Talk the Talk

Talk the talk: Learner-generated podcasts as catalysts for knowledge creation

by Mark J. W. Lee, Catherine McLoughlin and Anthony Chan

Source: YouTube How to Creat a Podacast

      Gist of the article: The project reported on in this article focused on enabling students to create their own podcasts for distribution to their peers. Through focus-group interviewing and an analysis of products of students shared dialogue and reflection, this article demonstrates how podcast exercise promoted collaborative knowledge building among the student-producers. In conclusion, the article concludes that podcasts is an effective way of stimulating both individual and collective learning, and it supports social processes of perspective-taking and negotiation of meaning to lead to underpinning knowledge creation.

      The aim of the study: To enable undergraduate students to create digital audio clips weekly, 3 to 5 min. talkback radio-style ‘shows,’ and share them with their peers through podcasting. The assumption of the study: the podcasts could be an effective solution to help students’ learning, and the outcomes will be aligned with the knowledge-building principles. Intended outcomes for student-producers include students' developing digital literacy skills,fostering generic attributes like teamwork, enabling them to express and conceptualize their understanding of subject matter.

        Using podcasting to support learning in higher education: John Udell (2005) attributes the growth of significant uptake of portable music players and podcasting to five main factors.① The pervasiveness of the Internet ② The rapid growth of broadband ③ The widespread availability of the multimedia personal computer ④ The blurring of the distinction between streaming and downloading media content ⑤ The rapid uptake of portable MPEG layer 3 (MP3) capable devices

       The key features of Digital audio learning objective (DALO) by(Middleton & McCarter, 2005)are, we can say it is imple to produce, immediate, educationally focused, reusable, and engaging. The research question was what sociocoginitive dynamics and knowledge-building processes were evidenced in the student-producers’ activity and dialogue as they created these audio learning objects? Methodology was interviewing two focus group consisted of eight members) Data analysis was content analysis (Patton, 1990) combined qualitative and quantitative approaches; interpreting data through a particular theoretical lens to capture the richness of student interaction.   Conclusions and discussions was that the processes of collaborative knowledge building took place through podcast production activity.

Key words

Digital Audio Learning Object (DALO) by Middleton & McCarter, 2005)

Knowledge building principles (Scardamalia, 2002)

Collaborative/cooperative learning

Podcatcher or podcast client vs. click and wait situation in streaming

Technology driven pedagogy (Salaberry, 2001)

‘podcast’ portmanteau = ‘iPod’ + ‘broadcast’ (coined by Adam Curry, 2004)

Three metaphors of learning

Content analysis

Sociocognitive dynamics