Archive for the 'Podcasts' Category

Last week UNE hosted the Narrowing the Gap Conference. The purpose of this conference was to look at ways of ‘narrowing the gap’ and helping improve the learning performance of disadvantaged students.

One of the presenters at this conference was a principal whose school was about to embark upon a podcasting project addressing literacy issues for aboriginal students. Specifically, the aim of the project was the enhance literacy development in the Middle School. It was making use of the Quality Teaching Framework elements of Substantive Communication, Connectedness and Engagement.

As an aside, this framework is worth looking at but hard to get hold of if you’re outside DET NSW (that includes us here at UNE) however one article that lists the elements of the framework can be accessed from:

http://www.acel.org.au/conference2006/presentations/suestanford.doc

In regards to these elements the issues being targetted are:

• Substantive communication - both oral and written language.
• Connectedness - this was not only to get the aboriginal students reconnected with school but also their own culture both within and outside their local communities.
• Engagement - providing relevance for students beyond school

To help support this a number of technologies will be used. Firstly voice recognition software is going to be used to help students actually see what they are saying helping them improve their literacy skills making stronger links with written texts. Secondly, and this is the reason I’m talking about this, the school plans to use podcasting to help reconnect students with both school and their culture.

What’s so cool about this program is it will be the students responsible for the creation of the podcasts. This involves activities such as writing scripts, arranging interviews, recording and producing the podcasts. As Aboriginal culture has such a strong oral tradition, podcasts are a great way to capture stories both personal, and those of the local community.

What the school hopes to develop within their students is the concept of a ’student voice’. The creation of these podcasts for distribution should help students see that their ’stories’ and culture are valuable and worthy of a wider audience. The school is also hoping that this project will engender a greater sense of collaboration as students work together to develop these podcasts. Putting the podcasts together should also help enhance generic problem solving skills. So here’s wishing the school well!

At the end of the day though the tool is just a tool. It’s the philosophy behind its use that the critical factor here. And what’s behind that is the philosophy of how students learn held by the teacher. In regards to podcasts, like other tools, they can be used to support two very divergent styles of teaching and learning.

For example, I’m currently trying to learn Chinese - I’m learning it by podcast. The little experience I have in teaching languages I know the importance of practice and repetition. So in this respect the podcasts have been invaluable in supporting a largely behaviourist mode of teaching. In defence of the authors there are extensive notes and the language learning is embedded in meaningful contexts.

So certainly podcasts can be used to support a very didactic style of learning and reading a few of the posts people have been expressing some concern over this. You might be able to argue that having a teacher talking at students in some respects has got to be better than simply having the podcast doing the same thing. However let’s move beyond this and look at the use of podcasts from a constructivist perspective. I mean listening to a podcasts doesn’t take up much brainpower but certainly creating one should. Great questions like: “Who is going to be my audience?” “What do I want to say?” “To what purpose?” “What’s the idea I’m trying to put across?” “What’s my motivation for saying what I’m saying?” “Will I include all points of view or simply my own?” “How am I going to say it?” “What order am I going to say it in?” “Should I formal language or informal language?”

These are all great questions that require a fair bit of cognitive grunt to nut out. So creating a podcast requires a fair amount of good intellectual activity on behalf of the authors, so why would you allow your students to miss the opportunity to experience this by creating podcasts for them?

These type of activities also help students learn that language is something that is used for a purpose within a variety of social contexts and for a variety of reasons. By allowing the students the opportunity to create podcasts they can learn some powerful lessons about language and how it can be manipulated to achieve a particular purpose. Everybody has an agenda! We need to give students skills to be able to go beyond what’s simply being said.

Could we get similar outcomes without going to the trouble of creating podcasts? Probably, but would the kids be as engaged and motivated? They’re the people largely hooked into the mp3 players listening to the content and ideas of others, wouldn’t it be great to give them the same capabilities? It’s about empowering students and getting them to take control of their own learning. It’s also about keeping school relevant by placing it in the centre of these new social computing tools.

To wrap this up, we can really miss the boat on this stuff and we have before. Educational television was once hailed as the “next great thing” to help solve all of education’s ills. For one reason or another it failed. (To read about this and other examples have a look at Larry Cuban’s book Teachers and Machines.). Now it seems kids watch the television with little ability to understand or critique what’s being shown. We’re paying for this as well through what I think is pretty ordinary and banal programming. What happen to the good old days? I mean, I learned everything I needed to know from Roadrunner cartoons namely -

1. Gravity only applies when you realise it should be acting upon you.
2. Never buy anything from the ACME Supply Co.
3. The light at the end of the tunnel IS an oncoming train!

The picture? The Temple of Heaven and Earth, Beijing.