Variety in the presentation of the basics
It's always good to have some quality variety when it comes to presenting basic information. Lectures and textbooks only go so far. Well, how about student-produced material?
James Harrison is a young man who is now a fresher at uni in Glasgow. He grew up in London and Scotland. Harrison has posted over 140 videos on YouTube, a few of them about British politics. The self-avowed Liberal Democrat is a political junkie and quite knowledgeable.
If you'd like a short, illustrated lecture titled (
British politics basics) about the main political parties in the UK, he posted one last April that might be a good introduction for your students. It comes directly from James Harrison's bedroom.
He featured Gordon Brown in
a 7-minute video update after Blair's resignation. He also did an
update in October when Campbell resigned as LibDem party leader.
His 3-minute video,
What the hell is the UK? is aimed directly at Americans who don't know the difference between England, Britain, Great Britain, the UK, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and Northern Ireland. From my experience, most American students could benefit from this little lecture.
If you like Harrison's work on British politics, last September he did
a 7-minute lecture on American politics, presumably aimed at a British audience. An American responded, "I wish more American kids knew as much as you do about American politics. Nice job!."
Labels: pedagogy podcasts, politics, UK
Podcasts
Jim Lerch who teaches at the
American School of Yaounde in Cameroon, sent the AP EDG a great suggestion about finding podcasts in
iTunes.I have suggested [
here] looking at
YouTube for video images connected to the countries you're teaching about, but I hadn't thought about looking for audio as well.
Wikipedia defines podcast as "a media file that is distributed over the Internet... for playback on mobile devices and personal computers." (As far as I know, that's a valid definition.) Note, that in spite of the name "podcast" you don't need an iPod to use these "media files." You can download them to a computer and listen to them.
iTunes is one bit of software you can use to access and playback music and podcasts. If you don't have
iTunes software, it's a free download at the
Apple Store, and it's available for PCs and Macs. I'm sure there is other software you can use, but I'm a clueless rookie on this topic. Tell us if you know more.
When you use the software and open the
iTunes online store, you'll find a catalog of available Podcasts. The News and Politics catalog at the
iTunes store includes Podcasts from a wide variety of mainstream media sources and at least two Democratic presidential candidates.
There are other sources as well.
National Public Radio has it's own catalog of podcasts, as does
CNN, the
the New York Times,
BBC News,
Yahoo!, and many more organizations. Search the Internet with your favorite search engine to find them.
Jim mentioned he'd found Podcasts of
- NPR's Fresh Air for February 1, 2007, which is "an interesting interview with Michael Specter, who just wrote an article for the New Yorker called Kremlin Inc.; Why are Vladimir Putin's Opponents Dying?"
- The Changing World from BBC and PRI has two good podcasts; both of them are in two parts. The first one is on macho men. It compares macho men in Nigeria and Mexico. It is very interesting and I think it will be of high interest to students.
- The Changing World also has a two-part podcast on Iran.
- The Economist has podcasts that are in the 5-10 minute range that cover broad issues concerning Britain, China and Mexico. For the amount of time they take in class, they are well worth the time.
- Finally, the Council on Foreign Relations has a podcast in which Senior Fellow for Middle East Studies Ray Takeyh discusses his new book, Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic.
As Jim suggested, the short, specific topic items probably have the most potential for use in class. Play a clip, discuss, ask questions. A report might be a prompt for a writing exercise.
And, all the ones I looked at (or should say listened to) are free except for some of the
Times Select items from the
New York Times.
In fact, this might suggest an alternative to the "clip an article from the newspaper and write about it for the class" assignment. What if students were assigned to find a Podcast related to each week's topics, bring it to class, play it, and then lead a discussion or answer questions about it?
Or even better, the students could produce their own podcast using audio bites from the original that they are reporting on. And, what if two groups produce podcasts on the same source? Would they represent the ideas in the original identically? Could the class analyze the differences?
Oh, the possibilities of technology. Use them.
Thanks, Jim.
Labels: pedagogy podcasts
If you'd like a short, illustrated lecture titled (British politics basics) about the main political parties in the UK, he posted one last April that might be a good introduction for your students. It comes directly from James Harrison's bedroom.
