Podcasting, seminars and e–portfolios, 26/05/06, Transversality

May 26, 2006

Podcasting, seminars and e–portfolios

Podcasting is becoming ubiquitous. MP3 players, such as those created by iriver are increasingly capable of recording audio in a high quality but easily handled format. The files that are created can be swiftly transfered to a computer, edited with free software, and uploaded onto the internet. Warwick's Sitebuilder² web content management system has a built in podcast player. My suggestion is that podcasting could eventually form an essential activity within research oriented seminar based teaching.

Last night I recorded a seminar as part of the What Is Philosophy? project. During the seminar discussion, I made some comments that I suspect may play a key role in my research. It took just a few minutes to edit my comments and the subsequent discussion into a small file, and upload it into my eportfolio and blog. You can listen to this by clicking on the button below:

Podcast play button

This gave me a thought:

Learning to speak in seminars is a key objective of research based learning. When a student achieves success in this skill, that success should be recorded. This offers an opportunity to reflect upon the success, considering the contributing factors. Keeping such a recording may also offer supporting evidence to assessment. Finally, it could also provide a useful resource to present in an e-portfolio, for example, to prospective employers.

Perhaps in the near future, as e–portfolios become more common within higher education, amongst the various snapshots of a student's academic work, we will see podcasts of seminars.

Robert O'Toole : 26 May 2006 21:07 | Tags: E-Learning Eportfolio Eportfolios Podcasting Warwick University | Comments (0) | Report a problem