Socratic Monologue
Despite technical difficulties, here is a conversation with Rick Schwier about podcasting and education. This was recorded in Rick’s office on his Olympus voice recorder. During the course of the conversation, I somehow manage to work WKRP in Cincinatti as well as a rant about the utility (or lack thereof) of teaching cursive writing in elementary schools. If you are concerned about education, interested in technology or both, you may find this interesting.
Here’s a (really quick) summary (or should I say a Really Small Summary – nah, too contentious. ;^) ):
- What’s the educational model for using podcasting?
- Comparing blogs and podcasts (including my pathetic begging for someone to send me an iPod shuffle)
- Content is king! (Rick and I rave zealously about CBC radio)
- Rick asks “Who is listening to podcasts?”
- Podcasts as theatre of the mind (mentioned several times)
- What does it take to put together a podcast? What are the needed skills?
- Using video/audio to reduce psychological distance between speaker and listener. I, being the raving Adam Curry fanboy, mention him glowingly several times.
- Where will today’s students take the medium? Producing audio essays (essentially small radio documentaries) as the product of their research.
- What are the necessary skills that schools should be teaching students? This includes my rant against cursive writing.
- Schools relationship with disruptive technologies. This is an idea that, I hope, Rick and I will pick up in the future.
Rick also blogs at Rick’s Cafe Canadien. Comments are always welcome (except for spammers – grrrr!)
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Hey you guys are good! Keep it up!
Cheers, James
Very cool, I’m using a “type of pod-cast” in my online design. I’ve created audio lectures for some of the “chapters”… the only difference is , I’ve used my DV camcorder to record the audio and I use a still image of myself in the QTime screen. Full video becomes a large file, but just the audio and some screen shots makes for an interesting listen.
cool, good work guys
Hey Norm, thanks for the comment. I like the sound of what you are doing – I might need to get you on the podcast one of these days! I’m interested that you are using audio and a still image of yourself – why not just make it audio only? Podcasts have really renewed my interest on how audio can be used to bridge the affective distance between participants in online learning (but I’m a much more text and audio person than a visual person).
Hi Rob, I’m using my image because when I was taking Rick’s class (Intro to ET), and I noticed that the video portion to his powerpoint lectures helped keep my focus and attention. Now, I have to consider that a dv file would be huge…but an audio file would be easier for playback/download. I figured that if I can still have some sort of image (for visual input) to help with the focus … you know “put a face to the voice”. I’m going to try and have a new image every ten seconds or something, just so the image doesn’t become passive.
And yes, I also think that you should return to the mac world. I just bought an iBook ….. cool, a new toy. ….. and I also purchased an iPod shuffle. The Shuffle is ….. very cool.
You’ve got the right idea in the mini-mac … it’s like mac legos, build your own system.
That makes sense to me – using a periodically changing visual image to keep their visual focus on a page.