Radio as an audience medium in Britain really began a century ago with the formation of the BBC in 1922, (see this Ofcom timeline for more detail).
The British Broadcasting Corporation was, of course, a state monopoly. When non-state broadcasters in the 1960s — literally known as ‘pirate radio’ — wanted to share music with an audience that wasn’t being played by the state monopoly, they had to broadcast from ships off British territorial waters. This meant that they were within wavelength reception for radio sets but were outside of British legislative reach. In the United States, there was an explosion in amateur radio in the early 20th Century up until World War I, when the United States Congress ordered all amateur radio operators to cease broadcasting. With the state holding the power to grant licences for the ability to broadcast over the radio spectrum, radio has been a professionalised and therefore restricted medium for most of its history.
The term ‘podcast’ was apparently first used in 2004 in an article in The Guardian by Ben Hammersley, who described it as ‘a new boom in amateur radio’. Up to today, that makes it roughly 20 years that podcasting has been around for as a medium for distributing audio content— long enough for the methodologies of podcasting to stabilise, mature and grow, and also for the form to reach widespread adoption and audience acceptance. Key to making this new ‘amateur radio’ format work at its inception was RSS, an Internet syndication format that audio files such as mp3s could be attached to. According to Wikipedia, the idea was first proposed in October 2000 and implemented shortly afterwards by software developer Dave Winer. Truly then, a new medium for a new century.
A few more interesting establishing facts and perspectives from the Wikipedia page on ‘podcast’ tell us that, unlike actual radio, podcasting requires very little overhead for creators to start and maintain a show beyond (ideally) a decent microphone, a computer or mobile device, software for editing, and the choosing of a hosting platform for publishing the audio files to (some of which are also free). The cost to the consumer is typically low and mostly free too, making it a ‘disruptive medium’ (even though some podcasts now carry advertising) and podcasts can also be produced at little to no cost. I’d argue that as podcasts are often listened to on headphones/earphones rather than out loud — certainly in my case, at least — they are a typically experienced as a personalised and even intimate medium, whereas radio is more commonly experienced as sound that fills a room rather sound that fills a listener’s head.
A maturing medium, then, that is easy to make, easy to consume, and which challenges many more established mediums. As of this month, there are almost 3 million podcasts on the Internet. If, at around 25,000, the US has the highest number of radio stations than any other country, I think it’s safe to conclude that there are now far more podcasts in the world than there are radio stations, even if radio is likely to still hold far greater audiences.
The graph from Google Trends above shows web searches over time since Hammersley’s coining of the term. My reading of this graph is there was a surge of interest in this new medium when it emerged. Although it dropped slightly once initial enthusiasm wore off, it remained fairly steady for around a decade. Interest in podcasting then began to rise again in the middle of the previous decade, and it has experienced its greatest interest from audiences in the past few years than at any time in its short history as a medium. I suspect that some of that would be down to large tech companies like Spotify investing a lot in podcasting, but also in the changes in peoples digital habits since the pandemic hit, which brought many people into more of a life online than they might have otherwise spent pre-Covid.
Accessing professionally-made radio programmes is dead easy for a prospective listener — they just need to have a radio and then be able to find the station they want to listen to. Getting on to professional radio to be a broadcaster, though, is very difficult. I’ve broadcast on college radio, on hospital radio and on Internet radio over the years, but have only rarely been heard on professional broadcast radio (even then, it has been as a guest or an interviewee than as a broadcaster).
Podcasting, on the other hand, is both easy to access and easy to make. Going a little deeper than the opening media history analysis, I’d posit that part of the appeal of podcasting is that it is closer to the human oral/aural communicative traditions than writing or reading are. To put that another way, reading and writing require degrees of literacy, whereas listening or speaking are much more common and accessible methods of communication.
If, then, blogging was the digital democratisation of getting writing published, then arguably podcasting was the digital democratisation of getting the spoken word heard. Although amongst those 3 million podcasts, the lack of ‘gatekeepers’ means that there will be plenty that might trouble a licence granter (eg podcasts on vaccine misinformation or far-right politics), this lack of gatekeeping is also one of the great attractions to podcasting.
