From dull work in locked drawers to enthusiastic open knowledge: rethinking essays as podcasts
Abstract: Students from Gen Z have grown up in a digital environment that enables them to publish and communicate aspects of themselves publicly. They are geared to public discourse even though that discourse may contain more noise than signal. We have found that this has led many of our students to resent "classroom activities" that produce essays or papers that get marked and then filed or thrown away. We therefore began an experiment with an elective course that previously took the form of a book exam, in which students read a text and then produce an analysis or reflection on it. We reconfigured it as a podcast production course, in which students produced a podcast reflecting upon a book they had read. This posed many problems, beginning with: how long is a podcast? To answer this we borrowed the mechanics of pecha kucha and expanded them into a production method, which started with reading and research and finished with a 6m 40s movie. These are made available on the university intranet, with the best being readied for a regular release schedule on a Youtube channel. This paper will demonstrate the methodology from conceptual instructions to practical scripting techniques. It will examine the production process and offer links to our online tutorials. It will argue for this as an example of real-life learning in a digital landscape in which students make incremental contributions to open knowledge, instead of turning out essays that achieve no life of their own.
Presider: Stefanie Panke, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill