Evaluating a Podcast

I finally got back to this post, which I promised weeks ago!

I started out following the directions given in Podcasting for Dummies, second edition, by Tee Morris, Chuck Tomasi, and Evo Terra. It's a great book if you're starting out with podcasting, and the sections about finding and listening to podcasts have great examples and recommendations. I agree that one should "browse" through many podcasts before starting out ... but I plunged right in, after reading most of the book first, and only later did I start to listen to some.

I'm using both Juice and iTunes as "podcatchers," but I'm not sure which one I prefer. There are some things about the different "screens" in Juice that I don't understand, but Juice is clearer than iTunes, it seems to me, in the step about "going-out-and-seeing-if-anything-is-new," whereas this step seems more hidden in iTunes. With Juice, you get a clear list of all available "episodes" and can see at a glance which ones you have or don't have. I haven't found this yet in iTunes.

The podcast I listened to was Episode One, "Wikipedia: Friend or Foe?" produced by Digital Campus and the Center for History and New Media. It originally "aired" on March 7, 2007. I think I'm going to like the Digital Campus podcasts, if I can work more of them into my schedule. The focus is definitely more on higher education than "Teachers Teaching Teachers," but I think there'd be some good stuff there as well.

This episode had the host, Dan Cohen (?), and two guests. It was pretty informal, the three speakers seemed to know each other, they worked off of each other pretty well, and they seemed comfortable with a few seconds of "dead air" here and there.

The episode started out with a "News Roundup," which covered many different topics and was very interesting. Oddly, though, it took up about half the time of the podcast. Here's a "run-down" of the topics discussed:

• MS Vista
• Google Docs
• A reminder that "students are not automatically technology literate" -- even though we might think that since they're mostly in the 18-22 age group
• A reminder that some students do not have MS Office -- due to cost or other issues
• A discussion about open-source class management systems vs. commercial ones such as BlackBoard and WebCT -- and how "tagging" works in various systems
• Flickr -- and the Ken Albers study
  
• Delicious

At this point, the discussion about Wikipedia began, and they made many good points. Instead of saying to students that they can't use it and/or they can't cite it -- which they're going to probably look at anyway -- we should "train" our students in a better use of Wikipedia. We should even ask and discuss the question, Is an encyclopedia an appropriate college-level source?

One speaker then described an extra-credit project in his Western Civ. class, a project which soon became a required project. He asked his students to either write or substantially edit a Wikipedia entry and then to track the commentary and changes made to the page. He argued that an important part of an entry that is often overlooked is the History of a page. His students soon discovered how quickly and how drastically a page can change, and not always for the better. However, the other argument is that the more people who are involved in a page, the better the article might be. His hope was that, through this project, his students might better understand both Wikipedia and the "scholarly process," the creation (and maintenance?) of knowledge.

The discussion also included, several times, the phrase: "Community of Enthusiasts." We need to recognize that these communities drive Wikipedia and that our students probably already belong to one or more "communities of enthusiasts," based on their personal and/or professional interests. We should capitalize on this and work the concept into our classes.

(As a side note, I already often teach my First-Year Writing course, especially when I focus explicitly on "academic writing," using the ideas of "community" and "conversation." Students need to recognize that, in coming to college, they are joining a new community, and they are going to be "listening to many different conversations." And every conversation is going to have different "conventions" to follow when/if one joins the conversation. We then start in with summarizing, then analysis, then evaluation, then synthesis, then argument, where they actually join or contribute to a conversation after doing all the "listening.")

Finally, the podcast ended with some recommendations for the listeners. If you want to use a wiki for personal or professional reasons, these two were highly recommended:

• wetpaint.com
• pbwiki.com

If you teach history or geography, you might be interested in:

• worldmapper.org

If you teach your students research skills, you might be interested in:

• the Open Content Alliance, a rival to Google Books (the Google Library Project), which has upward of 187,000 books online with searching and downloading capabilities -- archive.org/details/texts

I'm glad Digital Campus was recommended to me by my Digital Writing professor. I've already downloaded several more podcasts and hope to listen to them soon. I tried to listen while doing other things on the computer, but I'm not one to be able to do that, whereas I know others who can multi-task. It makes me question using podcasts for my classes: Will my students be paying attention, or will they be distracted with other things and come away with only a fraction of what was on the podcast? Maybe in asking them to find and evaluate some before actually doing their own, they might actually realize that their audience won't be paying as much attention as they hope? Is this too much to hope for?

