Podagogy gains ground
On October 12, 2005 I had the privilege of being one of 5 presenters in a webinar coordinated by Allan Carrington. The main audience of the webinar was located in Kona, HI, at the University of the Nations. Webinar presenters included
- Allan Carrington (on the ground at Kona), Instructional Designer at the University of Adelaide
- Philip Uys, the Manager of Educational Design & Educational Technology at Charles Sturt University, in New South Wales, Austrailia
- Jason Baker, Associate Professor & advisor for the distance education cognate in the Doctor of Education program at Regent University, Virginia Beach, Virgina
- David Gagnon, Instructional Program in the Academic Technology division of Information Technology at University of Wisconsin at Madison
- Randy Meredith (myself), Assistant Professor of Education & Director of Academic Technology at , Spring Arbor, Michigan.
My portion of the presentations focused on emerging technologies: Podcasting, Blogging, Wikis, Social Bookmarking, and Voice over IP (VoIP). In the process of developing the presentation I formulated a framework for the pedagogical use of podcating.
Rob Reynolds’ interesting article on Pedagogy for Podcasting at Xplanazine suggested a framework of “context -> information -> review”. I thought this an outstanding idea, and spent a good deal of time mulling it over. As a result, I used Rob’s framework as a springboard to a slightly different model:
Context:
- Connect with prior learning
- Connect with learning objectives
- Establish relevance
- Provide advance organizers
Content:
- Present high level overview, clearly structured, mapped to outcomes
- Present in small “chunks”
- Enable student to create a cognitive “map” of the content (relationships, precedence, sequence, dependencies, etc.)
Review:
- Provide “audio bullet points” covering the salient issues of the podcast
Connect:
- Reflective assignment (personal reflection paper, journal/blog entry)
- Reflective assignment (collaborative assessment-discussion postings and responses)
- Next steps
- online course resources
- self-assessments
- supplemental readings
- case studies
- problem sets
- transcript of podcast
- webliographies
- bibliographies
- media links
- Connect to assigned readings
- Advance connection to next topic in course sequence
Since then I have found 2 additional sites advocating “podagogy”, and a thoughtful framework for doing so. The first site is Teaching & Learning with Podcasting (U. of Wisconsin at Madison). This is an excellent resource for faculty considering the use of podcasting/coursecasting. The second site is the University of Wolverhampton’s School of Sport, Performing Arts, and Leisure Podagogy site. This site does not provide any resources of note. The main point of interest for me was their use of the term podagogy.
Obviously, the framework I’ve suggested is an untested framework, and represents an idea in process. I want to express my appreciate to Rob Renolds at Xplanazine for his insight, and to Allan Carrington for organizing the webinar which was the catalyst forcing me to begin crystalizing my thoughts on a pedagogical framework for podcasting. I would be very interested in other’s thoughts on a pedagogical framework for podcasting.
