ALT.Mentions Podcast. [A-049] Home : ALT Annual Conference 2019

Public Group active 4 months, 1 week ago

Tue, Sep 3 2019, 4:15pm – 5:00pm

Authors: Neil Dixon, and Pip McDonald

Room: McEwan Hall

Theme: Learning Technology for wider impact

Type: Poster + Gasta (5min)

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Description

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Session Description

During the ALT Assembly in February 2019 at City University, members were asked a critical question “How can we engage members more effectively?”. We are creating a podcast to engage the ALT community and aim to launch it at the ALT Annual Conference through a digital poster and lightning talk. Responding to the theme of Learning technology for a wider impact, we aim to engage members in conversations about best practice, share tips and exploring new ideas. The Podcast will be called ALT.Mentions and aims to capture of the diversity of the profession by giving a voice to our members. The roles of Learning Technologists has been reported in the journal literature, for example Oliver (2002). As podcasts an informal learning space (Middleton, 2016), we will offer something new to the ALT community.

By attending our lightning talk, participants will learn about the podcast, explore our findings, and have the opportunity to contribute and share their story. The digital poster will provide a summary of the findings from our pilot episodes and will be an opportunity to listen to the podcast. One of the participants has podcasting experience in Higher Education and has created a podcast before, so has relevant knowledge to create an engaging and innovative podcast. Podcasting is well established in education and has been used for example, as a pedagogical tool to meet the personalised needs of learners (Harris & Park, 2008).

Our session is based on our findings of the pilot episodes of the podcast which will be recorded in 2019. Both participants are both Learning Technologists working in very different educational contexts. In each episode, we will discuss our working lives, how we got here and where we are going. We will invite guests to share narrative from their career and experiences with Learning Technology. During the ALT conference, we will also record a special episode about our experiences at the conference. For subsequent episodes, we will we will work with ALT Regional Groups, the Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and individual to identify and curate a programme of relevant, engaging and important topics for each episode.

Both reflection and evaluation will be crucial to the project development. We will capture feedback from the ALT community on the pilot episodes to inform and improve future podcast episodes. Potential future developments could include integrating video with an opportunity for live interaction. One potential outcome is to carry out further research to inform the basis of a submission to the Research in Learning Technology Journal.

You can locate the podcast here; https://altmentions.podbean.com https://altmentions.podbean.com

References

Harris, H. and Park, S. (2008). Educational usages of podcasting. British Journal of Educational Technology, 39: 548-551. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2007.00788.x (Online) Available at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2007.00788.x [Accessed 12th March 2019]

Middleton, A. (2016). Reconsidering the role of recorded audio as a rich, flexible and engaging learning space. Research in Learning Technology, 24, p.28035 (Online) Available at: http://shura.shu.ac.uk/13284/1/Middleton%20Reconsidering%20the%20role%20of%20recorded%20audio.pdf [Accessed 12th March 2019]

Oliver, M. (2002). What Do Learning Technologists Do? Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 39 (4) p245-52. (Online) Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13558000210161089 [Accessed 12th March 2019]

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