Liberal Education Today

Notes on a presentation about student podcasting from University of British Columbia (UBC), given at the ELI 2008 annual conference.

The Prototype of an Educational Podcasting Initiative (PEPI) project involved multiple UBC offices, including Land and Food Systems, journalism, the library, public relations, and instructional technology. The goal was to support podcasting in a different way than profcasting, which was seen as very often done. A second goal was to move somewhat away from dependence on Apple's iTunes. Pedagogical goals: improving communication skills, engaging academic content in a new way, adding digital fluency, and reaching a larger audience.

A snapshot of students: agroecology majors are often very passionate about their academic issues, and are also relatively small compared to the rest of the university, in addition to being spatially removed.

Course development: a fourth year seminar was the initial class, which worked closely with the UBC Farm. Assignments involved describing details of the farm. Journalism instructors taught storytelling techniques. Technology training came from Duncan McHugh (Multimedia Developer, Land and Food Systems Learning Centre), who taught Audacity, recording practices, and copyright. GarageBand and iMovie were available, but not taught or otherwise supported (reasons of time and relative complexity). Content was published to the Web via a group blog, a WordPress implementation. Podcasts can also be found at this directory.

Reflections after the class: learning curve was high, which was a challenge, not always met with student enthusiasm. Technology staff faced challenges in supporting students, rather than faculty and staff. Supporting Audacity had occasional issues, including crashes and finding the LAME.dll file. Permissions and privacy issues came up; those should be dealt with ahead of time. Some student feedback was very positive.

Coming up: rerunning the class, with journalism collaboration continuing.

Discussion surfaced various topics, including recommending a WordPress blog podcasting pluging (PodPress). iTunesU might house content. YouTube wouldn't work as well, because of political problems (Canadian concerns about locating content in the United States, re: PATRIOT Act).

ELIAnnual08