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Viewpoint
Podcasting in Instruction: Moving Beyond the Obvious
6/25/2008
The public nature is accentuated through the mobility in that student voice can now be heard by multiple users and within multiple contexts and it can both present a multimedia publication and receive multimedia and multi-user input. This is powerful for students and encourages their efforts to be prepared for a wider audience and to collaborate with more participants. Additionally, within these accessible contexts, students are more likely to welcome feedback and commentary on their work. It is exactly with the desired intention for feedback and peer affirmation or confrontation that today's students welcome this notion of authorship. For educators, then, what was once a huge challenge to encourage students to publish is more familiar and acceptable, as is the notion of negotiating their individual voice, opinion, or idea within the larger context of viewers, users, peers, and whoever happens across their work.Student engagement also becomes more regular as students own the process from the outset. The whole publication becomes owned by students rather than a final stage in a project process. Additionally, providing more authentic assessment through the use of individual podcasts provides educators with concrete examples that can be assessed within the context of a course and can be evaluated by others in the course and outside the course as well.
An example from my own experience is using podcasting as a means to provide a continuous assessment opportunity based on real-life experience and individual voice within an overseas trip with a class of History and Culture students three years ago. The concept was that the students would begin the process before leaving for the trip, set up their podcast software and hardware items, design their podcast content based on the study sheets provided, and keep in mind that all of the podcasts would be made available for the entire university body upon returning to the campus. The students were totally responsible for their podcast design and the media used. Each student was also responsible to provide a written explanation of their project and their research plan and content development plan (interviews, video captures, images etc.). The benefit of this was that the students (as well as being excited about obtaining a new iPod for the trip) were focused on their "production" and the representation of their individual journey from the outset. They were also excited to know what their peers and others thought not only about their podcasts but about their journey.
Knowledge Building Through Collaboration
Often cooperation replaces collaboration in education (Scardamalia and Bereiter, 1996). That is, when educators provide opportunities for students to work together in teams toward a project goal (cooperation), it does not always result in collaboration. The latter is a process by which participants work equally to exchange ideas and build on ideas toward an undetermined goal (new knowledge).
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