My Search Strategies

The databases I typically use for my teaching and for my own writing probably tend to be more “old fashioned” than “tech savvy,” and most are found on my college’s library website. I use these primarily because I feel there are fewer “credibility” issues to worry about. I usually begin with MnPALS, the library catalog used for all the MnSCU colleges and universities as well as other MN private colleges; this catalog is mostly for books. I then go to the EBSCO family of databases, which is free for all faculty and students; it includes other databases such as Academic Search Premier, CINAHL (for nursing and allied health), EBSCO MegaFILE, and MasterFILE Premier. I then go to ProQuest for newspaper searching.

When I help my lawyer friend with medical research for his insurance-claims cases, we tend to go to the Diehl Hall Medical Library at the U of MN and use the computers there. I forget off-hand which specific databases we use there, but using the in-house computers not only guarantees access to those databases but also allows us to easily print full-text articles online and to physically go to the shelves if we can’t obtain a full-text article online. Another benefit is having a reference librarian right there to help us if we get stuck.

I sometimes will check Google, but it’s usually last instead of first, which is exactly opposite what I advise my students to do! I tell them to check Google first, even Wikipedia if they must, to get an overview of the topic and what’s out there. I then encourage them to go to the “better” sources and databases for their actual research. Much of this has to do, I suppose, with my own reluctance to use technology and my own skepticism of the credibility, reliability, validity, relevancy, etc. of much of the stuff on the Internet. We do, however, cover all these questions in class, and most, if not all, writing textbooks and handbooks include a section on “evaluating sources,” complete with lists of questions to ask about each different type of source.

The other advantage with the databases listed above is that, more and more, the full text of things is available online. This is ironic, because I also value the physical act of “browsing” in libraries and bookstores. More and more, I find that students will avoid going to the library if they can help it. They’d rather get the full text of things online, even if we are in a computer lab just down the hall from the library and I tell them they can walk down there during class if they need to find, get, or copy something. Rather, if they can’t get the full text online, they will probably skip that source, even though it might be the best source ever for their topic, the source with the “smoking gun,” even if the library owns a hard copy of a book or journal they could photocopy, and they go on to find something else, something similar, but probably something not as good. Another related thought: students also tend to avoid asking the librarians for help, even if the librarians are present with us in the computer lab or are wandering throughout the library.

For identifying and testing out relevant search categories or keywords, I usually begin by brainstorming as long a list as I can before even hitting the computer. I use the most obvious keywords, but I also try for synonyms, and I also try various combinations of key words. (For the law/medical research that I do with my friend, we do this together.) I also note where and when to use Boolean operators and quotation marks to group words together to be searched together.

Right now, I’m only beginning to understand, and use, RSS feeds to subscribe to things such as news, blogs, online magazines, podcasts, etc. I have feeds set up now for my three blog partners. I’m going to see if NCTE has a feed so I can receive their “INBOX” in Google Reader instead of through my email, which sometimes blocks NCTE emails for some reason. I’m also going to explore the Ed-Tech-Talk and Teachers-Teaching-Teachers that Prof. Beach has been talking about. I also still need to set up feeds for iTunes and YouTube, but I don’t yet know how to do that.

I think I’m already pretty good about teaching my students effective search strategies. I’m pretty detail oriented, and I think and do things my students don’t do, and hearing about these things helps them—I know because they tell me so. But, I admit, more and more they are actually teaching me things too—which I give them credit for and then share these tips with the entire class through the class distribution email lists. I can see already, through this digital writing class this semester, that I will have much more to teach when I return from my sabbatical in Fall 2009!