"Thinking with Our Ears": Enhancing Learning with Digital Audio
Our culture is dominated by the visual. Visual images and spectacles saturate popular culture, and our thoughts on education are unconsciously shaped by visual metaphors such as "illumination" and "enlightenment." Visual images are of primary importance in technologies such as PowerPoint and the World Wide Web. Indeed, as educational activities have increasingly been mediated by the Web, our sense of hearing has generally ranked second in importance—often as an intrusion to be blocked out so the learner can better focus on the course material before her or him. But does hearing deserve its secondary place in online pedagogy? Does the potential of audio and audio technologies in education exceed the delivery of recorded lectures? These questions are the touchstone for our February panel discussion.
Seminar
Wednesday, February 1, 2006
402 Walter Library, East Bank
12:00 p.m.–1:30 p.m.
The seminar also was available live online via UMConnect; access the recording (split into two parts because a portion had to be deleted due to copyright issues):
Cristina Lopez, a senior educational technology consultant at the DMC, will moderate a discussion among the following panelists:
- Michael Hancher, Department of English Language and Literature, College of Liberal Arts, Twin Cities campus; and
- Richard Reardon, Digital Media Center, Office of Information Technology, Twin Cities campus.
- Jenise Rowekamp, Language Center, College of Liberal Arts, Twin Cities campus;
- Thom Swiss, Institute for New Media Studies, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Twin Cities campus;
The panelists currently are working on projects to enhance students' learning through the use of digital audio and will discuss uses of digital audio such as:
- providing foreign language students with access to examples of diverse and authentic speaking styles and accents;
- enabling learners and researchers to access primary source recordings that enliven content;
- developing audio libraries that can help students access and review their own and others' audio performances;
- enabling students with visual and reading disabilities to access learning materials in alternative formats;
- expanding use of audio in student assignments, such as through the development of digital storytelling projects, class presentations, and multimedia reports enhanced with audio annotations; and
- enabling students to practice their foreign language skills in Web-based synchronous or asynchronous settings.
Bibliography
The following readings may help you prepare for the TEL seminar.
Bull, Michael, and Les Back. The Auditory Cultures Reader. New York: Berg, 2003.
Bull and Back present an edited collection intended to challenge the privileged status of vision in the hierarchy of the senses, to bolster the notion that "thinking with our ears offers an opportunity to augment our critical imaginations, to comprehend our world and our encounters with it according to multiple registers of feeling" (p. 2). To this end, the editors have collected works that cut across an array of disciplines, from the physical, cognitive, and imaginary domains, to the study of ambient sounds ("soundscapes") and the ways in which they may reflect aspects of culture and society, to the acoustic cultures of professionals as diverse as doctors and jazz musicians. A useful reference for expanding one's thinking on the role of the senses in learning across the curriculum.
Gardner, Campbell. "There's Something in the Air: Podcasting in Education." EDUCAUSE Review 40, no. 6 (November/December 2005): 32–47. http://www.educause.edu/er/erm05/erm0561.asp.
Campbell describes a number of evocative scenarios in which podcasting could serve to motivate, engage, and inspire college students, including a biologist broadcasting a weekly "scholar's diary" summarizing journal articles she read that week; students discussing the book of the week while practicing their language skills in an Arabic-language reading seminar; and Campbell's own experiment in reading and commenting on the poems of John Donne. Having established the potential of podcasting to enhance learning, Campbell provides a concise overview of the process of recording, encoding, and syndicating files and points to a range of useful technical and teaching resources.
Hogan, Bryan J., and Peter Dooley. "Design and Deployment of a Computerized Audio Library with Internet Streaming for Students with Print Disabilities." Journal of Special educational technology 18, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 73–5.
Some students find reading difficult or impossible due to conditions such as blindness, visual impairment, cerebral palsy, or dyslexia; the use of audio recordings have proved to be one effective way to assist those with what the authors term "print disabilities" (p. 73). Digital delivery of recordings, with concomitant improvements in availability, portability, and capacity to support non-linear navigation, offers further advantages. Hogan and Dooley discuss a system for digitizing, storing, organizing, and delivering such recordings.
Holmes, Glen, and Emet LaBoone. "The Importance of Culture When Creating Audio-Enhanced, Web-Based Instruction.” TechTrends 46, no. 2 (March/April 2002): 56–61.
Long before the advent of the Web, radio played a role in distance education. As early as 1911, radio was used as an instructional medium at the University of Wisconsin (p. 56). Holmes and LaBoone's application of Web radio ("webio"), in their case the use of audio to create realistic decision scenarios to support classroom learning, succeeded through "the combination of familiar language, sounds, and music [to] help the learner identify with his or her surroundings" (p. 56). Of particular interest in this study is the authors' discussion of ways that formative evaluation can be conducted to improve the quality of learners' experiences (p. 58).
Nwaerondu, N. G., and Gordon Thompson. "The Use of Educational Radio in Developing Countries: Lessons from the Past.” Journal of Distance Education 2, no. 2 (1987). http://cade.athabascau.ca/vol2.2/7_Nwaerondu_and_Thompson.html.
In their overview of research on educational radio that was conducted through the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, Nwaerondu and Thompson provide many instructive examples of radio as an educational medium that can promote active learning. Designing programming that addresses the interests and needs of the target audience is an important step, but research has revealed that radio programs do not have significant educational impact unless programmers also provide opportunities for discussion and guidance through the learning process. Extension workers who designed and implemented the "Radio Farm Forum Project” in Thailand during the mid-70s reinforced the relevance of programming for their audience by creating opportunities for discussion and problem solving, and promoting a two-way flow of information between farmers and extension workers. Village forums in a similar project in Ghana provided listeners with the opportunity to discuss issues before the radio program and debrief after. Researchers found that villagers who participated in forums learned more than villagers who only listened to the radio programs. In short, educational radio worked best when programming was connected with sound pedagogy and a sensitivity to the cultural norms and practices of the target audience—a valuable lesson that is equally applicable today for faculty members contemplating the use of podcasting or other digital audio presentation of course content.
