning environments, learning from each other, from their peers, using the technology for real purposes and learning much faster as a result.

Q: what’s your job? Journalism lecturer at City University for 10 years. Only has weblog. Ran Netmedia conference. Now creating a forum for people who innovate in digital media can move on and get financial support to build businesses, working with UCL. But also just a space to engage each other about innovation in the space and how we encourage it here.

Q: Any directories for this sort of content? No, but we’re working on it. (it will create itself, or the students will create it for themselves).

Q: Work with your local high-school

tags: podcastcon uk & podcasting & london