http://mgsonline.blogs.com/mgspodcast/ (5.52006)
podcasting at Musselburgh Grammar School

http://www.darcynorman.net/2004/10/30/podcasting-for-education (5.5.2006)
ideas about educational uses for podcasting and discussion

http://www.recap.ltd.uk/articles/podguide.html (5.5.2006)
educational podcasting ideas, aimed at school students, but techniques appear possible for university as well

http://epnweb.org/ (5.5.2006)
interesting resources and podcasts available (though “‘healthful’ living” sounds a little scary to me …)

http://www.learningcircuits.org/2005/jun2005/0506_trends (5.5.2006)
another interesting collection of ideas for educational podcasts use

http://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/lds/documents/podcasting_ideas.pdf (5.5.2006)
this is a nice diagram – maybe useful to append to our bid to show where other UK institutions are at?

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I beleive that there is real potential in the technique, provided — as with all these
developments — it is applied in an educationally sound setting. I think that simply
recording lectures so that students can put them on their iPod, is NOT a good use
of the technology and could ultimately undermine the enterprise.

I recently came across the Impala project, www.impala.ac.uk, one of the recent projects
funded by the HEA. This I think is one of the best projects in this area; in particular
it has links to other activities of the same kind elsewhere. Digging in deeper, I found
the  project by Chen and Lee (http://www.impala.ac.uk/projects/FromAustrlia.html).

This project addressed student anxiety in an IT course by provision of podcasts created
from other students. This paper has an enormous number of useful links in a vareity of
different areas. It links in very neatly to our plans for a wuantitative investigation
of the usefulness of podcasts as pre-lectures. (described in a page on this blog here).

I noted with interest the comments from the Scottish Council for Educational Technology
(1994) about the problems of conveying details and facts. In that respect, it would seem
that lecturing via podcasts, particularly in a subject such as physics is probably
not a good idea.

The paper does offer support for the idea of multi-voiced, short, radio style productions
rather than monologues.

The use of other students is also discussed;
Lee, M.J.W., Chan, A. & McLoughlin, C. (in press-b). Students as producers: Second year students experiences as podcasters of content for first year undergraduates. To appear in Proceedings of the 7th IEEE Conference on Information Technology Based Higher Education and Training (ITHET 2006), Sydney, July 10-13, 2006.

Michelle Marincovich, director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Stanford

• Outlined Stanford model of requirement to train TAs in general pedagogy (done centrally) and preparing to teach in their discipline (subject based, conceptual problems, Shulman’s pedagogical content model)
• Enforcement mechanism; TA oversight cttee, comprising faculty and student reps, produce evaluative “What’s working” pamphelt
• 3 phases to programme; preparation, mentoring and reflection / evaluation.
• TAs not deemed satisfactory are not reappointed.
• Can get experience in micro-teaching videotaped session
• Only 8% of PhDs go on to lectureships at research intensive Universities
• Not only ptofessional but leadership training as well; ehance ability to communicate, influence and inspire: exposure to other academic disciplines to ensure grad students leave with a network of contacts in other discplines.

Charlotte Taylor, University of Sydney

• “Welcome to the Team” : large scale TA training programme, implented in Science (8000 ugs)
• Standard programme across faculty (not subject specific) aimed at first year students
• Students don’t really know lecturers in classes of 550;Ta’s are the face of the school, to induct them into the research culture of the University.
• Tutor training website : useful set of “trigger” exercises to prompt reflection on the part of Tas.
• Also good links to SUPER: Sydney Unvisersity Physics Education Research Group

Lewis Elton, Visiting professor of Higher Education at the University of Manchester.

• Argued the case for disciplinary-specific training being done by someone with expertise of considering teaching in that discipline, to avoid the enless spiral of “teach as I have been taught”.
• Departmental culture may stifle innovations by Tas
• Teaching as an activity carried out in private by (not always) consenting adults
• Lab work to either verify known results OR instill compentancies to use equipment or practice a technique.
• Enquiry-based learning; learning in “research mode”; students as researchers but learning for themselves what is already known (eg EBL and PBL)
• The key role of assessment; innovative assessment is rare. Innovative teaching and learning may be hobbled by inneffective assessment.
• The need for a small number (1%) of eg Physicists to study Physics teaching as a scholarly activity.

“ … but how can you show quantitatively that it does any good? “

It’s a fair question and one that I have found myself struggling to answer in the past. There’s a number of inherent problems with trying to do “experiments” in the scientific sense on a learning activity with a class cohort.

• the opportunities for experimentation tend to come around relatively infrequently (say, once every year)
• there can easily have been external reasons why comparing last year’s cohort with this year’s is not a level playing field. Maybe the entrance grades went up, different people taught the course, the structurer of the academic year altered radically (as it did in Edinburgh two years ago).
• the ethics of having half your class as a control group who do not get the benefit of the wonderful new development that you want to evaluate…

 I heard a talk by Norman Reid a few weeks ago, from the Centre for Science Education at Glasgow and he was describing the idea of splitting the class into two and doing two repititions of a similar experiment, thereby allowing each half to act as the other’s control group. Any one student is treated just like any other, insofar as they are in the control group once and the other group once.

I thought about using this to try and evaluate the use of podcasts as a delivery vehicle for pre-lecture preparative work, to aid understanding of what we know to be the traditionally conceptually difficult bits of a course.

Rather than selectively releasing material to a group of students (who might not all listen to it) I planned to broadcast the material at the start of a workshop (tutorial-ish) session fir half the class (and not for the other) about a week ahead of the material being covered in the lectures.

The following week, I would ask the entire class a concept question (we call them time to think’s) at the beginning of the section on the material covered in the podcast pre-lecture.

Based on workshop sign-in sheets, we should be able to assume an even spread of ability (could cross check this with start-of-course diagnostic tests) in each workshop and could then look at the response profiles for the “have’s” as compared to the “have not’s” (collected using an elecctronic voting system during the lecture).

Repeat a few weeks later where the have’s become the have not’s.

Well, just because I can, I thought I would give this a go. Currently on a train just outside Newcastle….but the power socket under my chair which allegedly gives my machine juice is refusing to give me any charge at all…. and the keyboard is refusing to type certain letters which means this has taken me about 5 minutes to write as many lines….I blame the hot sun streaming in through the window…..

So the network connection appears to be the easy bit…..

Well, for a start, I have a web page that is massively out of date that I just never seem to get arond to updating these days. So eventually, this might just supercede this…. who knows…
If you want to see just how bad that is, you can find it …. http://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/~spb01, though I cannot imagine why you would.

I also wanted somewhere to be able to put some thoughts, links, ideas and conversations (… hmm, that relies on you, I suppose) regarding this part of my job.

I am a Senior Lecturer in the School of Physics at the University in Edinburgh. I teach a large first year undergraduate course, the development of which is one of the main reasons for wanting to create this blog.

I am getting slightly better pictures taken as time goes on (matter of opinion: this one has been described as making me look “like a psychopath”)

Pyscho or no, it is now all over everywhere because of this http://www.ed.ac.uk/news/060804chancellorawards.html