Flickr was formed in 2004 and I opened my first account in 2006, making it just two years after the platform launched that I was able to publish my amateur photographs to an online audience. It was a similar story with video. YouTube was launched in 2005 and I opened my first account there in 2007, being able to publish my amateur videos a year after I became a ‘published photographer’. Blogging took slightly longer for me to adopt. The term ‘weblog’ was coined in 1997 and shortened to ‘blog’ in 1999. I started my first blog in 2006, the same year as the Flickr account, so arguably nine years from the launch of the medium before I could claim to be a ‘published’ writer on the Internet. It took me a lot longer to become a podcast listener and producer than it did with my adoption of other digital mediums, like blogging. For some reason — perhaps the consequences of information overload that comes with the abolition of the gatekeepers — it took a long time for me to click with podcasting.
Over the years, I’d had a number of academics at the place I work being curious about getting in on the podcasting game for educational purposes, so I began looking into how it was done in order to be able to advise on setting up an academic podcast. I began to dabble with it myself in 2021, starting with setting up an account on Anchor.fm to learn a bit more about the file hosting and dissemination side of things, and editing a couple of readings of my writings into podcasts. Along with two colleagues, I then launched a podcast about hybrid teaching in higher education at an online conference, that same summer.
In 2022, I really embraced podcasts. From a production perspective, my podcasting work is mostly all to do with higher education (HE). What I listen to, however, is much broader than that. This post covers five ways in which podcasts and podcasting featured in my 2022.
tldr — here are ten things I’ve learned in 2022 from immersing myself in podcasting, with links to those I’ve been involved with after the list:
- Learn your craft by listening to other podcasts
- Picking a good name can be important
- Find your niche — there are a lot of other podcasts already out there
- Keeping the momentum of a publishing schedule can be quite demanding
- Have a good mic and choose the right hosting platform for you
- A formula is useful, but be prepared to shake it up too, such as by varying the presenter or the length of the episodes
- Academic uses for podcasting include as alternative research methodology or as something different to traditional lectures
- When conducting interviews, find interesting guests that have something to say (sounds obvious, but…)
- Where possible, give your interviewees plenty of notice of the questions you plan to ask them, to better help them prepare what they want to say, and have a good common question to ask each guest
- Podcasting can be a great method of storytelling
Teaching Here And There
Former colleague Dr Ivan Sikora and myself spent a chunk of 2021 writing up our pre-pandemic experiences of working on a series of experimental classes at City University. We brought a guest speaker from New Zealand into his undergraduate aviation seminars in London, blended in-person and online in real time, and called the resulting paper ‘Blended Learning to Fly’. Current colleague James Rutherford had started work on a project at our institution to build a series of hybrid learning spaces, in order to facilitate online students being able to join in-person classes in real time, remotely. Between the three of us, we realised that a lot of other people in the sector were beginning to grapple with the prospect of hybrid teaching as universities emerged (and in some cases re-entered) various stages of lockdown and university could no longer be just about being in the same physical space at the same time. So, we decided to launch a podcast that explored emerging practices in hybrid teaching in higher education.
Partly inspired by a paper from Zydney et al (2018) called ‘Here or There Instruction’, the podcast was titled ‘Teaching Here And There’, which also coincidentally abbreviated as ‘THAT podcast’. Picking the right name is tricky for a podcast. A good name can be one that people will easily find as a search term. However, with 3 million of them out there, there’s always a change that someone else will have already picked the name you want to go for. So, naming your podcast is an important early step.
I had a number of motivations for getting this going from my end, aside from the subject matter itself. One was to learn about more about podcasting by doing it. Another was to explore podcasting as a research methodology, having been inspired by the Cambridge Quaranchats podcast. A third motivation was to become a little more experienced in co-authoring (whatever the medium). Primarily though, it has been an opportunity to tap in to what people were saying and experiencing around hybrid teaching in HE. From my investigations, I couldn’t find much else catering for that particular topic and that particular point in time. Finding your niche is, I think, another key to a successful podcast.
We launched THAT podcast at the APT 2021 conference with a pilot episode. 2022 saw 12 full episodes, a wide variety of guests and plenty of different angles on the topic of hybrid teaching in HE. This ranged from arts contexts, communities of practice, and environmental psychology to perspectives that brought in American and European universities as well as students and IT staff. We even managed to fit in a discussion with Dr Brian Beatty, who coined the term ‘HyFlex’ (meaning hybrid in mode and flexible for students to choose which mode) in 2006.
