Podcasting for learning in universities

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Notes

1. IMPALA stands for Informal Mobile Podcasting And Learning Adaptation; IMPALA is part of the Leicester Media Zoo hosting a number of further animal‐named research projects illustrating considerable imagination in acronym creation. Besides impalas, we have seals (SEAL: Second Environment Advanced Learning) and mooses (MOOSE: MOdelling Of SecondLife Environments) in the zoo (University of Leicester, 2007).

2. I understand online learning as a subcategory of distance education. In the following I distinguish traditional distance education (of the correspondence and multimedia generation) from online learning.

3. See Hülsmann, 2006, 2008, 2009.

4. The list consists of nine rationales, which here are shortened to five: partly by combining them (e.g., rationales 5 and 7, ‘Learning locations’ and ‘Contributing students’); partly by suppressing what I consider less relevant (rationale 4, ‘Novel way of presenting information’; rationale 8, ‘Accommodating different strokes,’ i.e., learning styles; and rationale 9, ‘Moving from entertainment to learning.’

5. There are good reasons for making lectures available as PowerPoint slides or accompanied by printed lecture notes rather than lengthy podcasts. Text affords a more holistic access to content (allowing users to skim and skip) and therefore a more efficient use.

6. The term VLE is widely used in the UK literature including in the reviewed book; elsewhere the term learning management systems (LMS) is preferred; this review will follow the usage in the reviewed book and use VLE. However, there is no deep conceptual difference between the two terms.

7. In addition, flexibility is facilitated by features such as Really Simple Syndication (RSS), which allows students to subscribe to RSS feeds such that the respective podcasts are automatically downloaded to their laptop, iPod, or MP3 player (e.g., see Chapter 10).

8. For different types of podcasts, see Chapter 3 ‘Podcasting Technology.’

9. My review of this book is available in the Book Reviews and Reflections section of Distance Education, 28(1), 117–123 (Hülsmann, 2007).

10. For the distinction between transient and stable media, see Kozma, 1991.

11. You could post short audio clips to a bulletin board simulating a voice‐based asynchronous interaction. However, there are better technologies for this (Wimba Voice Tools, for example) and it would raise the question as to why asynchronous voice‐based communication would be better than asynchronous text‐based communication. Having experimented with Wimba Voice Tools I find it much more time consuming and cumbersome; students having the opportunity of text‐based communication preferred the text‐based one; essentially because skim and skip makes it more efficient and verbatim citations in voice‐based asynchronous communication are much more cumbersome.

12. DE FACTO is my unpublished creation and has been used occasionally in my OMDE 606 class Costs and economics of distance education, taught with Greville Rumble and Tony Bates as visiting experts. DE FACTO developed as a playful challenge to Tony’s famous ACTIONS framework, where I dislike the importance given to Novelty and Speed and the separation of Interactivity and Teaching and learning.