Podcasts in Education

Education ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Ladyem McDivitt

Since its introduction in the early 2000s, podcasting has become a popular alternative to traditional radio, with a do-it-yourself emphasis and a democratization of producing audio without a need for advertisers or a broadcaster’s backing. Podcasting has also been a promising learning tool for educators and students. With the popularity of the platform, many have jumped on board to create and utilize podcasts for pedagogical purposes, both in the classroom and for the public. Podcasting for pedagogical purposes has coincided with developments in educational theory such as flipped classrooms, active learning, and digital humanities. While there have been debates about the effectiveness of using podcasts for educational purposes, the majority of the literature on podcasting demonstrates that there are benefits for students learning through podcasts and digital audio recordings. Whether it’s the positives and the negatives of the format, or even just how to create a podcast, literature on podcasting has grown exponentially as more people and scholars think about how to use the medium for learning purposes. One significant hurdle in terms of a creating a podcasting bibliography is that the technology involved has changed over the years since its introduction to academia. While some of the methodology may not be as up-to-date in the older texts, they still have critical information that is relevant to incorporating podcasting into a classroom setting.

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (s1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathalie Entringer ◽  
Peter Gilles ◽  
Sara Martin ◽  
Christoph Purschke

Abstract The mobile app Schnëssen establishes a digital and participatory research platform to collect data on present-day spoken Luxembourgish through crowdsourcing and to present the results of data analysis to the general public. Users can participate in different kinds of audio recording tasks (translation, picture naming, reading, question) as well as in sociolinguistic surveys. All audio recordings are accessible to the public via an interactive map, which allows the participants to explore variation in Luxembourgish themselves. In the first year of data collection, roughly 210.000 recordings have be collected covering numerous variation phenomena on all linguistic levels. Additionally, over 2800 sociolinguistic questionnaires have been filled out. Compiling such amounts of data, the Schnëssen app represents the largest research corpus of spoken Luxembourgish.


Author(s):  
Eva Eglāja Kristsone ◽  
Signe Raudive

Keywords: children’s poetry, public engagement, reading aloud, recording of poetry, Veidenbaums The development of public engagement technologies has provided new ways of ensuring societal participation. Public engagement events developed by various institutions provide ways to combine learning about cultural heritage with individual participants. Poetry readings serve as one of the ways the sound of Latvian literature and particularly Latvian classical poetry can be updated. The authors of this article analyse the first two public engagement actions (“Skandē Veidenbaumu” and “Lasīsim dzejiņas” of the series “Lasi skaļi” (Read Aloud) launched by the Institute of Literature, Folklore, and Art of the University of Latvia. During these events, participants were given the opportunity to record thematically-selected poems in the audio recording booth of the Latvian National Library or, as an alternative, to record a poem on their computer or mobile device and upload them to the action site. The events combined the creation of a recorded body of poetry readings with related educational content and represent one of the newer educational methods for reaching the general public and some of its subgroups (children, pupils, students, etc.). Through these events, the public was given the opportunity to become acquainted with Latvian cultural heritage while simultaneously creating new cultural artifacts. The participants creatively used different approaches of performance, recording the poems in a variety of voices, singing, or even incorporating digital sound processing programmes. They actively seized on the opportunity to create new versions of poems that had already been set to music. The main reasons for rejecting any particular recording were buffoonery or cursing during the recording process, or having left the recording unfinished. Both events resulted in more than 4,500 audio recordings which were then stored in the digital archive of the Institute. The set of recordings could be of interest to researchers in the fields of linguistics, sociolinguistics and computer linguistics, as it provides a unique representation of pronunciation during a specific period of time performed by people of different ages, genders, and nationalities.


Anthropology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jo Day

The influence of the “sensory turn” in the social sciences was first manifested in archaeology in the late 1990s and since then has permeated regional, chronological, and material specializations. Two interlinked themes underpin sensory archaeology: firstly, a recognition of a historically constructed ocularcentrism in how archaeological research has been planned, conducted, and presented; secondly, a realization that the senses are not just physiological but culturally created, and therefore every culture will have a different sensorium that establishes, reflects, and reinforces social practice (although this can be subverted by individuals or groups). Early efforts to counter the primacy of vision highlighted different sensory modalities, such as touch or hearing (less often olfaction and taste), and discussed more ephemeral aspects of visual analysis like shimmer and color symbolism. These studies explored a range of archaeological material, including monuments, artifacts, and significant elements in the landscape such as rock art. More recent work shies away from singling out any one sense and focuses on full-bodied, multisensory encounters—as happens in reality where the senses operate in tandem. This approach is a professed aim of phenomenological archaeology, adopted especially in studies of the landscapes of prehistoric northwestern Europe, although it has been much critiqued for being overly subjective and predominantly visual. Fully accessing the sensorium of any past culture is impossible, but if written sources can be used in tandem with archaeology, a more detailed picture can be painted—this has been the case with Roman, Mesoamerican, and Near Eastern archaeology in particular. Overall, the aim is to explore sensory relations for new insights into issues such as memory, feasting, social hierarchy, and ritual. To what extent this multisensory awareness can be practiced across the chain of archaeological knowledge production is much debated. Whether individual sensory experiences of excavation and finds analysis in the present are relevant for interpreting the past can be queried, but “doing” a more sensory archaeology must involve some element of reflection. Experiments with sensual narratives, audio recordings, collaborations with contemporary artists, and augmented reality (AR) explore dissemination beyond the traditional text and image. Museums have embedded multisensory elements within exhibitions and collections management, both to further engage the public and at a curatorial level to create more inclusive object biographies. Rather than requiring archaeologists to embrace a paradigm shift, as some have called for, sensory archaeology is one more element in the toolkit that enriches our understanding of past lives.


