On Podcasting

One of my recent experiments in binary invention has been the development of a podcast with my colleague, Joel Jonientz. Like most of Joel’s ideas, the podcast began with a simple premise: “Let’s talk about interesting topics.” Obviously, that wouldn’t help us stand out in the podcasting marketplace and it wouldn’t do much to provide an editorial voice to the end-product. But Joel’s motivations were instructive: he thinks academics are most interesting when the talk about things beyond their academic interests. For academics, that probably sounds flattering. For non-academics, it’s probably evidence of the suspected egotism of the academy.

All that said, we call our podcast Professor Footnote and the more we’ve thought about it, talked about, and explained it to colleagues (or had it explained to us), the podcast presents some interesting scholarly possibilities.

1     It trains us in a new practical pedagogical mode

      It traffics in the politics of discussion

3    It remediates scholarly work

More after the jump

Podcasting as a Practical Pedagogical Mode

One of the reasons I was interested in podcasting was it represented a way to package lessons about the rhetorical tradition with a contemporary skill-set. Undergraduate students no longer experience the liberal arts as the arts one is free to develop; instead students come to us expecting the arts of liberal everyday life.  Compounding the problem, for the realm of rhetorical studies, is that while rhetorical practice remains politically and economically practical, it is viewed as a so-called soft-skill. Pairing rhetorical practice with podcasting allows me to solve these problems by teaching the technological form of the podcast (a perceived hard skill) with the content generating possibilities of rhetoric, such that students come away with a resource for civic living, but they experience that resource as secondary to the technical proficiency of planning, producing and distributing a digital artifact.

While I think this is a valuable application of podcasting, it doesn’t really require me producing my own podcast and it only justifies my podcasting practices as a kind of instructional development. Much as I think podcasting offers students a simultaneous technological and intellectual education, I think podcasting represents more than a technology of instruction.

Podcasting and the Politics of Discussion

One of the things we say in our podcast’s intro is “we won’t be the first to talk about it, and we won’t be the last.” This line is borrowed from William Keith, author of Democracy as Discussion. Keith’s a formative figure in rhetorical studies, particularly as a scholar of the history of speech education. One of the virtues of Professor Footnote is that it leverages the research skills and modes of inquiry of the academy to broaden a potentially public discussion of a chosen topic. The process of footnoting functions as a way of sharpening the discussion (I once explained the podcast as a corrective to the “I read somewhere…” mode of discussion) and as pointing listeners to an array of resources about the topic. By integrating the podcast with a bibliographic, hyperlinked website, we’re making an effort at convergence.

Again, I’m reluctant to color the podcast as a technological practice (convergence) only. The podcast, in general, also serves as a device for connecting the work of the university to the communities that (theoretically) support it. Professor Footnote, in particular, expands this connection by creating conversational nodes for those communities and also by performing a particular style of discussion: one that is well resourced, not afraid to note its mistakes (on two occasions, in three podcasts, I’ve had to take the starch out of my own shirt, either in the cast or via the website, to correct things I’ve gotten wrong), and that—most importantly—values a broad knowledge base and intellectual dexterity. But even this work of the podcast seems limiting: is it merely a community service?

Remediating Scholarly Work

Professor Footnote is produced in the lab of the Working Group in Digital and New Media at the University of North Dakota. One of the nice things about the Working Group is that it serves as a collaborative hub for projects working in or around digital technologies. One of those projects is a nascent digital press. While talking at the working group open house, the professors Footnote and the digital press professor got to thinking about the ways in which an annotated podcast functions like academic work. We release our podcasts in quarterly batches (to encourage binge listening and because it gives us more time to consider themes and produce the casts). We cover a range of literature to produce a final project. We have footnotes.

What if, the conversation went, we released the podcasts under the digital press imprint? I’m not arguing that my podcasts are as novel as my scholarship in rhetorical studies. But I do utilize the same set of skills to produce the product, which bears a resemblance to a scholarly article. Obviously, it isn’t peer-reviewed the way an article is, but it is reviewed. Our podcast on Christmas and Consumerism was selected as the bestChristmas podcast by Stitcher. We open ourselves up to critique by way of the website and social-media. I’ve often heard academic bloggers explain blogging as a precursor to, but not substitute for, academic writing. I don’t think the podcast is an alternative to traditional academic publishing, but surely it’s more than a precursor, an off-the-books kind of labor.

Obviously, the above account of Professor Footnote is shaped by the three pillars of academic tenure: teaching, service and research. The particular case of Professor Footnote and perhaps the general case of podcasting demonstrate an attention to each category of academic work while not squarely falling in any one. Such is the hazard of experimenting in the new mediation of scholarship (both as an object of practice, a set of conceptual commitments, and a reflexive mode of inquiry).