Thinking further about using podcasts in teaching, I was wondering how feasible it would be to have short explanatory ones for difficult issues. Inspired partly by the "Close Reading" work done by some lit-colleagues on WebCT I thought I'll try something similar in a different medium, a walk-through SPOCA analysis in a podcast. SPOCA analysis is something a lot of students have problems with, so a few extra exercises would be useful. Here is my first go at one:
You presumably see nothing. That's because blogger doesn't seem to like that particular podcast. And neither does YouTube. And all sorts of video converters crash when trying to make something of it. Which is rather frustrating...
Blogger just gives me an error code and a video id, and asks me to contact them, but that is virtually impossible. It simply takes you to a kind of FAQ. Even more frustrating.
No idea how to help with the uploading thing.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I also plan to use podcasts as explanations of complicated issues. My third-year module requires the students to read some pretty tricky postcolonial theory. I don't want to offer an alternative to the reading itself (like a crib-sheet or something) as I'm determined that the reading itself has to be engaged with, in all its frustrating ambiguity, because that's exactly where the interest lies. The podcast, for me, is perfect as it can both be watched more than once, but doesn't have the 'authority' that written resources have, and therefore discourages dependence.
At a recent teaching colloqium, I saw that colleagues in Social Care were sucessfully embedding podcasts in WebCT. I have absolutely no idea how.
Yes, I think podcasts can just fill that gap between a written handout and something that you explain in a seminar. At least that's one way I intend to use them next year!
ReplyDeleteMmm. Have you tried storing it in box.net and then just linking to it?
ReplyDelete