I’d be delighted to work together on an article. Just let me know when and how.

Ken

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?

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?”

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!!

Keep up the good work.

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?

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

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.