If students can download podcasts of lectures or presentations and can listen to them at their convenience, as often as they wish, they can reflect on what they learn. Teaching materials may thus be reused, teaching expertise may be shared and student note-taking during lectures may change. A lecturer may point students to podcasts of his previous lectures or those delivered by others. Podcasts therefore provide useful opportunities for reflective learning. Podcast-mediated reflective learning may even be a measure of student growth and competence (Flanigan and Amirian 2006; Dillon and Brown 2006).
The Chinese proverb, ‘if you wish to know the mind of a person, listen to his words’ says a lot about the relationship between podcasting and reflective learning. Listening to student generated podcasts may give educators insight into what students know and can know. Educators may use such insights to design student learning activities that draw from previous student learning experiences and may require students to reflect on these experiences. If the experience has an accompanying audio trail, the reflection becomes even richer.
To this end, podcasts are catalytic to reflective learning. In order for students to stay focused in the process of reflection, some guidance is required. Questions are a useful tool to give structure to reflection. Podcasts are not intrinsically learning tools, so to use them as such requires that they are carefully integrated into the curriculum at the pedagogical level. |
