Podcasts: are they really necessary?

At the time of this writing, I'm 30 years old. As a result, there are a variety of technologies that simply do not interest me. Some of these, such as Twitter or Instagram, are things that not only disinterest me, but actively annoy me. Whether I'm wise beyond my years or becoming a grumpy old man at the early stages of a technological disconnect is immaterial and irrelevant; the point here, as I've briefly discussed in my past blogs, is to filter through the unnecessarily large pile of technology and hope to pull something genuinely useful. To that end, today I ask: are podcasts useful?

To be fair, I've listened to podcasts. NPR, for instance, is a popular one that I think delivers meaningful content. However, I consider this to be the outlier, or the anomaly. Even in cases where I actually enjoy the content of the podcast as well as the author, I find myself annoyed by it. For example, Neil DeGrasse Tyson has a podcast called StarTalk. I thoroughly enjoy watching videos of some of his interviews on Youtube, and yet, when I get to hear him talk live, I can't stand it. I get annoyed by the time wasted by jokes, ads, music, and whatever else enters a podcast. It's not efficient. It takes far too long to listen to an entire podcast and hope that it's filled with something interesting.

StarTalk would be great if you could filter out all the irrelevant rambling.

I think this speaks to an interesting dynamic of consuming information on the internet: we're used to getting highlights of articles rapidly, or summaries instantly. In the 'tl;dr' generation (too long; didn't read), it's imperative for us to be able to get information as efficiently as possible. In fact, there are probably readers of this right now who are scanning this a bit too quickly hoping that I get to my point. For those people, here it is: podcasts, while technically a newer technology, are outdated when it comes to the evolution of our attention spans. If, instead of writing this blog, I were to record five minutes of my voice, you would - almost by nature - fast forward until I starting saying something interesting. Every second counts, and in the fast-paced world, podcasts aren't conducive to gathering information as quickly as possible.

The internet world consists of summaries of summaries. Meta-summaries, if you will.

To be clear, this doesn't mean that podcasts aren't without their benefits. For instance, in the short podcast I did on podbean, I uploaded a short video of a quick scan around the room. If I wanted to, I could show my friends how the room looks and start a conversation about how few people are in my class. Another potential use could be to verbally or visually post important class instruction for groups of students with reading disabilities. The applications for podcasts exist, though at least in my mind, they appear to be selective for specific purposes.

Podcasts also have limitations that, at the time of this writing, seem to negatively impact usability for teachers and students alike. With the online tool we used in class, Podbean, there was a 50mb total size limit, which can all too easily and quickly be reached. Further, there is a maximum upload size of 28mb per file. Considering that audio-only files can be nearly 100mb alone, and that video files can range from hundreds of MB to over 1gb, this limitation makes podbean unusable. When it comes to uploading media, there should not be such a harsh limit on file sizes - I wasn't even able to upload a 30-second clip of the classroom video, and had to redo it so that it only took 10 seconds.

In summary, while podcasts seem to have limited and specific points where they could be useful, there are too many technical limitations that prohibit them from being useful as intended unless a lot of money is spent for upgraded storage space. However, even if this was solved, the problem of being able to filter information efficiently still exists, making podcasts inefficient if you're looking to quickly gather information on a topic. If these issues were fixed, I think podcasts could be a very powerful tool; until then, however, podcasts are more of a burden to those using it than something that truly contributes to learning.

Becoming the content author rather than remaining a consumer

Blogging is something I've always considered to be a passive way to consume information of some kind. I've never cared to actively engage myself in someone else's blog by commenting on it, though I would sometimes skim the comments after a particularly interesting blog article to see others' opinions on the material. I could speculate that this is somehow my introverted nature manifesting itself into an internet-based version of introversion, but that might be better discussed at a different time. When it comes to passively consuming information, I think blogging is a good way to get news and share information from non-mainstream sources, many of which might be working under certain biases.

Did someone mention biased mainstream news sources?

