Pesky Podcasts

I decided to use ‘Enhanced Podcasts’ as my new technology for Core Activity 8.1 in the H808. I took an audio podcast that I made last year which was aimed at students with disabilities deciding which university to choose. These potential students often have many concerns about receiving the appropriate supports and there are some (convoluted) alternative admissions routes which need to be understood. We felt that as many of these students have issues with text, presenting some of the information in audio form might be beneficial. Similarly, we had feedback that hearing the voices of the staff potential students would be meeting was reassuring.

 

Since then I’ve given workshops on creating podcasts to various groups, so I felt pretty confident about my technical skills regarding audio. I was aware of enhanced podcasts, but these are not the widely-used mp3 format, but (at the time) lesser-known AAC or m4a format. This format is now supported by many popular devices (iPod, iPhone, Playstation 3, Wii, as well as phones from Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Blackberry) so I decided to revisit a podcast with a view to converting one into an enhanced podcast with images and hyperlinks.

 

I used Garageband, an Apple application available as part of the OSX operation system. This allowed me to import the existing recording and add chapter markers, images and URLs very easily. The images had to be imported first into iPhoto (an image management application, again native to the Mac). These could be accessed then from within Garageband, along with other media such as sound effects or other audio items.

 

Non-Mac users are not well served when it comes to creating enhanced podcasts but it can be done. Jake Ludington gives a tutorial using Windows Media Player.

 

I appreciate (see below) that not everyone will readily be able to listen/view the podcast attached, but iTunes is a free download, Miro works well and VLC claims to. Feedback on the technical issues would be welcome.

 

 

 

Key features

 

1. Ability to augment audio with appropriate images. This could be useful to display an image of a person or item being discussed. Diagrams or screenshots could also be included, or just an image with text (e.g. a URL). Institutions may welcome the ability to include logos or other branding. Images are also very useful for visual learners, some people with disabilities or younger listeners.
2. Hyperlinks can be embedded. If a listener is playing the podcast on a device with a web connection, they could be directed to sites with hyperlinks embedded in the podcast at appropriate times.
3. Chapter markers. Longer podcasts can be organised into chapters and these can be given meaningful titles.
4. Format more widespread. While not as pervasive as mp3, the AAC/m4a format can now be played on a very wide range of popular devices (all Apple players, Sony Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii, Nokia N-series and most Sony Ericsson phones, Blackberry, Creative Zen players etc). Free cross-platform media players such as VLC and Miro claim to be able to handle enhanced podcasts (although I (surprisingly) had problems with VLC).
5. All of the benefits of audio-only podcasts.

 

Potential issues

 

1. Software. As mentioned above, it is relatively easy to create an enhanced podcast if you have access to a Mac. The process is more convoluted if using Windows or Linux.
2. Time and effort. The process of choosing appropriate images, resizing, ensuring that the correct balance between size of image and clarity of image is achieved, deciding and creating chapter markers, including hyperlinks, compressing and exporting and testing – these all have to considered and undertaking with an enhanced podcast.
3. Access. While AAC/m4a is supported by a wide range of devices and applications, it could not be considered a standard in the way that mp3 could be.
4. All of the limitations of podcasts (unsuitable for those with hearing impairments, limited bandwidth, slow connections, older equipment)

Core Activity 7.1: Professional Values

 

The aim of this activity is to make us consider the importance of a statement of values or code of practice/ethics. First we looked at the values held by CMALT and we were to consider any values that we not explicitly mentioned but tat we felt were important. I found this rather difficult, as the four values above are quite all-encompassing. I’m certain that this broadness is on purpose and unavoidable due to the hugely diverse group of people under the CMALT umbrella.

 

Elearning (not that ALT call it that!) is an emerging (and emergent?) profession and so it is rather difficult to set down stringent standards when the profession is still in development. Let’s look to the traditional professionals once more and see if they do things differently.

 

 

Predictably, I looked at medicine and law. The Irish Medical Council have a Guide to Ethical Conduct and Behaviour which has some large general principles (respecting the dignity of the individual) but over one hundred very specific ‘professional responsibilities’ such as how to treat colleagues, what material should be on letterheads and personal use of alcohol and drugs.

The Law Society of Ireland has a comparable Guide to Professional Conduct of Solicitors in Ireland. Again, there are a few overarching principles followed by over one hundred pages of highly specific guidelines.

