Our new friend Stefaan Lesage on Educational podcasting (www.devia.be)

Kids are using PSP/podcasts all the time - so why not use them for educational purposes?

At Podcamp Barcelona, Stefaan outlined the advantages of podcasts: with ear phones on you can get much closer to your customer (and shut out everything else). They’re mobile, you are not time bound… Commuters can maximise their time by learning something.

But are people really learning by using podcasts? Research seems to support this (he says).

Stefaan believes there are 2 approaches to learning by podcast – passive or active. The active approach he suggests goes a step further; let the students record things, conduct interviews, go on trips, research their interests, create… This makes sense to me, they’d probably learn much more this way as they’re developing their own personal motivation to learn. Can teachers let go though?

Stefaan outlined a few podcast projects in education that he knows of:

  • Mees podcast is a Dutch project taking place in a Belgian school. 5th graders record a half hour session every Thursday, telling jokes, riddles, things they have learnt at school.
  • Stanford University runs an iPhone programming course, by recording all their sessions and putting it all on the net for anyone to use.
  • Radio Lingua Network is popular in Spain for learning languages. Short courses ‘1 minute Catalan, 1 min Russian’ work really well. You learn a phrase in one minute and you can revisit the podcast, and use it whenever you want. They have started to enhance their offering with additional resources to support learning by podast.

Of course Podcasting is not limited to school or class. You can learn how to make better video, colour correcting, importing information. For example:

  • IzzyVideo: how to shoot, edit, produce better video
  • Screencasts online: a weekly podcast of Mac tutorials www.screencastsonline.com

Stefaan produces a weekly episode each month, with 2500 downloads each month. He thinks teachers in Belgium are a too scared of making mistakes to use Podcasting but Stefaan believes that by making mistakes, learning becomes bi-directional.

‘The world needs talent – it’s time to use technology to improve education’ Stefaan finishes. The other Podcampers seem to agree; it is time for a ‘different kind of university’… We have the technology now; but we need to change the mindset in teachers before we can move forward. (Seems to be a running theme).