iPods in Economics

At the ASSA conference I enjoyed seeing the various posters in the AEA/CEE Poster Session on Teaching Ideas and Projects organized by Rae Jean B. Goodman. One in particular I knew would be of interest to readers of this blog, Jean Shackelford's "iPods in Economics? Technology for Enhanced Active Learning." I talked to her for quite a while and she admitted to recording and trying just about everything from lectures to short vignettes. Her paper is available on AEAweb.org (click here).

You can listen to her presentation by clicking here. I thought, how clever is that -- to present your paper on podcasting via a podcast.

I have posted an alternative method to record podcasts in an earlier posting (click here) and have made use of such recordings to send explanations back to students when neither typed words nor digital ink were enough. My own hypothesis is that few students will ever listen through all of a lecture, but smaller amounts on specific topics might just be the trick.

Best quote of the evening:
"It isn't about how you use technology to improve education, it's how you rethink education in the context of technology." -- Rick Rashid, Microsoft Research Chief, quoted in an article on iCampus (MS-MIT's 7 year initiative to study technology and education)