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The good news is that a lot of people turned up to be in the Experts group the bad news was that they weren’t sure that they were Experts at all.  But one of the main points that came out of our discussion was that in order to make effective, engaging podcasts we actually had to have conversations so what I’m going to do right now rather than me just filling in and giving you a monologue, because monologues are bad, I’m going to go around and every time I encounter somebody from our group there going to tell you what the next interesting group was.  So we began by talking about where we came from, a lot of our back ground was learning technology my background was err for instance I’ve been working with media quite a lot so Graham, actually your background was similar I think?

 (Graham) Yes my background was in learning technology.  I was appointed by our Pro Vice Chancellor for Learning and Teaching to effectively pull together an institutional strategy for developing and promoting the use of podcasts in learning and teaching.

Ok, well there were several different sorts of people in our group and I know Steve, I don’t think your background is learning technology is it?

 (Steve) Err no it’s not it’s delivering music curriculum within the university.

So we had expert academics, practitioners within our group.  So how have we all arrived at this point of thinking that podcasting was relevant.  Alan, any thoughts, why is podcasting important to education FE and HE?

(Alan) Well my thoughts were because that’s what the students already expect us to be doing.  They are already familiar with this kind of technology and that we need to be using it to engage them.

Ok  so there is some recognition that are students might want this but there was also some discussion about our students not being interested at all in podcasting.  They might be wearing MP3 players but they weren’t necessarily subscribing to podcasts, so we actually spent quite a lot of time talking about subscription, you know that aspect of podcasting, and whether when we spoke about podcasting were we talking about that bit where students were subscribing to audio files and downloading it to their mobile devices so there was a bit of discussion about that and we felt, we didn’t conclude on that, but we felt that it was important for this group to be clear about what we meant by podcasting, were we talking about digital media or were we talking about the whole caboodle of students subscribing that mobility, that flexibility.  We didn’t conclude on that, but err…. what’s the next question we’ve got to answer? Ok, what issues are we facing now? Trying to think about what issues we spoke about, but essentially what we are talking about, are we talking about a niche potential here something that some people like us are going to pick up and run with or are we looking at our institutions err mainstreaming podcasting and looking at the advantages of extending that learning environment by bringing in more that text into the VLE but bringing in all this media as well.  Mmm, anything else to say on the issues that face us as ‘experts’ and the users of podcasting now, Mark?

(Mark) Well I think the issues that face us are the issues that I think were highlighted in several groups which is about change management, it’s about getting people to see that there is some benefit for them and it’s easy to look at podcasting and think in terms of “I’m going to do something audio, I can do it quickly and easily” and almost lose sight of what it’s like for the students and what is the benefit for the students.  So change management is really is one of the key features.

Yeah, we did spend a lot of time trying not to talk about cultural change and  how on earth we could start to mainstream this but it’s another of those issues that we couldn’t avoid.  Now the ‘experts’ can tell you all sorts of things but I’m going to stop there and basically invite people who weren’t in the ‘experts’ group to ask two questions of the ‘experts’ and we’ll see if we can get some answers to that.  Is there anything you would like to draw upon in terms of our experience, not that we believe we’ve actually got that much yet? What’s your burning question?  Right we’ve got a question….you know I need to fit keep fit, don’t you……

Yeah just to expand upon that theme of change management, I know you were trying to avoid talking about it but I think it’s the massive podcast in the room that we can’t avoid.  I always think that it’s something to do with mmm a creative view point of experimenting with technology that I think when staff start to get excited about this technology they go for the obvious or they go for something that they know or something that they feel safe about when actually the opportunity is wider than that and I got very excited about the last presentation where it was shown a kind of range of different ways of using them and perhaps in staff development sessions perhaps we ought to try and be much more creative in our approach as to how staff can possibly explore what’s on offer.  What’s your thoughts?

Any ‘expert’ response?  Yes Mark –

(Mark) I think one of the things that we can think about particularily  is using this as an opportunity to encourage staff to change their mode of delivery I mean they’re all called ‘lecturers’ and so inevitably they kind of tend to think about lecturing but this is an opportunity which I think we can perhaps roll together with wicki and blog technology to think about giving an opportunity for students becoming co-learners with the academics.  The academic is the expert who should scaffold the learning but lets thinks about providing an opportunity for students to actually grow the content because after all the content out there is growing at such an exponential rate how easy is it to maintain your expertise in your field?  Engage the student.  In that way they feel much more inclined and motivated to develop their learning, to do deep learning, because one of the problems, I think, we have with podcasting and granularity lets chunk it into small things is that it rather tends to mitigate against deep learning. One of the ways in which we can help to counter that is  to get them involved in creating content.

Ok.  Can we err just finish this one now I suppose we’ll be wanting to move on.  But the reason I stood up and said ‘ yeah I’m willing to do this’ is because one of the other main points, you had conversation and interaction, but the other main point is that podcasting is really accessible and it can be very engaging and I hope that this err spontaneous response from the ‘experts’ group is slightly err engaging for you.  Thank you.