Nearly everyone involved in Higher Education (HE) is constantly attempting to find new ways of learning and teaching, facing up to new challenges, meeting changing learner demands, achieving more with fewer resources – and in our special era – working out how technologies can be harnessed productively and successfully. The contexts and conditions for learning technologies are changing very fast. We cannot take control of the external environment but the new technologies pouring across our boundaries do offer us all very special opportunities.
Enter the sparkling new podcast, stage left. The audience in this theatre is made up of students who have grown up with the internet as part of their lives – and their learning. Their adoption of technologies in their everyday communication and entertainment has already outstripped our understanding of appropriate pedagogical responses in universities. Hence mobile learning and its cousin podcasting are variously viewed as a passing wave, a threat to formal education, or the answer to the question of how to engage and enthrall learners of the future.
Podcasting for learning is part of the vast and confusing changes occurring throughout HE, throughout the world. We’ve just got used to using the internet as part of our core offerings – we create or aggregate content for our students’ to consume. But new directions on the web invite contribution and choice (often known as Web 2.0) and gives us a new landscape. Learning, knowledge and technology is converging, everything and everyone is increasingly mobile and many people have multiple ‘presence’ online. So the future is complex, uncertain and a little difficult to predict! In the complex marriage of technology and pedagogy, our new challenge is to consider where podcasting for learning could go next.
Podcasting is part of a wider movement towards Internet-mediated collections of people linked by their common interests and by producing, sharing, collecting and remixing diverse ‘stuff’. In addition, the interest in voice messaging may result in a new genre for collaborative and remote groups – already I have started work on the younger sibling of e-tivities (Salmon 2002): pod-tivities! Podcasts and podcasting do not have learning explicitly built into them: we design in the pedagogy. We should start from a learning challenge, allow ourselves to ‘evolve’ and examine ways of supporting and extending learning. I believe strongly in finding, evaluating, creating, contributing and working together for knowledge sharing, and that these must be the best places to start. |