After writing my initial blog, I realized that it didn't feel all too different from writing a long post on Facebook. If it's a topic that I'm particularly interested in, I have no problem writing multiple pages of content to address it with sufficient depth. The idea that my thoughts or opinions could be shared to the world with enough publicity is interesting, though it's also something that I think I would avoid. Ultimately, I don't care to have random people on the internet get to know my thoughts and opinions about things, so I think maintaining a blog would create an added layer of complexity to my already-sufficiently-complex life. And, again, with whatever introverted predisposition I'm working under, I could do without the added attention. I prefer the 'lone house on an island' environment.

Because f*** people, that's why.

If I were in the position to teach, I can't necessarily say that I would use a blog. Even though I can customize the content to be somewhat interactive with videos or podcasts, the experience still feels too descriptive; the same effect could be had using other in-class means. To be fair, I do like what blogging offers in terms of flexibility and utility, but I struggle in coming up with a way that would genuinely make some facet of education improved by its use. To that end, the blogging experience seems to me like an awkward puzzle piece: it doesn't quite fit perfectly anywhere, and attempting to jam it in place might make the overall image unclear. I think having utilized the class wiki was good and useful, but that's probably due to the wiki being so flexible in allowing several people to come in and edit as necessary. The differences between blogs and wikis are small at first glance, but their usefulness becomes apparent after a bit of use. This video further goes into detail on the differences between wikis and blogs in the classroom:

Overall, while I'm hesitant to suggest that blogging is necessary as an educational tool, I do concede its benefits outside of the scope of education. As a way to share your bigger and brighter ideas with the world, it works wonderfully - and as I understand, if your ideas generate enough traffic, you could also be paid relatively well through advertisements. However, I think some words of caution apply regardless of whether a blog is utilized for education or not. Perhaps the most prominent thing to understand is that it's important to be mindful of the fact that you're representing yourself to the internet, where current colleagues and potential employers can easily view your content. It may seem like a headache to consider the perspectives of everyone you know if they were to read your blog, but I think that being a little careful at first will save a much bigger headache later. You'll note that in this blog post in particular, I've chosen to break this rule on purpose twice to bring home this point: I may have friends who don't appreciate my snarky comment about Fox News, and I may have future employers who wonder "if his 'lone house' caption borders on using offensive words in his own blog which represents himself, how might he represent this company?" It's a valid question to ask, and something you should consider before someone else does.

Educational Technology - A Reflection

Deciding what kind of technology to use within education, whether it's applied directly in the classroom or in developing curriculum, can be a daunting task. This has been particularly evident in my Educational Technology course, in which we briefly cover some technologies that can be utilized in education. It quickly became apparent that what we were learning was just the tip of the iceberg; depending on how one defines 'educational technology' (a nebulous term, a point emphasized on day one), educational technology could entail hundreds of thousands of things, and that's a conservative estimate. The only possible contribution I can hope to make when it comes to teaching others about educational technology is how to search for it. Since it comes in so many different ways, it's important to learn how to filter what's important.

We often do this when we shop online. If I want to browse games on Amazon, I can do this in a number of ways: filter the category to 'Video Games,' filter the console of my choice (usually Playstation 3 or Playstation 4), filter by new or used, filter by the average user ratings of the game, and I can even go into minor details, such as filtering by a specific game developer. The power of filters when searching for things can be incredible in its impact on efficiency, yet it's something I see under-utilized time and time again.

Turning over 32,000 video game results into 56 results with the above filters on Amazon.com

These same filter principles apply to educational technology just as much as they do to video games, cars, microwaves, restaurants, or anything else one might be inclined to search for. While it's always a best practice to search for things that have a perfect 5-star rating, keep in mind how many people rated it. If the website you're using gives you the choice, it's best to filter by 1. average user rating and 2. number of ratings. Personally, I'd rather go for the 4.5-star item on Amazon that has 3,400 reviews than a 5-star item with only three reviews, but it ultimately comes down to what you're most comfortable with. The important thing is that you know how to turn a massive amount of data into something more manageable, and once that's achieved, you can then exhibit freedom in arbitrary and subjective decisions of how the data is interpreted. With some luck, you'll soon be able to quickly search for the best of a certain type of educational technology while comparing it with others.