(The following was cross-posed in the podcasting blog, Podcasting Your Class)
What are some student perspectives on podcasting? Carie Windham, former undergraduate student, North Carolina State University, and current graduate student, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland presents her own views and experiences with podcasting as well as views from several students she interviewed in the paper: Confessions of a Podcast Junkie: A Student Perspective.
In “Confessions…”, Windham recounts her own introduction to and involvement with podcasting (and how she became a “podcast junkie”) and cites student data and interviews from University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of British Columbia, Bentley College, Duke University, and DePaul University. Some of the conclusions are as follows:
All the students identified the same benefits to podcasting technology:
• The ability to access course content on a 24-hour basis
• The chance to take their learning mobile so that listening can be done on the bus, at the gym, or on a walk between classes
• The creativity factor when making podcasts: they can present the content in a way that they choose
• The ease of access: podcasts can be easily downloaded from the Internet for free
For teaching and learning, the students saw concrete benefits to podcasting projects, especially when compared with standard modes of testing, such as writing a paper or doing a class demonstration:
• They were able to get “intimate” with course material, either by re-listening to course lectures and supplements or by teaching the rest of the class.
• They could showcase their projects to the rest of the community, expanding the reach of
the classroom to their friends or members of the community.
• They had the opportunity to review course material during pertinent moments in the semester, such as before exams or during course projects.
• They learned new technical skills, whether they were downloading files or creating new ones.Finally, all the students reported that they enjoyed their classes more because of the inclusion of podcasting, and all hoped that more faculty members would use podcasting in the future. Michael Martinez-Mann said it best when he said of podcasting: “The possibilities are absolutely limitless. If there’s an idea, there’s a way to do it.”
Some of the sections of the paper also include:
- Podcasting in the Real World: Student Use (and Misuse) of Podcast Technology
- Notes on the Go: Offering Lectures and Class Notes via Podcasting
- In Their Hands: Students as Podcast Creators
- A Microphone and an Idea: Nonacademic Podcasting on Campus
- If I Were in Charge: Tips for Faculty
Windham’s paper is informative, well-written, and entertaining, and was published in EDUCAUSE Review, Vol. 42 (May/June 2007). It also appears on the web in the resource-rich ELI Discovery Tool: Guide to Podcasting in the section “What Do Students Think?”
While whitepapers, research, and case studies are certainly useful, it’s definitely refreshing to get student perspectives directly from students in their own voices.
Travel back two years in time, way back to 2006. The read/write web, or “Web 2.0” (also synonymous with “connection, collaboration, and individual expression”), had finally attracted enough mainstream attention for Time magazine to name “You” 