Author(s):  
Ryan McGee ◽  
David Rogers

Seismic events are physical vibrations induced in the earth’s crust which follow the general wave equation, making seismic data naturally conducive to audification. Simply increasing the playback rates of seismic recordings and rescaling the amplitude values to match those of digital audio samples (straight audification) can produce eerily realistic door slamming and explosion sounds. While others have produced a plethora of sucha udifications for international seismic events (i.e. earthquakes), the resulting sounds, while distinct to the trained auditory scientist, often lack enough variety to produce multiple instrumental timbres for the creation of engaging music for the public. This paper discusses approaches of sonification processing towards eventual musification of seismic data, beginning with straight audification and resulting in several musical compositions and new-media installations containing a variety of seismically derived timbres.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric B. Brennan

Scientific information is a key ingredient needed to tackle global challenges like climate change, but to do this it must be communicated in ways that are accessible to diverse groups, and that go beyond traditional methods (peer-reviewed publications). For decades there have been calls for scientists to improve their communication skills—with each other and the public—but, this problem persists. During this time there have been astonishing changes in the visual communication tools available to scientists. I see video as the next step in this evolution. In this paper I highlight three major changes in the visual communication tools over the past 100 years, and use three memorable items—bamboo, oil and ice cream—and analogies and metaphors to explain why and how Do-it-Yourself (DIY) videos made by scientists, and shared on YouTube, can radically improve science communication and engagement. I also address practical questions for scientists to consider as they learn to make videos, and organize and manage them on YouTube. DIY videos are not a silver bullet that will automatically improve science communication, but they can help scientists to 1) reflect on and improve their communications skills, 2) tell stories about their research with interesting visuals that augment their peer-reviewed papers, 3) efficiently connect with and inspire broad audiences including future scientists, 4) increase scientific literacy, and 5) reduce misinformation. Becoming a scientist videographer or scientist DIY YouTuber can be an enjoyable, creative, worthwhile and fulfilling activity that can enhance many aspects of a scientist’s career.


Author(s):  
Maija Demitere ◽  
◽  
Jan Georg Glöckner ◽  

In the paper “Two perspectives on ecological art”, we will compare two perspectives on sustainability and the practicality of an ecological artwork. One perspective is from Latvian media artist Maija Demitere, researching slow media art, deep sustainability, and food production. Demitere uses micro-gardening prototypes as an instrument to inform the public on the problems of food production (local food, biodiversity, pesticides, herbicides, pollution caused by agriculture). Demitere uses gardening in combination with DIY (Do it Yourself) technologies to talk about slow living, ecology of the mind, and mindfulness. The second perspective is offered by Jan Glöckner. Glöckner is a German artist and researcher. His research interests are collaborations between fungi and Hominidae. Glöckner reaches out with diplomatic gestures towards fungi to re-localise humans within the larger domain of living entities. He is working on an ethical framework that draws from deep ecology and Tibetian Buddhism to ensure the rights of microorganisms and macroorganisms in artistic, industrial, and research setups. The first part of the paper will focus on recycling, waste management, waste produced by households, and the artists’ perspective on the problem. The second part will focus on a specific case of the exhibition “Life” by Olafur Eliasson at the Foundation Beyeler in Riehen, Switzerland. The second part will also look at the idea of “artistic greenwashing”. The last part of the article will attempt to conclude what can be considered an actual sustainable artwork and propose possible key points that describe a (deep) ecological artwork. The paper uses such methods as case studies, literature analysis, and autoethnography.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-27
Author(s):  
Chris Parham

The Internet provides us with a plethora of material to read and view and is the tool that people use today to communicate and acquire information. YouTube is a globally-used platform for individuals and organizations to share audio and visual material. Due to the COVID-19 situation, many teachers in schools and universities have looked to this website to supplement their teaching as it provides a scope and depth of material that is easily and readily accessible to the public. Theatres having been forced to close because of the pandemic have used this platform to share their work, and many teachers, especially those teaching theatre or performance-related studies have accessed recordings of performances to use in the online classroom as it is, as far as I know, the only way to access the arts for free during the pandemic. As a teacher of English language with an interest in drama and theatre arts, I had been viewing many free performances as I hope to share and foster an appreciation of drama and theatre in my students. With that in mind, I attempted to design a theatre reviewing task for use in the EFL classroom. The report shows my findings and my reflections of the task, and reveals that viewing and writing about the theatre arts can have a positive influence on students.


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