by Derek Morrison, 15 June 2008
The Podcasting for Pedagogic Purposes (PPP) SIG is one of the five Pathfinder Network Projects. I participated in the well-attended third face-to-face event at the Warrington campus of the University of Chester on Wednesday (11 June 2008). Particular respect is due to the SIG for including a delegation of students as contributers to one of the afternoon workshops. The main source of information about the SIG appears to have gravitated to a PPP pbwiki site rather than one hosted by any particular university. I find this preference for, and growing confidence in, external services such as “ning” and “pbwiki” quite interesting.
I suspect it’s because it is so easy to setup in comparison to wrestling with the complexities of negotiating institutional hosting and it also provides neutral ground for collaborative endeavours such as the PPP SIG and ELESIG. Of course there are also risks, e.g. loss of ac.uk domain ‘brand’ association, hosting service failure, change of hosting service mission, becomes a charged for service, or even a corporate buyout; but there are also different risks and issues associated with single institution hosting on behalf of an external group. I’m also interested in whether such services are a growing part of what I’ve previously called the “Hidden Learning Environment” (HLE). Maybe I should rename this as the “Underground Learning Environment” (ULE)? 🙂
But let me now turn to some of my other reflections of the day:
An early part of the day focused on the nature of SIGs and Communities of Practice and what the various configurations and sustainable models could be. The PPP wiki will undoubtedly provide some of the rich detail of that session but I think that some of the issues addressed in this session align with some of what I posited in my posting to this blog Take me to your thought leader (13 January 2008) in which I provide some examples of how even major, apparently egalitarian, enterprises like Wikipedia are actually driven by a relatively small cadre of active contributors in comparison to the mass of readers, e.g.
“… only one tenth of one percent of Wikipedia editors account for about half of the content value of this uber Web 2.0 exemplar… So far from the “widsom of the crowd” a significant proportion of the value of Wikipedia appears to derive from the contributions of a relatively small proportion of authors/editors, i.e. the wisdom of an ‘elite’? 🙂 ”
However, instead of getting too worked up about ‘lurkers’ (nasty pejorative term that it is) we perhaps need to take a broader view of what a “contributor” is. After all without a large number of readers (or attenders) where would Wikipedia et al be? So maybe that should also provide some food for thought for all of us interested in facilitating and maintaining SIGs and would-be communities. Perhaps there will always be a need for an energetic committed cadre to create the conditions and environments which others find worthwhile to contribute to in various forms and degrees; which may well be limited to participation in occasional events. I suspect sustainability can only be achieved when sufficient members of a group continue to feel they are getting something out of the participation whether that be recognition, receiving, sharing, personal and professional development, reassurance, testing ideas, optimization of bid production, or whatever. The challenge is in generating sufficient momentum and intrinsic energy to keep going once the initial flush of enthusiasm falls to a background level.
I certainly detected a high level of interest and enthusiasm for the podcasting concept(s) which also included screencasts, videocasts etc but it was also good to see and hear some professional sceptics (aka academics and pracademics) who were asking those essential challenging, but sometimes uncomfortable, questions about whether, what is after all just multimedia digital files, albeit conveniently disseminated via the web, offer better learning experiences and outcomes than words on a page (or screen). An academic or student producing a podcast may well find this a highly novel and stimulating experience, and while the power of such a motivational impetus should not be underestimated, we also need evidence of learning outcomes that transcend the Hawthorne Effect. If we don’t do so, the risk is podcasts and podcasting get invested with almost mystical powers or – and – acquire a political advocacy not backed by hard evidence. Although not minimizing the anecdotal, such evidence needs to transcend “we enjoyed using/producing them” or “I could listen to them on my iPod on the way into the University in the morning”.
My mind was also exercised by questions of why students would bother with podcasts in the first place? To me the simple answer is that they need to perceive them as relevant. Where does the relevance come from? Although an imperfect division I think that relevance can either be intrinsic or extrinsic. One example of extrinsic relevance would be a requirement, enacted through, say, a course/module/unit assignment, activity or task that requires users to create or listen to, analyse, or comment on, a podcast. In that case the podcast is a learning resource forming part of a designed learning activity which becomes part of a constructive alignment (Biggs, 1999) framework of objectives, assessments, activities/events, and resources. My illustration below is informed by John Biggs’ model.
