Are podcasts inferior to text?
Recently, Lisa Neal, editor in chief at E Learning magazine blogged a rather odd piece called Ten Reasons Why Podcasts are Inferior to Text. I think the post is misleading to anyone wanting to know about podcasting. I’m surprised the editor in chief at E Learning Magazine could have written it.
Her argument is somewhat muddled. The sub-heading doesn’t follow meaningfully from the title. It reads
Ten reasons podcasts don’t work for education…
So first, podcasts are inferior to text, and then they just don’t work for education. If the second statement did follow from the first, would it then mean that, apart from text, no other medium had any value in education? (You could probably argue that every medium is inferior to text, in that sense.) Should e-learning then stick to text only at that rate? Hmmm.
Given these types of logical implications, it seems an odd direction for her to take. But a comparison between text and podcast is moot anyway, because no-one has ever suggested that podcasts were superior to text, that they should be isolated from it, or that they should replace it, etc. As one ChinesePod learner, Dave, commented
I don’t like the idea of placing text in the ring versus podcasts because both offer different benefits. It seems analogous to comparing the virtues of vitamin D with vitamin C–they’re both good for you so creating a scenario where they ought to battle it out is absurd.
The real issue
The real question, to my mind concerns whether podcasting can enhance text, or go beyond it. My answer is yes it can, and for most subjects. With language learning this is obvious - podcasts provide up-to-date audio samples of the target language, often upon user request or in response to a problem. (Imagine learning languages from, ahem, text only.)
Secondly, when properly designed, audio can very effectively intergrate other elements. At SpanishPod, we use the podcasts, not just for samples of the language, but also for commentary: hosts talk about the content (grammar, vocabulary, culture) in a spontaneous, two-way, exchange that adds the human element that textbooks cannot. Lessons become events that bond practitioners with learners, personalize the experience, and aid memory. Human conversation brings an emotional dimension to the content and triggers cognitive faculties that text alone cannot. (More engagement, more learning.) It allows practitioners demonstrate and offer insights into managing context as well as cultural insights, socio-cultural competence, discourse competence, language awareness, register, pragmatics, and a number of things that textbooks traditionally do not.
And all of this is actually hyper-efficient: natural human conversation is way, way more efficient than formal, written exposition for many purposes. Podcasts also allow for sound effects, stories, guesswork, cognitive depth, humor, and more.
It is true that you cannot search a podcast as you would a text. But there are endless ways to deal with that problem: We separate the core dialog from the rest, for example, so that listeners can simply click on the part they wish. Meanwhile breaking down the podcast on a structured basis also helps. With SpanishPod, for example, you have the
- Intro
- Dialog
- Translation
- Commentary
- Dialog repetition
- Cultural Observations
- Ending
A standardized approach to the audio design means that users know the times where they find each of these elements after 2 or 3 listens. I’ve never actually heard a user complain of getting lost in the audio because lesson are short and there are clues all over the place.
I actually believe that audio and visuals are the great new frontier that, when integrated with text, will open all sorts of new learning possibilities. I won’t be abandoning these inferior media, but continuing to spend thousands of hours delving deeper into them. Clearly, however, we are all at an early stage of understanding the new media.
I’ve tried to contact Lisa. I may ask to see if she’ll give me a space on E Learning Magazine to explain why I love podcasting. It’s time to let the world know about this!
Ken Carroll
April 8th, 2008 at 9:29 am
Can you please check the link to Lisa’s post? It just comes up with a “No cheese for you” graphic from Anonymouse.
Personally, I think a crappy podcast would be inferior to a high-quality text, but the reverse will also be true. If the no significant difference research has taught us anything, it’s that the pedagogy of how a technology is used matters much more than which media it is. Where the media matters is what it allows you to do.
Even though I’m not a big consumer of podcasts myself, I can certainly see educational possibilities. Audio lets you listen to conversations for learning a language, as you said. I can imagine a number of possibilities for podcasts in teaching music theory and history; those are subjects where listening is critical to the content.
Reading text alone won’t teach you to speak a language or hear how music has changed over the centuries; listening alone won’t teach you to write a language or read musical notation. Fortunately, we aren’t limited to a single type of media for education; we can combine them to get the best of both worlds.
