From The Chronicle of Higher Education
February 10, 2010
Do Your Job Better
Podcasting
By James M. Lang
Back in September, I used this space to make a few teaching resolutions, one of which was to overcome my usual technological inertia and try out one new tool in the classroom. Luckily for me, I taught a course last fall in which I worked with another faculty member to create a shared syllabus for the course's two sections, and she made a suggestion that allowed me to fulfill my pledge: We would include an assignment that asked students to create their own podcasts.
Until my colleague proposed the idea, I had not heard much about it. Everything I had read about podcasts in teaching and learning had focused on the benefits of faculty members creating podcasts to give students access to course content outside the classroom.
Faculty podcasts seem useful enough, but remain firmly within the traditional function of teaching to deliver content. I often find myself less than excited about many new teaching technologies for exactly that reason: While they may initially seem innovative and exciting, they are often just an expensive means of doing the same thing we have always done. As a colleague of mine once put it, many faculty members use PowerPoint now exactly as they used overheads in the past—it's just have a fancier way of shining a light on the wall. The same could be argued for the use of clickers—a really expensive alternative to having students just raise their hands. My point: Innovations in technology don't necessarily lead to innovative teaching.
In the case of podcasts, however, turning the equation around and having them created by students struck me as quite different. So I agreed to incorporate the assignment into the syllabus even before I knew much about how it would play out.
The course, called "Life Stories," was a small seminar designed for students entering our honors program. The course fulfills one of their general-education requirements in the humanities and analyzes biographies and autobiographies to consider the range of ways in which people seek to find or construct meaning in their lives. We surveyed a wide spectrum of stories, cultures, and philosophies, including Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist, Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, and Dave Eggers's What Is the What.
As we were mapping out the semester's schedule, we put the podcast assignment around the part of the course dedicated to Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, a biography of a free-spirited and intelligent college graduate who cuts off all ties with his family, donates his considerable trust fund to charity, and treks off to try and survive on his own in the Alaskan wilderness. We didn't get much beyond putting a due date on the syllabus, though, before the semester started.
Our lack of initial planning certainly contributed to the fact that, as the due date approached, we both found ourselves too caught up in midsemester grading to sit down and plan out the assignment properly, so we pushed the due date back to November.
We didn't want to make this project simply another version of the kinds of assignments they were doing already—standard close readings and interpretations of literary texts in the form of papers and a presentation. So we decided to use the assignment to bring the major theme of the course—the search for meaning in our lives—closer to home for the students.
Our assignment sheet for the podcasts detailed the three steps students had to take to complete the assignment. First, they had to analyze the values and motivations that drove the book's central figure, Christopher McCandless, into the wild and led him to cut off ties with contemporary American society. Second, they had to interview a current senior in our honors program about the values and motivations that seemed most important to that person now, and would drive the senior's life and career choices after graduation. Finally, the students had to construct a podcast that compared the perspectives of McCandless and their senior interviewee, and then offer their own perspective on which values seemed most important to them.
We required the podcasts to be approximately 10 minutes long. Students had to make use of at least three out of four forms of media: written text, audio recording (spoken word and music), video recording, or static visual images. In class we explained that images of McCandless were easily available online, and that they could draw from the film version of the book for either images or video.
A few weeks before the podcast due date, my colleague scheduled a class session with our IT department. She had worked with the IT staff members in a previous semester and knew that their help and support was essential to making the project work. The IT session would demonstrate to students the technical steps involved in creating a podcast, including everything from capturing images and video and audio clips to editing and presenting them.
As it happened, the date of the session coincided with my attendance at a conference. But my students told me about it later in class, where I learned that they had been given instruction in software called GarageBand. Plenty of other software programs are available for that kind of work—including a free, downloadable program called Audacity.
I had students work in small groups, and set aside a full class period and then part of another for the seven podcasts, assuming we would have at least one or two technical difficulties. That turned out to be right. We squeezed in five on the first day and two the next class period. The students all uploaded their podcasts before class to our iTunes university page (which is available to all users on the campus), so we had access to all of the podcasts from a single computer in the classroom, and projected them onto a big screen.
In terms of their quality, the final products turned out just like every other set of final products I have received from students: Some were terrific, some were mediocre, and one or two were less than mediocre. None of them were awful, but some students either had technical problems that prevented us from really appreciating their work (like inaudible audio, or music playing too loudly for us to hear the spoken word), or they were far less imaginative than others.
The most consistent problem was image overload. Since McCandless spent his journey in the Alaskan wilderness, and since gorgeous images of Alaskan scenery are plentifully available online, some students decided to run their interview text or their narrative summaries over a constantly changing backdrop of random scenes from Alaska.
Other students tried to match up every bit of spoken text with an image of some kind. As they were saying a word like "independence," a town sign from Independence, Mo., would flash across the screen. If they mentioned the word "thoughtful," it would be a picture of Rodin's sculpture "The Thinker."
As I pointed out, that was both unnecessary—since so many images of McCandless were available, including multiple self-portraits—and distracting. The presentations that were most effective featured fewer but better-selected images that allowed the viewer to pay more attention to the substance of the texts and the interviews.
Almost all of the students made interesting choices. They wrote excellent analyses of the themes in Krakauer's book, asked interesting questions of their seniors, and selected musical choices that complemented the themes of their podcasts. A few students requested photographs from the seniors they interviewed, and edited those images in with images of McCandless.
One of the most haunting images of McCandless, available online, is the final self-portrait he took, before he starved to death. In it, he stands in a green and beautiful landscape, gaunt and skeletal, smiling beatifically and holding up a farewell note. Some of the presentations orchestrated the unveiling of that photograph in a deliberate, thoughtful, and emotionally powerful way.
I would call the results of the assignment mixed but, in the end, more positive than negative. I would give our use of the assignment about the same assessment, with two particularly prominent negatives.
First, showing all of the podcasts in a row, especially five in a single class session, was a mistake. It was inevitable that students would use some of the same images, and hit upon some of the same themes from Krakauer's book, and so some of the later podcasts ended up looking somehow derivative or less original than the first ones, through no fault of their own. It also proved difficult—both for myself and the students—to pay attention to that many iterations of the same assignment in a single class period.
When we do it next year, as we plan to, I will suggest we modify the assignment to allow students to work on different texts, which will reduce the amount of repetition in the final product and allow us to space the podcast presentations over the semester.
Second, and perhaps more important, I don't think we gave the students enough instructions on what would constitute a good podcast. I suppose I had to see the first round of them in order to foresee what problems and mistakes would arise. Next time I will review in advance issues such as avoiding image overload and properly mixing music and word files, and try to give a firmer sense of the criteria on which the podcasts will be graded.
I also found out after we had given the assignment that incorporating video into the podcasts was a more complicated process than I had realized, and none of the podcasts included it. Next time we will focus the assignment sheet on image, audio, and text.
But even with those problems, I was pleased with the assignment, and will use it again. I would not put it forward as a groundbreaking new pedagogy, but it provided a different challenge to the students, one that I think cultivates skills they will likely need in their careers.
The need to incorporate multiple forms of media into presentation formats—whether a sales pitch, a report, a blog, or a class—will only grow stronger. If we can give students practice at it now, while still demanding of them the skills of close reading and interpretation that we have always expected, we will be helping prepare them more effectively for the work environments they will face.
James M. Lang is an associate professor of English at Assumption College and author of "On Course: A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching" (Harvard University Press, 2008). He writes about teaching in higher education, and his Web site is
http://www.jamesmlang.com. He welcomes reader mail directed to his attention at
email@hidden.
http://chronicle.com/article/Podcasting/64000/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
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