This podcast is brought to you as a service of Burks On Learning.  For more information, visit the blog at burkso2.blogspot.com

Well, welcome back!  This podcast is something a little different for me – it is sharing with my listeners some details about a very innovative course at the University of Western Australia.  Not an online course, but one that uses current Internet technologies in pedagogically-effective ways.

How did I find out about this course, you ask?  Well, I now regularly search for podcasts on the topics of learning, higher education, and educational technologies – to get material to include in my “Burks’ Selections” blog.  So just yesterday, I found the blog for this course, which prominently features podcasts, and I became fascinated by what I found.  In fact, I thought that this course was so interesting that I should do a podcast about it.  You see, this is the first time I have encountered a course that is largely centered around a blog.  The blog is at:

http://i-generation.blogspot.com/

I’ll include links to various parts of this blog in the shownotes for this podcast on my Burks On Learning blog.

The course was developed by Mr. Tama (TAH-ma) Leaver, and was offered as an honours course [that’s honours – H-O-N-O-U-R-S, with the British spelling] – an honours course called [quote] iGeneration:  Digital Communication and Participatory Culture” [unquote] in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Western Australia in Perth.

First, let’s deal with the name “iGeneration”.

A quick Google search turned up a BBC website called “The I-Generation” – which seems to deal with all things digital, including the digital divide.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/2003/the_igeneration/default.stm

A check of Wikipedia turned up a good definition of iGeneration:

[quote] iGeneration is a term used to describe a subset of Generation Y born from about 1984 to 1992 from Baby Busters and late Boomer parents. The name is based on the popular iPod music device widely favored amongst this age group. The term was popularized by MC Lars in his song iGeneration, although it has been previously used elsewhere to describe the internet generation, or a digital generation. [unquote]

I’ll include a link to the lyrics for the iGeneration song in the shownotes:

http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/iGeneration-lyrics-MC-Lars-Horris/7C2DAA1A02711ABD48256EED000C0E45

And I’ll also include a link to the MC Lars website, where you can download the iGeneration song in mp3 format:

http://mclars.com/audio.html

Here is a short excerpt.

[music]

OK, now I think I have a much better sense of the course title:

[quote] iGeneration:  Digital Communication and Participatory Culture” [unquote]

It clearly is looking at how digital communication and participatory culture – blogs, wikis, podcasts – are impacting the iGeneration.

Now that we understand the course title, let’s look at the course objectives.  I’m going to read the course aims, simply because they are quite unique for this Baby Boomer educator turned podcaster:

[quote] This unit aims to expand and develop your critical understanding of current social and cultural trends in the production, development, use, distribution and influence of new media forms. It is expected that you will build upon the communications theory examined in past units and broaden those perspectives in relation to the ideas and practice of participatory culture. Further, students are expected to enhance their practical skills in digital media by participating in collective authorship of participatory media forms (most notably through the unit weblogs) and individual authorship (most notably through the production of a podcast).  [unquote]

What a well-written set of aims for this course!  The expected outcomes of this class are just as unique:

[quote] At the successful completion of “iGeneration: Digital Communication and Participatory Culture”, students will be able to:

• Identify and critically analyse key issues and debates emerging from recent social and cultural trends in the digital communication and interactive media
• Demonstrate a practical knowledge of participatory cultural forms
• Identify and evaluate the requirements of digital audio recording, editing and distribution
• Plan, produce and create a podcast  [Got that?  Create a podcast?  How many of us are asking our students to do that?  Continuing on with the expected outcomes, we have:]
• Research a topic by collecting, analysing and interpreting data.
• Formulate, express and defend an argument.
• Express research findings and ideas coherently and logically in oral, textual and recorded digital formats.  [that’s where we see the podcasts coming in – express yourself in recorded digital formats.  And finally,]
• Engage in constructive and critical dialogue (in oral and electronically mediated forms) with peers and other course participants.  [unquote]

This seminar is really fascinating to me - since it is in a blog, when you first view it, you view the latest blog postings – from the end of the course – from the last day of the semester.  You have to look around a bit to get back to the beginning of the course, to Tuesday, July 19, 2005.

http://i-generation.blogspot.com/2005/07/welcome-to-igeneration-digital.html

The initial posting in the blog by Mr. Leaver outlines the course – the aims and desired outcomes that I just listed, and the course assessment:  20% of the final grade is for a critical evaluation of a blog or podcast series, 30% of the grade is for participation in the discussions, and 50% of the final grade is from producing a major research podcast.

I’ve never encountered a course that is so highly dependent upon a blog, and maybe that is because I am new to all this.  Each week, Mr. Leaver would make a blog posting one week in advance of the scheduled class meeting.  This posting would include a list of online readings, and a list of discussion questions.  The students would meet the following week on Wednesday and be prepared to discuss these questions.  After the class meeting, the students then would post a follow-up in the blog.  Note that they could do this, since they all were given author status in Blogger – the blog was created as a team blog.  I guess this all could have been done in a course management system, such as Blackboard or WebCT, but since the course is about blogs and podcasts, why not use a blog for the “participatory” interactions?