We have chalked up over 1,600 listens to date and I’ve received a variety of positive comments from listeners. Whatever my motivations for having started a podcast, knowing that you have an appreciate listenership is gratifying. Meeting and maintaining a publishing schedule can be challenging to keep momentum, but a podcast is made to be listened to, so it’s always good to know that it is.
In 2023, the three of us will be looking to turn the results of the podcast into a paper. Who knows where that’ll take THAT podcast?
A Turn on the Research Beat
Over our heat record-breaking summer, I was delighted to get an opportunity to rack up my first guest appearance in somebody else’s podcast, with a turn on The Research Beat. This podcast is produced by the team behind the audio-based start-up Audemic, a tool for accessing academic research via audio. In a wide-ranging conversation with host Jordan Kruszynski, we talked about how digital technologies are changing HE and what the future might hold in this space.
We started by discussing the role of the educational technologist and some of the specific challenges that educational technologists can face. I recounted some of the steps I took along the way to find myself where I am now, and then took a deeper dive into what I saw as the state of play of things at the moment. We took a look at disruptions to the traditional model of HE and how the lockdown phases of the pandemic had impacted on universities and their ability to deliver ‘business as usual’ education.
Being a research-focused podcast, I was asked about how I use research in my work. This was an opportunity to think about both research inputs — how other people’s research informs what I do — and outputs — how I utilise research methods to understand and communicate the impact of the work I do or am involved in. There was a touch of imposter syndrome here, as I’m not an actual researcher in the traditional sense and this was a podcast with a lot of conversations with people who actually are. However, I work in a research-focused environment, it’s an undeniable feature to my work, and the podcast didn’t seem to mind me not having a doctorate!
Looking more towards the future, we discussed the current tensions in HE between making better use of educational technology at scale, given the large scale adoptions of ed tech during the lockdowns, and how this compared with the understandable desires of institutions, staff and students to ‘go back to normal’. Forecasting is always a difficult game to get into, so I talked a little bit about what my hopes and expectations were, including around smarter uses of campus environments, better application of blended learning approaches and effective use of hybrid teaching where it is appropriate to do so.
I was also asked to offer some advice to students for handling the big changes in education that were going on around them. To the extent that I’m able to provide students with any useful advice, I recommended for them to ask if they don’t know and offer help if they do, in the recognition that that this period in HE is one of great change. I also suggested that no-one has all the answers at this stage (if indeed anyone ever does) and that I would encourage them to become critical users of digital technology in their lives. This is not to suggest that all digital technology is bad and should therefore be avoided, but that students should ask serious questions of the tools that they use in their education as well as take advantage of the benefits that they can bring.
I’ve been a panel speaker at conferences and events before, but this was probably the first time that I’ve been looked towards for domain expertise and been given the space for a full interview to explore the ideas within. In another tip for good podcasting, it was very useful that the team behind The Research Beat gave me sight of the questions that Jordan was going to ask me with plenty of notice. This gave me plenty of time to prepare and make sure I could get the points across that I wanted to.
The Internet and Higher Education
2022 saw not just one guest appearance on someone else’s podcast, but two. Puiyin Wong works at the intersection between learning technology and arts education in HE, and hosts the podcast ‘My Liminal Pod’. She invited me to join some of the high quality company she’d already kept and be a guest too.
Excitingly, although the topic of the conversation was inevitably going to be around digital technologies and higher education, she invited me to talk about anything I wanted to talk about and wasn’t that bothered if the discussion strayed into different areas along the way. This meant for much more of a free form discussion than the formal interview of The Research Beat and I think lead to a very different quality of listening product.
For my appearance on My Liminal Pod, I decided to bring together a collection of ideas that I’ve had going around my head for a while and used it to see if I could put them together in a coherent whole. I joked a little that this would be a topic I’d probably look to do a PhD on if I ever got round to it. No idea if I ever will, but it’s nice to imagine that one could be a possibility one day!
I opened our discussion with an assertion — that HE doesn't make effective enough use of the Internet. This might come as a bit of a surprise, given that global HE was effectively saved from even temporary cessation when pandemic lockdowns across the world forced most universities to move their educational activities online in 2020/2021. The key there though, I think, is ‘effective enough’. Emergency remote teaching is one thing. Higher education truly designed for the Internet Age is another thing altogether.
In Part One, I set the scene for my assertion. We opened with a discussion of Morton’s notion of hyperobjects (2010) and how the Internet was one. We explored the idea of a layers model for understanding the Internet, a framework I looked as as part of my Masters dissertation. We also covered the concept of ‘affordances’ (best known via the work of Don Norman) and how the disruption paradigm is often invoked when talking about the Internet.