April 8th, 2008 at 11:50 am
Podcasts for a while reverberated to the sound of the bandwagon: they were seen as cool BECAUSE they were podcasts, regardless of the quality of the content.
Nothing different from any other new technology being tried out for learning. Long ago and far away, the stack of 12-inch laser disks use for multimedia training might have reached to the space station.
Even the comments to Lisa’s post, almost without exception, highlight circumstances in which podcasts make sense. No, you probably wouldn’t learn details about operating the company performance review system via podcast, but that’s a mismatch between the medium and the learning goals.
April 8th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
I’ve read about the unsuitability of podcasts for education in a few places recently, and it seems to me the issue isn’t that the medium is bad but rather than we haven’t adapted our learning habit to suit it.
I would suspect retention of podcast-delivered material is lower because we tend to consume it on the go — it’s easy to be distracted and miss things. Thanks to this on the go nature, though, we have a lot more time to listen than we do to read, so we can repeat things multiple times. It’s all about fitting a medium to your needs.
Her point #7 makes me laugh — god forbid education be entertaining. Why, students might actually start to enjoy learning! The horrors.
April 8th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Ken,
It appeared to me that her list should not be taken too seriously. It is written from a very narrow perspective considering a single project from a single class. She even manages to disparage entertainment #6 which, as we know, can increase motivation.
I have seen so much un-entertaining text in education that a bit of high-quality podcasts that are entertaining can do much to increase learner interest.
Certainly, text is much more searchable, and this is a huge weakness of sound but some day this too will fade as an objection as we figure out how to search through sound.
Oh, finally, I wonder what kind of review this piece would get in the Brialle Gazette?
April 8th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
Hmm,
Language learning, Music school, Sonar school, Spy school, SETI interpretation school, Comedy school, Recording Engineering school, Control Tower school, 911 operator school, and a tens of other other far flung professions need to use their ears to learn, interpret and do their jobs.
Is aural learning the same as written learning? No, of course not. It has a logic and flow of its own. Ask a sonar operator to study by reading a text of the sounds. Sounds kind of absurd doesn’t it?
There is a logic and a learning style unique to both. Why not concentrate on figuring out how one can accelerate and amplify the other instead of looking at this as an either or proposition?
April 9th, 2008 at 3:08 am
There is also the “good enough for now” phenomenon. Lisa Neal is a professor at a med school. When you have a large body of specific facts for people primed to receive them, text isn’t necessarily a bad way to go — dense, easily accessed, etc. Lots of declarative knowledge that’ll have to be rehearsed to be learned.
(When the med students get into messier areas like diagnosis, they’ll have to get off the page, and I doubt Neal would disagree.)
Most of the time, we’re not learning masses of facts at one time. Language-learning podcasts combine facts with examples, demonstrations, audio compare/contrast, context, etc. Podcasts on other subjects can deliver overviews, summaries, opinions, viewpoints — not at the how-to-conjugate irregular verbs level (though you could do that with small, specific podcasts).
Actually, Neal’s post sounds a bit as though the inspiration was “seven ways to spice up your blogging.” Without, you know, having heard a podcast to give some nuance…
April 9th, 2008 at 3:16 am
The key is not to focus on her title as EIC of ELearn Magazine and her controversial first sentences, but to recognize that this is an informal blog post, see that she is an “Adjunct Clinical Professor at Tufts University School of Medicine,” and that her last sentence pretty much sums up the point of her post: “I prefer text and am unlikely to ever make podcasts for my students.”
It’s obvious that she is not coming from a language-learning perspective. Assume another professor of medicine made a comment saying that they don’t believe the use of audiotapes work for education. Sure, a professor of linguistics can come in and say “WHAT?!” and proceed to tear the argument apart by demonstrating it’s usefulness in language learning.
Unless you can convince the other side that you can design podcast/audiotape lessons to be as effective in teaching medicine as they are in teaching languages, the best you can hope for is that they tone down their language and qualify it by saying, “I didn’t mean languages!”