The weekly discussions in this class dealt with the following topics:

• Participatory Culture
• Copyright, Creativity, and the Creative Commons
• Citizen Journalism
• The Politics of Play – where play refers to video games
• Wikis – The Wikipedia, Collective Intelligence, and Communal Authorship
• Fan Culture & the Origins of Participatory Culture
• Podcasting:  Revolutionizing Radio?
• Participatory Culture Then, Now, and Tomorrow

In the Critical Evaluation Exercise, which was 20% of the course grade, the students were to write a 1500 word paper to [quote] Critically evaluate one blog or podcast in terms of its position, contribution and relation to participatory culture and digital communication. [unquote]

http://i-generation.blogspot.com/2005/08/critical-evaluation-exercise.html

Mr. Leaver wrote the following hints:  [quote] For the larger blogs and podcasts you are not expected to read everything in the blog or listen to all the podcasts. Rather, listen to or read enough to get a good sense of the tone, position and politics of the blog or podcast. Why is it being made? Who’s writing/recording it? What is their aim? How does this relate to participatory culture? How is this instance of digital communication both similar to and different to [from] previous media (especially print media or radio)? [unquote]

Again, this seems like a great assignment for the iGeneration.  Of course, 50% of the course grade was for the “Major Podcast Assignment”.

http://i-generation.blogspot.com/2005/10/major-podcast-assignment.html

The students were asked to [quote] Construct an innovative digital audio programme of up to 45 minutes length which explores the medium of podcasting and critically engages with the idea of participatory culture /// in either the podcast itself or its exegesis (?k's?-j?'s?s - critical explanation or analysis, especially of a text). The programme can be of any genre or type, but must comply with copyright restrictions as the file will be made available publicly online. [unquote]

Note that instead of a word limit, the podcast had a time limit – 45 minutes.  And how cool is this?  That the students know that they are producing something for public consumption.  I note that Mr. Leaver also asked the students to produce a set of “show notes” for their podcasts, with all references and a time-code showing what is being covered in each section of the podcast.  Of course, the show notes were to be posted to the course blog, along with a link to the podcast itself.

The student podcasts ranged from a commentary for a Simpsons episode focusing on consumer culture to a podcast on Christianity to a ‘pod play’ in the style of old-time radio theatre called “Rich and the Rural”.

This course looks really very well thought out.  Really creative.  I would love to try something like this in an online class.  Having students learn to analyze a blog or a podcast.  Having them learn to create a podcast.  Understanding the impact of new forms of digital media.  These certainly are very valuable skills for the i-Generation, and really, for almost anyone these days, even Boomers of my generation.

I hope you’ll take the time to check out the course blog, and to read some of the very thoughtful postings from the students in this honours seminar.

I note in passing that the very creative instructor who developed this course, Tama Leaver, is himself a prolific blogger.  One of his blogs is at:

http://ponderance.blogspot.com/

It has the tagline:  “Tama Leaver’s thoughts on the blogosphere, podosphere, popular culture, digital media and citizen journalism shovelled online from a laptop computer somewhere in Perth’s isolated miniature urban jungle ...”

His other, newer, blog – which is about eLearning – is at:

http://tama.edublogs.org/

And it has the tagline:  “an eLearning blog with podcasting & blogospheric inclinations”.

His recent postings to this blog have covered:  Education 2.0 Wiki, Student Podcasting, Dave Winer’s Philosophy for Podcasting, Open Source: Leading the Learning Tech Race?, and Stanford on iTunes … Where Podcasting & Academia Get Together.

These all are topics in which I am interested.  Clearly, this blog is something to follow – I just subscribed to its RSS feed.

One last thought about the iGeneration course, and its emphasis on student posting to such a public environment as a blog.  When I shared the iGeneration blog with a few of my colleagues last week, Lanny Arvan, from the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois, was very concerned that individual students were identified with this course.  In an e-mail note, he wrote:

[quote]  I think here in Urbana some would find the approach in conflict with FERPA and, beyond identifying the students as a member of the particular class to the rest of the world, there is the issue that Google is the keeper of the content on Blogger.com.  One can solve the second issue by having the campus run the blog service, but then there is less of a savings over the CMS.  And one can solve both by giving students the ability to post inside the CMS or on the blog, with an opt in for the latter.  [unquote]

Lanny is worried that Google is amassing a huge amount of information about individuals and their habits, by people creating blogs on blogger.com and having Google host the blogs on blogspot.com.  Maybe he has a point – but until I see differently, I’m going to keep on creating my blogs with Blogger.com and publishing them on Blogspot.com.  However, I also note that my colleague, Michael Cheney, who is podcasting for his online class at the University of Illinois at Springfield, also advanced our discussion of the iGeneration blog when he wrote in an e-mail note [quote] And a follow up concern, for those who do not know Google saves every email message sent through gmail -- even if you delete the mail message.  The argument is that they use the info for their advertising profiles and content profiles...but at some point privacy issues will become an issue. [unquote]

I’ll leave more on Google and privacy for a future podcast – this clearly is an important topic.

To sum up today’s podcast, I’ve discussed a fascinating course from the University of Western Australia in Perth.  This course, “iGeneration: Digital Communication and Participatory Culture” was created by Mr. Tama (TAH-ma) Leaver, and taught as an honours seminar.  Much of the course interactions took place in a blog, and students learned to critique blogs and podcasts, and most importantly, they learned to create their own podcasts.  I’ll put a link in the shownotes to the site where these podcasts can be downloaded – they really are fascinating to listen to.  Mr. Leaver can be justifiably proud of what his students have accomplished.

Let me bring in a minute or so of audio from the end of a podcast created by two of the students, Liz and Hilary, because after recording this podcast, I know exactly how they feel:

[part about participatory and how hard that is to say]
Liz and Hilary
2005-10-31-1000-168414.mp3
approximately minutes 51:00 – 52:00
downloaded from:  http://ilectures.uwa.edu.au/ilectures/ilectures.lasso?ut=878

And there you have it – thanks to Liz and Hilary.  Participatory!!

I hope you have enjoyed listening to this podcast as much as I have enjoyed putting it all together.  If you have any questions, of course, please send me an e-mail note – my e-mail address is burkso2 at gmail dot com.

So that wraps up this podcast, and until next time, this is Burks, signing off.