(Right click your mouse button to view a higher resolution version of this image)
Intrinsic relevance arises when the podcast is perceived to be worthwhile because it meets the interests, aspirations, needs, or goals of the user (student or teacher) which, although it may not be a extrinsic requirement, may enhance the life (including work) of the potential user. I think the intrinsic relevance of podcasts (and indeed other artefacts/resources) also depends on the perceived status of the podcast developers/authors/presenters. Such status doesn’t necessarily mean that to be a successful podcaster one requires a Nobel Prize or a Reith Lectureship, but simply to be perceived as important to the life of the user. Viewed from that perspective, the views of and artefacts produced by a peer may be as, or more, important as that of a prince or princess depending on the context, e.g. I would imagine my views on whatever genre of music etc would not put me in the perceived ‘thought-leader’ category in comparison to, say, a knowledgeable peer of my teenage daughter. Similarly, a course tutor, lecturer, supervisor may equally be perceived as important people in the life of the student and so any artefacts emerging from those sources may be perceived as equally important, even when they lack broadcast-quality production values (which is not to say that we shouldn’t all aspire to the best quality possible within the resources and time available).
Pocasts, like any other resource or artefact, are not a panacea. They do not become vested with magical educational properties just because enthusiasts have created them or because the information is wrapped in a digital and metadata coat that optimises dissemination potential. They are simply a resource which need to be perceived as valuable to the person expected to listen/view them and so the focus needs to be on creating or optimising relevance. But yet, so often artefacts such as podcasts are designated as “value-added”, “supplementary”, or “optional”. My experience of such categorisation is not good mainly because increasingly busy goal-oriented students are also ruthless managers of time, and so anything not considered to be in the “essential” and course-relevant category tends not to achieve critical mass; and that technical and theoretical learning design excellence is no guarantee of significant uptake.
Eight years ago I was involved in a major EU Socrates project which as part of its activities created an EASA award-winning piece of software at considerable expense. In the context of the time (an aeon ago in technical terms) my peers decided it offered great design, and was great software, but the faculty decided to offer it to MSc students on the deadly “supplementary” basis. I undertook the evaluation with the intended student users and they said … “yes it was great and they wished they had time to do it justice but as it wasn’t part of their course …”. So whilst technical innovation is important and the opportunities it opens up are legion, and I think staff and students do require experience of all the possibilites, I think it’s also important to reflect on how this podcast, screencast, videocast or whatever is going to be relevant to learning and teaching experiences; and how we are going to establish that this relevance actually exists at a level that justifies the effort of production and utilisation. So instead of repeated cycles of speculative development, and activity for its own sake, evidence of relevance and impact should be providing the necessary fuel and informing sustainable development. Step forward the researchers … Which provides a useful link to the next section.
The PPP event organisers had set themselves an interesting goal for one of the afternoon sessions, i.e. to generate 100 educational podcasting ideas using the “wisdom of the crowd”. Such a generative activity was to become the basis of a “book”. Delegates were invited to work singly and in pairs to initiate and extend ideas. My contribution was based around the meta or emotional levels of learning using a podcast as one vehicle. I labeled this “Vicarious Learning” or “Put yourself in my shoes”, i.e. one person’s experience became part of the learning experience of another person. For example: listening to a patient or – and – their partner describing what is was like being told they had terminal cancer; or a mother in a hospital labour suite misunderstanding the meaning of a student midwife telling her supervisor that she couldn’t find the baby’s heartbeat; or the young woman describing what had happened to her life once she had been misdiagnosed with epilepsy.
To reinforce my Vicarious Experience examples, and quite by coincidence, I came across a recent podcast based on an investigative series the BBC Radio 4 Today programme has been running focusing on the care of the elderly in the UK … or is that lack of care? Although we can read about it on the BBC site listening to it adds a new dimension. Deddie Davies is the 70 year old investigator who shares her learning experience with us in her audio diary entitled Care Home Life is Slow Death.
