Education Session at PodcasterCon
Tuesday, January 3rd, 2006Originally posted on 2ยข Worth, Jan 3, 2006
I’ll be facilitating the Podcasting as a Teaching/Learning Strategy session at PodcasterCon on Saturday (January 7). If you haven’t registered already, and are within driving distance of Chapel Hill (which a good part of the U.S. population is), please consider coming.
The education session will be especially interesting for two reasons. One is that there will likely be equal mixes of participants from the K-12 arena, from higher ed, and folks who are not directly involved in education at all. The perspectives are varied, and I hope that an open and lively sharing will be beneficial for all communities of interest.
The second reason is that Podcasting, like so many technologies as they are initiated in education, is a solution without a problem, a hammer without a nail. In June, I attended Apple’s unveiling event for iTunes 4.9 at the National Educational Computing Conference in Philadelphia. Andy Carvin (Waste of Bandwidth) and I (Connect Learning) recorded a co-podcast while in line (with hundreds of educators), waiting for admittance to the way too small room. We interviewed many of the people who are in line, and not one could comfortably describe what a podcast was. None had ever produced a podcast and only a couple had heard one. But they were all there, because it was the buzz of the conference.
In preparation for this session, I ask a couple of education technology mailing lists for some essential questions that we might tackle in the Saturday session. Leslie Simonfalvi, a teacher educator in Budapest, put it very well as she asked how we might utilize podcasting and other emerging technologies when “…quite a few students, especially gadgetophiles, think about modern learning modes as escape routes.” She continues with some typical alibis, which I included on the sessions wiki page.
In my opinion, students view technology as an escape route because they see such a vast distance between the learning experiences of their classrooms and the information experiences that they have invented using IM, text messaging, blogging, networked video games, etc. We’ve left it up to them to meld these new technologies into their lives while we have been too cautious about adapting our classrooms and curriculums to the changing information environment.
I have some ideas and most of them come from a handful of innovative educators who have invented new teaching and learning strategies around media production and narrowcasting, and I’ll share them on Saturday. But I think that the real value of this session will be a mixing and remixing of perspectives that we will all learn from.
Hope to see you there.