 

As I’m the one who seems to keep talking about the cold, hard cash, I find it interesting to see whole sections in both of these documents around payment. The HEA’s guidelines make no mention of it.

 

I thought it might be interesting to look at the codes of practise (if any) of another emerging and diverse ‘profession’, that of the alternative/complementary practitioner. Like elearning, CAM is made up of people who advocate practices that range from the almost integrated (massage, use of PowerPoint) to the more marginal (angel therapy, use of Second Life). Both groups are trying to establish professional associations and have those associations set standards for their own practitioners. http://www.dohc.ie/publications/pdf/rrpcam.pdf?direct=1 Chap 3.2). The Code of Practice set out by the Society of Homeopathy in the UK is very similar to that by the Irish Medical Council. No doubt this is partially to appear thorough and credible and as such it does a good job (and that’s coming from one who has very little time for the ‘profession’).

 

My conclusion is that a set of values/code of ethics is essentially a tool to establish credibility. Law and Medicine (In Ireland, at least) have based their codes on both legislative and self-imposed requirements. The statutory involvement is justified given the very direct and powerful relationship these practitioners who often work in isolation have with people. In education, it’s a little different in that practitioners rarely work individually and belong to institutions which are themselves frequently regulated by legislation and have, by extension, credibility. Private institutions on the other hand have to work very hard to earn their reputations.

The elearning professional also will generally work in an institution and his/her work will contribute to the reputation or standards of the collective. Perhaps given CMALT’s promotion of learning technologists as being at the ‘core’ of teaching and learning, a statement of values should simply be the one used by the institution generally? That there will soon be no relevant or significant distinction between a learning technologist and anyone else involved in learning.

 

More on ‘professionals’ and ‘professionalism’

Boston Legal: lawyers in pants

Originally uploaded by LordKhan

The tutor groups are abuzz with discussion about what exactly is a ‘professional’ and indeed an ‘elearning professional’. Our tutor doesn’t let things lie, and reckoned that if we as burgeoning elearning professionals don’t see ourselves on a par with more traditional professions, is this not a problem. Here’s my 2c.

From looking at various contributors’ reponses across many tutor groups, it seems difficult not to include remuneration in definitions of professional (as opposed to ‘professionalism’). If we look at the established professions such as law and medicine, and we seek to place elearning on the same plane, it doesn’t seem to work.

What’s the difference?

1) Gatekeeping: the traditional professions don’t make it easy to get in. Apart from the qualifications, being published, experience (so far, the same as ourselves), there are also quite protracted periods of study, formal networking/ritual (a friend of mine who is becoming a barrister in Ireland must attend a number of dinners and speak to ’superiors’ using quite antiquated terms), and indeed costumes. It’s difficult to get into these professions (I wonder how many doctors there are with non-acquired disabilities?). Elearning is rather easier to get into (indeed many seem to have found themselves in it somewhat accidentally!)

2) Remuneration. The traditional professions are generally very well paid. If we look at some of the characteristics of a professional as collected by Warrior, we might have to stretch them in order to includes athletes, some of whom are described as being professionals. Certainly a professional boxer also pays his/her dues, spends time improving his/her abilities and may even be involved in progressing the sport, but when we talk about sports people being professionals, it’s usually about the money. Sadly, elearning professionals (in line with others in education) generally cannot command as much as our friends in law and medicine do.

Of course we could go to the free market and sell our knowledge there, but if we make some money out there is it not down to our business acumen rather than our elearning skills?

6.1 Thoughts on Warrior

Warrior argues that ‘professionalism [in teaching] is synonymous with quality and the current practices relating to maintaining and monitoring standards are issues of contentious debate’. While I found her round up of the definitions of professionalism illuminating, I was particularly interested in the ‘contentious debate’ connected with the attempts to raise teaching to professional level by applying standards but how this trend may adversely affect practitioners.

Professionalism can be defined as being ‘not amateur’ (Lindrop 1982). In that sense, it involves being paid, often highly paid, and making a career out of pursuing an activity. It involves pursuing a career, one that has distinguishing characteristics and ‘an element of intellectual training’. Warrior lists two sets of characteristics of professionals, from 1964 and 1982. Both make reference to having a responsibility to serving the public either through having codes of conduct or ‘minimum standards’.

Interestingly, the later definition lists the professional’s claim to ‘exercising personal judgement’. When she examines the teaching profession, she notes that this characteristic is significantly lessened by the impact of external and rigidly enforced standards of quality. These ‘bureaucratic rules and managerial controls’ can be ‘intrusive’ and may result in ‘a severe loss in professional autonomy’. Sometimes this can result in teachers suffering from stress and seeking help for depressive disorders in disproportionate numbers.