Deddie Davies’ experience reminds me of “On Being Sane in Insane Places” (Rosenhan, D 1973, Science, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Vol. 179, 250-258). In the controversial Rosenhan experiment, eight confederates engineered their admission to different psychiatric hospitals in the US on the basis of hearing voices (auditory hallucinations). Once admitted to hospital, they behaved normally but, because the system was primed for abnormality, not normality, i.e. they had been labeled as ‘insane’, even normal behaviour, e.g. writing notes, could be interpreted as part of their ‘condition’. This could make extracation difficult; with one pseudo-patient not discharged for 52 days, and even then with the further label of “being in remission”. If you want a bit more of the background then there is a YouTube clip that sets the scene and you can follow this up by reading the PubMed abstract. The full paper appears to be available from several online sources.
For the purposes of the BBC undercover work, and similar to the Rosenhan approach, Deddie’s cover story was that she had mild dementia and her normal carer was away. The combination of the ‘elderly’ and ‘dementia’ labels enabled her to be sucked into the care home machinery with ease. As with the Rosenhan experiment, staff perceptions were suitably primed and the consequent behaviours, so Deddie suggests, being pretty representative of what awaits those so labeled.
It’s perhaps interesting to compare the Rosenhan work with the BBC investigation. One is considered to be a notable, if controversial, piece of academic research, whereas the other is considered to be investigative journalism. Yet both enjoyed a high level of media impact and both certainly “rattled the bars of the cage” of the institutions they investigated. Both have that potential for changing the way of how we think and the policies and practice that emerge from that.
But what if such “undercover” techniques were applied to other areas of study of experiences, e.g. being a soldier in a war zone, teaching in a “failing” school, or even being a student in Higher Education? What about the unpredictable consequences when discrete but powerful modern technologies like mobile phone cameras are aligned with ubiquitous and free online services like YouTube or a podcasting service to almost instantly disseminate “experiences” from the user’s perspective, experiences that may not necessarily align with how the institution like to think of itself or the message it wishes to project? Opportunistic and sometimes mischievous capture and dissemination of controversial statements or events devoid of contextual information, should not, of course, be compared to carefully planned research activity; but, as the Rosenhan work demonstrated, even careful planning and scholarly publication will not necessarily shield such researchers from attempts to oppugn their work particularly by the institutions or subjects that were studied. Anyone wishing to undertake such academic research could quickly find themselves in a “Catch 22” situation. The researcher may want to “tell it as it is” but even assuming approvals were granted, the act of seeking approvals and the institution’s knowledge thereof could change the behaviours and therefore experiences to something unrepresentative of the norm. But without such approvals what could have been valid scholarly activity risks becomes something more akin to investigative journalism. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to speculate on a scenario in which, rather than employing spurious and sporadic YouTube videos as a disruptive weapon, students with a high level of understanding regarding technology, information dissemination, and research methodologies employ more scholarly and organised approaches to “telling it how it is”, i.e. student conceived and implemented investigations in which academics and institutional provision have become the subjects/focus and some of the ‘evidence’ is gathered by devices that are to all intents and purposes invisible. Research? Investigative journalism? Cyber-bullying? Unethical? Subversive? Disruptive?
In the BBC report Deddie Davies played the role of patient in order to observe and record naturalistic behaviour and she is likely to enjoy the unqualified support of all (except those with a vested interest in discrediting her work). It’s interesting to reflect on what the response would have been had Deddie Davies been playing the role of student in order to observe and record naturalistic behaviour in HE settings a la Rosenhan?
To balance this, what some might construe as a nightmare scenario, it’s great to see activity in which academics and students become willing collaborators in investigations, e.g. Kansas State University Digital Ethnography group’s A Vision of Students Today.
From the A Vision of Students Today YouTube site:
A short video summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today – how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. Created by Michael Wesch in collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University.
The videocast is part of the work of Kansas State University’s Digital Ethnography group which describes itself as:
A working group of Kansas State University students and faculty dedicated to exploring and extending the possibilities of digital ethnography.
In conclusion, what initiated the chain of thought above was whether there is any justification for employing podcasts and their ilk at all or whether this is just another transient technology panacea soon to be replaced with another. While I think constructive sceptism should certainly continue to be part of the SIG’s mindset it is important that groups such as this continue to enthusiastically engage with all the possibilities that technologies such as podcasts offer so that they can help inform that “relevance” question. The Digital Ethnography faculty/student partnership perhaps offers a useful model here.
See also:
Pulling them in with podcasting (Academy Pathfinder blog, 17 July 2007)
Teaching Research Methods (Times Higher Education, 3 January 2008)