Part Two’s themes included the Digital Age or Network Society and the role that higher education plays within that, the current ‘tech stack’ utilised within HE and the risks of not ‘building back better’ after the disruption of the pandemic. Peter Bryant’s blog post on ‘The Snapback’ (2021; which, ironically, also makes reference to liminality and affordances) is a useful reference for the latter point. We wrapped up the discussion with some examples from my own work at City, including the another look at the idea of the intelligent campus.
Puiyin was a great host, as her conversations with her other guests make clear. Useful podcasting tip from her then (humbly thinking of her other guests rather than yours truly) — find interesting people with something to say and then give them space to talk about it makes for worthwhile listening material.
Podcasting, Not Lecturing
My main driver for engaging with podcasting was that I was finding an increasing number of academics coming to me to talk about the possibilities of using them for educational purposes. I typically tell them that there are three main parts or stages to launching a podcast:
- Recording
- Hosting
- Syndication
Obviously, you have to start with an idea too, but these three stages assume you have the idea and maybe the voices in the bag already.
The recording stage is pretty straightforward, although there are different levels of engaging with it. Essentially, this is where equipment (a decent mic, good headphones, a computer) comes in as well as the software for editing the podcast. On one hand, there’s an investment question here for those that don’t have these things, or at least access to facilities that contain them. On the other hand, this stage can also all be handled easily with a smartphone. It all depends on the audio quality you want.
The syndication stage is pretty straightforward too. It requires an RSS feed (essentially, a custom URL) and then the ‘seeding’ of that feed on various podcasting platforms, such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, etc. There are various tools and services out on the Web too that find podcast RSS feeds and add them to other directories too, so it’s not always a manual process.
The tricky part, I’ve found, is hosting. This is essentially somewhere on the Internet to store your audio files so that the RSS feed has somewhere to draw from when you update with a new episode. It’s not tricky in that it’s difficult to find a host, as there are hundreds of websites where you can store audio files and use that for generating RSS feeds from. It’s tricky in that this is where you might incur fees. Not an unreasonable question to have to answer, but a gate of sorts, at least, in a medium with so few others. For Teaching Here And There, we use Anchor.fm, which is Spotify’s free podcasting platform. I wanted to learn about the medium first before I was prepared to invest in it, and so a free host was a good way of doing that. As with anything on the Internet, however, free tends to come with trade-offs.
One of the groups of academics that I’ve spoken to about podcasting ended up using them as an alternative to lectures. I was delighted to see the diversity that this offered in educational resources for students and fascinated to see how Drs Adrienne Yong and Sabrina Germaine of the City Law School (CLS) wove podcasting into their pedagogy. They used SoundCloud as a hosting platform, which has a richer web interface than Anchor.fm does.
One of the interesting things for me about the CLS Law & Society podcast was the idea of podcasting as an open educational practice. Under the lecturing model, in order to be able to listen and learn from an academic expert about a particular subject, a student will usually need to be enrolled onto a particular programme at a particular institution, have chosen and enrolled onto that specific module where the subject is taught, and turn up to the right lecture theatre at the right time. These are just the pre-conditions before a student can do the learning tasks of listening, taking notes or discussing with others. With a public-facing podcast, all those pre-conditions are gone, and anyone can learn from those subject experts as long as they have access to the Internet and the means of playing audio. This fundamentally rethinks the lecture model.
The pedagogical approach of the lecturer speaking from the elevated podium of a closed lecture theatre is often referred to as a ‘sage on the stage’. Proponents of active learning will look to subvert this paradigm by encouraging the lecturer off the stage and to move amongst their students, in an attempt to facilitate learning (rather than just ‘teach students’). The lecturer in this approach is referred to as the ‘guide on the side’. James Rutherford, my co-host of THAT podcast, has offered another variation on these educator metaphors in his work on designing active learning spaces, where the teaching station is placed in the middle of the room rather than at one end and the students surround the teacher in an equidistant manner. For this approach, James talks of the ‘mentor in the centre’.