Two years ago, I got a new colleague who set about restructuring our department. To my mind, she injected some badly needed systems, procedures and record-keeping which had the result of my feeling more professional and competent. With her backing, I sought and got a regrading of my post with the resultant (dramatic!) increase in salary. The trade off was an enormous increase in bureaucracy and occasional delays in service provision as a result of ensuring the paperwork is in order. I have sometimes decided to turn a blind eye to the threat of an external audit in order to ensure that a student receives urgently-needed support.

All of which suggests that a certain baseline of accountability is required in order to establish standards that can be adhered to and compared. After all, quality does not exist in a vacuum; it is only meaningful as a concept when two or more things are examined using the same criteria.But this need not be restrictive. Once the baseline is reached, they must be room for discretion and rule-bending.

And indeed, both she and I have formally chosen to break the ‘rules’ imposed on us from government agencies. We were upfront about our rationale and unapologetic about our decision. Far from being reprimanded, the new path that we beat was formally incorporated by the government agency the following year. This suggests that, while standards are imposed from without, the expertise of the professional is always within.

Perkin’s Professional Society

Professional society has enormous potential for enhancing human life and ensuring social justice, but it also presents the professional elites with egregious opportunities for exploitation.

In this introductory chapter to Perkin’s The Third Revolution: Professional Elites in the Modern World, the author outlines how he will demonstrate how the modern world belongs to the professional. The professional possesses specialised knowledge based on education, competitive merit and experience in the field. He (more likely than she) dominates society because he controls ‘the scarce resource of expertise in its manifold forms’.

The opening pages appear to belong to one of those unlikely bestsellers with a Big Idea which illustrated by myriad examples of the negative effects of contemporary life often tracing the historical/ideological roots of the malaise. The language of these books (e.g. No Logo, Fast Food Nation) is frequently foreboding, occasionally shrill, but often these stylistic devices can be overlooked as the message and premise appears sound.

In this case, I’m not so sure.

Perkin starts his chapter in a quite dramatic way (capture the reader), but his tone becomes more reasonable and less hyperbolic as the chapter progresses. The results of the Neolithic Revolution, he claims, had brought wealth and power to the few, but a regression for the many. These unfortunates had been yanked from a ‘casual, carefree, improvident life of hunting and gathering in humanity’s Eden’, it seems. Or had they been rescued from short, painful, barbaric existences that offered no opportunity to progress beyond instinctual survival?

Perkin talks about the ’seductive revolution of the professionals’, how professionals have emerged as the leaders rather than servants in the current order. He looks at seven countries which he says illustrate ten characteristics of professional society. One of these trends is the ‘centrality’ of higher education. The numbers of young people in higher education has doubled or trebled between 1960 and 1988. This, on the surface, would appear to be something worth cheering about.

Far from it, as he argues that a professional society needs to invest heavily in education in order to feed the corporate/service/political machine. In this sense, I question my own motives in enrolling in a module called ‘The eLearning Professional‘. Not only am I angling to ‘command a rent as surely as the landlord or owner of industrial capital’, but I’m involved in facilitating students in becoming the next generation of the privileged. As you can imagine, I feel a little conflicted.

Interestingly, he cannot deny what perhaps those of us idealists involved in education feel; that education is an empowering currency which makes it more difficult for regimes to deceive for very long. He cites the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites as an example of how an educated population would no longer swallow the propaganda being fed to them.So he ends the chapter in an altogether more measured way with the line that opens my thoughts here.

Would I be persuaded of the ambiguity of my pursuit of professionalism were I to read on? I don’t know. I’m unlikely to delve more deeply into it. When I struggled though No Logo and The Long Tail, I tried to make sense of the statistics and economic jargon because I knew who the bad guys were.

With Perkin, I seem to be the bad guy. And things don’t usually end so well for them.

Hello world!

I’ve decided to ditch the Movable Type blog, the site the Open University assigned to me, in favour of tried-and-trusted WordPress.This was done for several reasons:1. I’m learning a great deal of things and I don’t think I need to grapple with yet another blog tool.2. No matter how much tinkering I do, I can’t seem to get Movable Type to display anything other than September 2007.3. Movable Type is unattractive (but I’m sure it has a wonderful personality).