Here is another one of those small winding internet trails I found myself on without anticipating of it. Back of the mind, this leads me to wonder about highly structured learning __________ systems, where everything is precisely detailed and specified, and leaves no room for wandering off trail.
But that’s another post. Or not.
This is about podcasts, listening lists of them.
I think it was Dean Shareski who tweet asked about what education podcasts people listen to. Jim Stauffer listed two of my usual suspects, feeds in my player.
Thinking that a lot of people will give similar lists, I decided to toss a conversation bomb, given than I just blogged something about often getting ideas about education that was not specifically Educators Sitting Around Talking About Education.
And this is where I find that you get something bby at least being in the flow and adding something to the mix. Bonni Stachowiak, who prolifically produces the mentioned Teaching in Higher Education podcasted, came in with a reply with both a valuable suggestion but even more.
No, I had never heard of Scene on Radio… but now I have, and subscribed. Here is also a reason I love the Overcast app, besides the lack of me cussing about getting Apple’s own app set up, is that I can tell it to give me episodes from oldest first, so I can listen from Season 1 on.
This is all stuff I could have just tweeted, but then again, I have a blog, and I can let my mind wander.
I had always admired or been overwhelmed the massive podcast lists blogged by my friend Bryan Alexander, like his 2021 list (he even used one of my photos). So I was glad that Bonni referenced Bryan’s habit in her own shared list of favorites for 2021 (having done something like his back to 2014), I counted 48 shows! And she even bravely tried to winnow them down to a top 10.
Whew!
That as a habit has immense value more than the sharing of the listens, it creates your own arc of listening over time.
I can also not help to wonder how they listen so much! But that is the beauty of this media form, it being really the only one I know of that you can partake of with attention, while doing something else.
Myself, I only listen while driving to town and back on errands, and of course if I am driving with Cori, we are talking to each other. Having moved closer to town in February, this is maybe 25 minutes each direction. I really do not find I listen at home. If I am outside working on things, I prefer focusing on them, or enjoying the scenery (a perk of not living in an urban/suburban setting!).
All of which boils down to me having maybe 10 shows in the podcast player, not at all a giant list I am going to brag about. And this does include Bonni’s Teaching in Higher Education, Terry Greene’s Gettin’ Air (cause Terry is a friend), plus the Check the OL one Terry does with Anne-Marie Scott, and I have Tim Carson’s Praxis Pedagogy because… well heck, Tim had me on the show once.
I guess that makes it 40% education topics.
The rest are more of the type I like because they are about other things, yet I invariably find something of interest, or something that kindles an interest. A few are just the ones I started using as examples when teaching audio production and digital storytelling. These include:
- This American Life (TAL) is the big daddy, the show that always establishes and hones the storytelling format. If I had only one to listen to, this would be it. And for bonus, I went to the same high school in Baltimore that Ira Glass attended (I was a bit later, so he never pushed me around in the hallway).
- 99% Invisible is close in style but nearly always grabs me with interest with topics I never considered, and about the world around us. For just a few recent gems, the Pink Margarine episode (I never knew there were butter historians) or the Lows of High Tech, a look at the design of artificial limbs. These shows, like TAL always start rooted in someone’s personal experience.
- Radiolab – Another go to when I taught audio, for Jad Abumrad’s classic on how radio creates empathy. Their rapid audio style zips by before you stop to wonder how the heck they do something so rapid paced and multileveled. Along with TAL and The Truth (below) this was one of the three shows I suggested as listening exercises to understand the radio drama form in DS106 (still there in the open course version I last touched in maybe 2014). I used a cut from a show on Detective Stories to post in SoundCloud (likely a copyright no no) with comments attached to specific parts demonstrating an audio technique. I had dropped this from the player a while ago, so I look forward to catching up.
- The Truth – “movies for your ears” is maybe atop any list I would create because they are dark Twilight Zone style shows with unexpected twists that just exhibit good writing and sound production. It was Zoe Butterfly that sent me down the road of blogging about The Truth About Education (and Butterflies) (and Podcasts). There was Robocalls that was totally centered on a telephone. But an all time favorite was the first episode I ever heard, Moon Graffiti
- Song Exploder is just a concept I cannot let go. A finished album recorded ong is broken down track by track to let he author describe its origin, how it was built track by track. There is a rich metaphor here for the creative process, that there is something so valuable about thinking of and creating of media by its layers but also the difference between a finished product (like a presentation or a class project) and all of the layers and events that went into it. I played out a few times as a metaphor that gets to the role of that cave person era act of blogging or even an example of Class Exploder to break down an assignment layer by layer to understand how it was made. But see, I ventured off track here. I like the show also because I end up learning about a lot of genres of music I would not typically listen to (synth pop, rap, etc). That alone is valuable.
- Twenty Thousand Hertz (“The stories behind the world’s most recognizable and interesting sounds”) is much like 99%Invisible but all about the design and nuance of sound and things we might encounter often but never consider what went into them. Listening to the Movies was one of a three part series on how sound aids for people with limited or no visual ability, I did not even know of this entire realm of movies being audio annotated. The Windsor Hum was a followup to an earlier episode that now explains the mysterious deep humming heard in the city of Windsor, Ontario. And Domestic Symphony covered the world of audio design of… appliances (and I agree that the sounds from my LG dishwasher are downright annoying).
And now I am adding to this list, thanks to this whole series of clicks and ticks, Scene to Radio. A summary might have to wait until next year.
All of this is to say that (and no offense to my education podcasting friends) that there’s a lot to be said for listening to a variety of shows. Even if you only subscribe to a puny 10, there’s so much potential if you mix it up.
There’s going to be almost an entire ocean of other things I ought to listen to. But there’s time to discover or fall into them.
Featured Image: Mine!
Nice list, dog. The Truth is new to me, so I’ve commanded Stitcher to fumble with it.
Thank you for sharing the internet path you followed – then adding to it.
Hi Alan,
A rich list, adding to the already overflowing pool of podcasts. I like to listen to a range of non-Edu podcasts. Even with two 40 minute plus commutes every day I still can’t get through much. Like you I really only listen to podcasts while driving. There are a couple of things that I find useful.
Castro, is a podcasting app that lets you sub to many podcasts but triage the ones you want to hear into you “queue”.
The other is Huffduffer, this is a bookmarklet that will pull individual episodes into your own RSS feed which you can then sub to. It will even rip YouTube videos to audio and host the mp3 for 30 days. https://huffduffer.com/johnjohnston is mine. Now I am off to huffduff some of your suggestions:-)
Thanks John, and for reminding me of Hufferduffer, a rather elegant way to curate, collect, reshare audio between source. Happy listening, and I’ll check back to see what’s you are adding.