Introducing Podcasting for Pedagogic Purposes

The Podcasting for Pedagogic Purposes focus provides us with an opportunity to revisit MELSIG’s roots and the widespread interest of innovators in the role of the recorded voice to supported learning, teaching and assessment.

In this strand, we will take a broad view of the idea of podcasting and identify ways in which the ‘digital voice’ of the academic, the student, employers, clients and publics can be harnessed to stimulate learning. For example, digital media can be used to convey knowledge and it can be used to capture experience. More than this, however, audio is an ideal locus of co-production and the co-construction and representation of knowledge. This is partly because it is an easy medium for the academic or the student to work with, especially given the array of technologies we have nowadays to record conversations and events and to share and use these artefacts. This ease of use may mean we also understand podcasting as a single dimension of video-based media, such as screencasting, digital stories and learning capture, where the voice has a primary role in creating a rich learning experience.

Access to both provided and personal technologies provides us with an opportunity to check the range of technologies and ways the voice can be brought into the physical or digital learning environment, and to consider the purposes to which it can be applied. Perhaps the best known audio method is audio feedback, but lecture capture, webinars and student note making using smart technologies are also commonly used. Examples of podcasting formats such as student group ‘magazine programmes’, interviews with experienced people who can provide new perspectives on knowledge and professional practice, co-produced audio revision notes, and so forth, indicate the wealth of possibilities for this pedagogic media.
Key resource: Digital Voices: a collaborative exploration of the recorded voice in post-compulsory education book on the MELSIG site (free to download)