Since my previous post on this subject, there's been a lot of talk about audio feedback at Alt-C (the Association of Learning Technology Conference): at least two papers on it and mentions in many more.
Much of the talk has been wildly enthusiastic, but as Isobel Falconer observed to me, most of the examples presented of good audio feedback were just examples of good feedback pure and simple, which would have been good even if they were given in print. People found it hard to distinguish the benefits which were due to the audio medium and the benefits which were simply due to giving better feedback. For example, in one workshop, we were invited to compare a piece of written feedback which was impersonal, brief and bueaucratic, written to a form template, with a piece of audio feedback which was warm and personal, supportive and encouraging, with suggestions for how to improve. Not exactly comparing like with like.
The Open University since its foundation has made it its business to provide its students with personal, supportive and extended feedback; in fact, it is is this, rather than its TV programmes or even its printed course materials to which its success is chiefly attributable. So what WE want to know is whether there is anything additional which the audio medium adds.
From the sessions I attended - together with the much more sophisticated research paper also presented at Alt-C by Sue Rodway-Dyer et al - here are some of the potential advantages.
It may make it easier for tutors to give better feedback, for example:
- they are less likely to slip into academic language
- it may be easier for non-native speakers of English, the medium being more tolerant of verbal idiosyncracies
- by making their feedback more of an object, from which they can stand back and experience it as students will, it prompts tutors to be more critical.
It may be easier for students to make good use of feedback, for example:
- they may find it easier to take in, if their literacy is poor
- it forces them to pay attention, because it can't be skimmed over the way written feedback can (we know this is a problem) - in fact, students apparently often listen to audio feedback two or three times and sometimes make notes
- BUT where their assignments are long and discursive, it can be harder for them to locate the particular places being referred to in the feedback.
Some lecturers are reporting that audio feedback has encouraged dialogue between students and tutors, and between students themselves. Others have reported additional benefits if students themselves start to submit assignments in audio form also - for example, health studies students started to become more critical of how they related to their clients.
Having just heard Mike Wesch's keynote address on how media are not just tools but mediate relationships, it occured to me that this may be a case where a change in medium opens the possibility, at least of a change to the relationship: making it more personal, more aware, and more critical.
Alt-C had an inspiring conference keynote address yesterday from Michael Wesch, including extracts from his three excellent videos, all available on YouTube: The Machine is Us/ing Us, A Vision of Students Today, and An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube - the last two of which were the results of class projects. How cool must it be to study with him!
The keynote was pretty good too. I loved the idea of starting a conference about educational technology - in which every other person in the room had a netbook open and was madly blogging or tweeting - with an anthropologist talking about his fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, where there was not only no wi-fi or broadband, but no electricity or running water, and the people don't have fixed personal names (making census-taking - which is what Wesch was there to observe - highly problematic, until they invented the concept of the "census name").
His basic message - that media are not just tools but mediate relationships, so that when you change the medium you change the relationship, creating new ways of relating to others and knowing ourselves - was especially welcome to me, since I've been contending for a long time that we need to stop thinking of educational technology in the IT terms of information transfer or the liberal individualist terms of choice and consumption, and more in terms of the network of relationships in which all these activities happen.
Last week, a colleague urgently needed training in Elluminate (a synchronous audiographic conferencing tool) in order to support a live Elluminate session. I arranged for us to meet to set up a live online session together, working on separate machines in adjacent rooms, and on the advice of our local Elluminate "champion" urged her first to read the basic introductory guide so that she would "get the most out of the session", as we learning designers say. I also suggested that she prepare by going into the Elluminate "room" on her own, so that she could practice finding and using all the tools and buttons, even if there was nobody there to talk to.
As things turned out, she wasn't able to do any of the preparation - and I wonder if in fact this wasn't for the best. She was a very unconfident explorer of new software, despite being an experienced computer user, and perhaps the most useful thing I was able to do for her was to sit by her and take her on a tour of Elluminate - which I could do quite briefly, because I could say "and you can follow that up later in the documentation which I sent you".
Many computer users are confident enough within their regular everyday comfort zone but are paralysed when attempting to move outside it for fear of something going wrong which they can't repair. It's mistakes and difficulties which IT training never seems to address (unless it's following John Carroll's "minimalist" approach): trainers only tell you the procedure to follow, not how to recover when things go wrong. For many users, our standard "read first, experience afterwards" will be fine, but for such unconfident users it may be the company of a person (or the support of a personal relationship) which they need first to take them over the threshold. Then, once they have the experience and the confidence, they can explore and read on their own.
