A colleague pointed me in the direction of the audio podcasts on the Learn 4 Life site. They should make interesting listening. Of particular note is the recent interview with Jason Cole about Moodle use at the UK Open University (mp3). But then I got to thinking rather more broadly about the way we are approaching the gathering of material which reflects the opinions and experiences of those involved in actually making things happen. Such material could be as much part of our cultural heritage as the artefacts produced by the big media organisations.
What’s also interesting is that despite apparently having a commercial edge to its activities, as its growing podcast archive demonstrates, Learn 4 Life perceives much of the innovation coming from within the public sector. There’s a lesson here for all the organisations and bodies involved in whatever level of education. There are also a few issues.
Why aren’t you doing something like this? Why aren’t you out talking to and capturing the views and experiences of the innovators in your own organisations and then sharing them with the rest of us? Where’s the funding that will make this possible going to come from? Is this best left as a distributed activity involving just anyone who’s interested, or is there also scope for a major pump-priming initiative involving the major educational funding bodies/agencies?
In common with many other putative podcasters, Auricle has attempted to contribute to the sector’s audio knowledge base and while it’s something I would personally like to do a lot more of the challenge now is how to move beyond the proof-of-concept stage and scale up such activity. That means time and effort and it’s the former which gets squeezed.
So perhaps we do need a few central initiatives to get things underway and help the sector to realize the value of the innovators in their midst and the value of expending some time and effort capturing part of them for posterity, without needing a BBC outside broadcasting unit to do so.