My experience in academia is that the teaching of languages is not seen to be as scholarly as other fields–language professors are teaching students how to speak and write, like ESL teachers teach immigrants, while the professors in other fields are teaching students to hypothesize, research, analyze, deconstruct, interpret, write, practice, etc. So, good or bad, language learning/teaching is often overlooked in the sphere of academics and education.
April 9th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Jason,
I agree that her point was simply that she personally prefers text. However, what she actually said went considerably beyond that.
Of course I have no personal animosity towards her and I am a keen reader of her magazine. (I fully expect to establish a friendly discussion with her.) My point is that her post came across as an off-handed dismissal of the value of podcasting in learning. I simply want to state a different perspective on that point.
Ken Carroll
April 9th, 2008 at 7:40 pm
> It is true that you cannot search a podcast
> as you would a text.
Huh? Paper books have indexes, but these are rarely comprehensive. Indexing is done manually, which means it almost never happens with non-academic publications.
In contrast, podcasts can be tagged with transcripts of audiovisual material. The text can be sychronized to the audio with timestamps so you know within a few seconds of when something was said. A podcast version of War and Peace is FAR more searchable than a paper copy. Electronic texts can be searched too, but at that point you’re quibbling over formats for data storage.
To be fair to Lisa, she seems to be arguing that paper texts have an advantage when studying means rapidly scanning and memorizing stuff. This might make them better for field tests with limited domain knowledge. At which point we’ll just point out that the future of education is supposed to be pushing away from such drone-like study so that people actually learn, right?
April 11th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Lisa’s article is one of the most successful transparent trolls that I’ve seen for ages.
April 11th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
Ken, you’re right and that Lisa person is wrong. It’s obvious. I live in Taiwan, try to learn Chinese, with a personal tutor and a very good text book. Still your podcast adds a lot to my learning. You’re fun and friendly and intelligent and right there in my ear when I’m taking the bus to the university in the morning. I constantly find myself using your phrases during the course of the day.
Keep up the good work.
April 12th, 2008 at 5:59 am
Are we not all missing the point?
Some people like reading books to learn. Some people like to learn in other ways. In my humble opinion, the podcasts are wonderful. Of course they may suit some particular subject matters more than others. So what?
At the end of the day, i think what matters most is that the end-user has the free right to learn whatever tickles their fancy and also has the free right to learn using whatever method tickles their fancy.
I think podcasts are here to stay for quite a while and e-learning is only in its infancy. Let it learn to walk before we start to push it over!!
April 13th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Podcasts are great, especially those from CP. You learn spoken language, patterns. But what about grammar, characters? Qing Wen is nice, but (as a German native speaker) sometimes I have trouble to follow the English banter etc. (Amber speaks quite fast). For grammar, characters, books or person-to-person courses are a good add-on to CP.
For me books AND CP are the best solution.
April 13th, 2008 at 9:16 pm
Are podcasts inferior to text?
Podcasts are listening material and text is reading material?
Please correct me if I’m wrong but is that not the same as asking “Is listening inferior to reading?”
April 20th, 2008 at 7:27 am
What a fantastic post and discussion, Ken. As someone with an academic background, I used to research everything I wrote. Blogging, which I am new to, is totally variable. I see blog posts where people do nothing more than post links with barely a comment on it and ones that are thoughtful and could easily be magazine articles.
The post that you commented on was one of my quicker ones and I agree with many of the insights here from you and your readers. My motivation in writing it was a negative reaction to what some students envisioned for the future of learning that was primarily podcast-based. (They went on to articulate a much more creative and innovative solution!)
Let’s write an article together for eLearn Magazine that delves into this topic and provides a balanced view of what the issues are! Interested?
April 21st, 2008 at 4:59 am
Lisa,
I’d be delighted to work together on an article. Just let me know when and how.
Ken
April 29th, 2009 at 3:59 am
Basically - for most subjects - but not necessarily language learning, lisa is right. I would add to her reasons
1) podcasts are not easily editable - if someone provides a correction to something you have said - it is much harder to edit the podcast than the text
2) podcasts are not scannable and searchable - if only a small percentage is what you really need to hear - then you have no way of zooming to that direct point unlike say in text
3) podcasts without text transcript are inherently inaccessible -
4) good podcasting requires far more competencies to be able to produce well than text