An education in AV technology: the annual EduComm conference covered podcasting, distance learning, and classroom planning

University Business, August, 2006 by Jean Marie Angelo, Tim Goral, Ann McClure

He urged attendees to take note of the members who embrace the training. They will eventually become the technology leaders of their departments, and will help in future adaptations and training. Eventually they become allies, helping to find specialty grants and applying for them. "This helps pay for the classrooms," he said.

"We have one state-of-the-art classroom because an educator wrote a $150,000 grant," he added.

Podcast Production

The iPod was introduced in late 2001 as a music player. Within a few years colleges and universities were capitalizing on the potential to produce and play digital MP3 files of all kinds--lectures, foreign language lessons, even music instruction.

Georgia College & State University was one of the first higher ed institutions to use iPods for learning. "We've been doing this since 2002," Jim Wolfgang, CIO, told attendees during his session, "A pocket full of learning in an iCommunity."

"Naysayers said this would never work, that the students would use iPods for music only, and that the device was just a toy."

Four years later the university's robust program has proven them wrong. There are at last 40 iPod-related projects at GCSU, Wolfgang estimated. About 30 percent of courses are using iPods. (More information can be found at http://ipod.csu.edu.) Music instruction, foreign language, and education are the disciplines that have done the most with the new technology. The campus choir, for example, provides iPods and MP3 files to students so they can rehearse between formal sessions.

A project in the education department had teachers in training shadow middle school students and interview them about life and learning.

"This project was modeled after the radio program, This American Life," Wolfgang explained. GCSU called its project This Adolescent Life. Wolfgang played excerpts of interviews with students, including an interview with a student who recalled the difficulties of trying to attend class with a violent classmate.

"We are thinking of doing this as a package to help parents understand what children are going through," he said.

Getting the campus community to this stage of production and usage has taken some work. "We are not rich," Wolfgang noted. GCSU did not have an unlimited budget for this type of program. So launching it required having a good strategy. "We looked at what the needs were," he said.

His first step was issuing an RFP to the faculty. "We asked them about the challenges they would like to meet and how iPods could help." The request was answered with some specific programming ideas. One professor produced podcasts for foreign language students who traveled abroad. He knew that students who travel to other places struggle to absorb all the new information about other histories and societies. While traveling they can listen to foreign language lessons, literature, and historic information on their iPods, so lectures and tours can be used to focus on other information.

Wolfgang showed a graphic of students using iPods while touring outside the United States. One student listened to podcasts of Irish poetry while walking the Celtic countryside. "This brings relevance to what is being taught," he said.