I was struck by how different the Law & Society Podcast sounded from a classic lecture, which nevertheless remains the dominant paradigm in undergraduate legal education. Adrienne and Sabrina’s discussions with each other and their guests had a warmth to them that not only came across from the rapport that was evident from listening to two close colleagues in conversation with each other about a familiar topic, but also in the literal distance from speaker to listener. As I listened to their podcast lectures via AirPods literally placed within my ears as opposed to hearing them from a seat I’d been able to find somewhere in a lecture theatre, another educator metaphor occurred to me. We can refer to the podcasting lecturer as a ‘peer in the ear’. In similar ways to ‘guide on the side’ and ‘mentor in the centre’, this challenges educational power dynamics and makes them more learner-centred. It also helps us to think about podcasting as an educational methodology.
After their first module series had run its course, I interviewed Adrienne and Sabrina about their thoughts on the experience. You can read the resulting interview on the Learning at City blog — big thanks to them both for sharing their experiences.
Pods for listening
In the same way that the more that you read, the better writer you can become, in order to become a good podcaster, it’s helpful to listen to a lot of other podcasts. To round off this post (which has become far longer than I anticipated it to become), here are some pointers towards a handful of the other podcasts that I listened to during 2022. Overall, a mixture of climate, politics, history, technology, education and music.
I’ve been thinking about climate change a lot during 2022. Two of the podcasts that I have learned from and which have shaped my understandings of things are ‘Outrage + Optimism’ and ‘How to Save a Planet’. The former is co-hosted by Christiana Figueres, one of the architects of the 2015 Paris Accords, and includes a glittering array of the best guest speakers in the climate space. The latter, which seems to have stopped publishing in October, was a ‘Spotify exclusive’ (in that it wasn’t available on any other platforms, thus adding a gatekeeper into the world of podcasting) and focused on practical solutions to the problems caused by climate change rather than doomerist thinking.
Politics-wise, I’m a regular listener of ‘Oh God, What Now?’ (formerly ‘Remainiacs’), a couple of Guardian ones (‘Politics Weekly UK’ and ‘Today in Focus’). I also occasionally dip in to ‘Doomsday Watch’, dark as that one is. On the history front, I’ve found ‘Human Resources’, about Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, and ‘Empire’, so far about the British in India, to be immensely educational. ‘The Rest Is History’ is another good one I’d add to that list. ‘Intelligence Squared’ is a debate and discussion podcast about big topics, and ‘Tech Won’t Save Us’ gives a critical perspective on the tech industry, while ‘Internet of Humans’ kind of looks at both sides of the Internet, again with great guest speakers.
More irreverently, ‘The Trawl’ is almost pub talk — two very funny women scrolling through Twitter and taking the piss of what they find, with a decidedly left-wing slant and a horror about the current state of UK politics. ‘Pedagodzilla’ takes me somewhat back into my professional sphere where pedagogic theory, research and practice get refracted through a pop culture lens, and even features my former ‘A’ Level Media Studies from the early 90s as one of the hosts! ‘Off The Record: David Bowie’ is a podcast biography of one of my favourite musicians, peppered with interviews with some of the real-life characters that featured in his story.
What have I picked up about the craft from my listenings?
From ‘Outrage + Optimism’, I got a question we often asked guests on THAT podcast (‘On a spectrum between X and Y, where would you place yourself?’) and the realisation that although many podcasters attempt to keep within shorter radio-style lengths for their shows, the fact that they are masters of their own publishing rules and often just a bunch of people engaged in a conversation that they find interesting, episodes can wildly vary in length and over end up longer than intended. They usually end an episode with a piece of original music that is related to climate change. I had high hopes for the idea of getting musicians in different places to collaborate in real time and play the results on the end of THAT podcast too, but that was rather too bold an intention. From ‘Oh God, What Now?’, I realised that it’s OK to rotate the cast list of a podcast, even the presenters. Several podcasts have a single common question that gets asked across episodes — ‘Internet of Humans’ asks ‘what is your favourite Internet human story?’ whereas ‘Off The Record’ asks all of the guests if they have a particular standout memory from their time with Bowie.
2022 then was the year that I really became a podcaster. As for 2023, I have an article about THAT podcast pending for Media & Learning as well as a workshop with them later this month, and a webinar about the subject at the University of Manchester to look forward to, at some point. We’ll hopefully turn the main findings from THAT into a paper this year too, no doubt with more episodes to come. I enjoyed guesting on the two that I guested on, so am definitely open to more of that. And undoubtedly, I’ll be continuing to listen to plenty more too.
Now, where did I put those AirPods?
