Not quite sure if it is 16 or 17 – and no time to post it here now. But if you can’t wait for the next edition of Sounds of the Bazaar head over to the Bazaar web site – and listen to the latest edition of our podcasting goodness.
I’m in a bar in Sofia – grabbing a bit of bandwidth. And in comes this interesting email.
“Dear Dr. Attwell,” it says, (thanks for the Doctorate, I am a sucker for flattery), “I am a producer for the Spanish Americas Section of the BBC World Service. I am writing an article about Online Educa Berlin and I would like to have a telephone interview with you about Podcasting.
The idea is to talk about Podcasting as a tool for learning, what is the potential and the future of the tool, the plus and the minus points.”
Well how could I refuse. But I thought it might be time to do a little research about podcasts, as opposed to just making them. I remembered the excellent Impala project – I have an interview with one of the project researchers, Ming Nie, due out next week. The IMPALA project, funded by the UK Higher Education Academy, is investigating the impact of podcasting on student learning and how the beneficial effects can positively be enhanced.
Perhaps more interestingly, the IMPALA partners are experimenting with a range of pedagogical models to address specific challenges in teaching and learning.
I searched around the various project web sites, wikis, blogs and presentations. I am not sure about their first attempt at a model – it seems to me overly media / technology prescriptive. But some of the work looking at the pedagogic use of podcasts is very useful.
In a paper presented at a JISC Workshop on Innovative E‐Learning with Mobile and Wireless Technologies, they say podcasts can be used:To support online learning and to integrate other e‐learning activities – a profcast model
In a presentation at Alt C, 2007 Ming Nie says podcasting can “facilitate collaborative learning and skills development through dialogue (Allen, 2005; Laurillard, 2002;Wenger, 1998).
Ming Nie goes on to say podcasting can be used to “Capture Informal Knowledge, Experience, feelings, viewpoints through conversation, discussion, debate. Podcasting is Personal, interesting and engaging.”
From conversations with e-learning researchers and practitioners in the corporate sector, I think education is behind in this. Many large companies are already using podcasting to develop and capture informal learning. the problem with education is it isn’t quite sure about informal learning. Yes it is there. yes, it is probably a good thing. But do we really want to sanction knowledge acquisition which takes place outside of the classroom or the VLE and outside the approved sanction of the official curriculum.
I’m not short our ideas for blog posts at the moment. But I am short of time. And blogging takes time. But hopefully in the next few days I will have some opportunities to get some of these ideas off my chest. And I’ve still got notes form last weeks Alt C conference which I promised to write up.
For now you will have to content yourself with this picture from the Emerge island ins Second Life. the jukebox connects to the different podcasts I have been making as part of the Emerge project. (If you do visit the island the jukebox has now been moved to an exhibition centre in the star floating over the island(.
I love it. maybe it is flattery. But i am beginning to see the real potential of Multi User virtual environments such as Second Life, not for replicating classrooms on line, but for infomal discourse and learning.
More on this soon – I’m working on some ideas.
Technorati Tags: podcasts, SecondLife
Cyborg patented?
Forbes reports that Microsoft has obtained a patent for a “conversational chatbot of a specific person” created from images, recordings, participation in social networks, emails, letters, etc., coupled with the possible generation of a 2D or 3D model of the person.
Racial bias in algorithms
From the UK Open Data Institute’s Week in Data newsletter
This week, Twitter apologised for racial bias within its image-cropping algorithm. The feature is designed to automatically crop images to highlight focal points – including faces. But, Twitter users discovered that, in practice, white faces were focused on, and black faces were cropped out. And, Twitter isn’t the only platform struggling with its algorithm – YouTube has also announced plans to bring back higher levels of human moderation for removing content, after its AI-centred approach resulted in over-censorship, with videos being removed at far higher rates than with human moderators.
Gap between rich and poor university students widest for 12 years
Via The Canary.
The gap between poor students and their more affluent peers attending university has widened to its largest point for 12 years, according to data published by the Department for Education (DfE).
Better-off pupils are significantly more likely to go to university than their more disadvantaged peers. And the gap between the two groups – 18.8 percentage points – is the widest it’s been since 2006/07.
The latest statistics show that 26.3% of pupils eligible for FSMs went on to university in 2018/19, compared with 45.1% of those who did not receive free meals. Only 12.7% of white British males who were eligible for FSMs went to university by the age of 19. The progression rate has fallen slightly for the first time since 2011/12, according to the DfE analysis.
Quality Training
From Raconteur. A recent report by global learning consultancy Kineo examined the learning intentions of 8,000 employees across 13 different industries. It found a huge gap between the quality of training offered and the needs of employees. Of those surveyed, 85 per cent said they , with only 16 per cent of employees finding the learning programmes offered by their employers effective.
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