I love the radio show This American Life. I’m always happy when I’m out on the weekend and it comes on the radio(Because we live out in the boonies and have terrible radio reception, I only get to listen to NPR in the car. Poor me. ) So I was thrilled to find this short audio message from host Ira Glass at LearningTimes Network today.
It’s a wonderful anecdote of how important it is to create stories for learners. Not only does it make the learning experience more meaningful it makes it more memorable.
Registration is probably required and it took a little while for the Flash audio to load on my computer, but I think it’s worth the wait.
Sidenote: I know that TAL is trying to make money off of selling cd’s of their broadcasts, but a podcast sure would be nice.
I am huge TAL fan myself and have found that listening to their broadcasts via RealPlayer is excellent and you don’t have to worry a bit about reception. I too wish that it were podcast, but you can download the RealPlayer files and listen to them on your ipod using AudioHijack (rogueamoeba.com).
http://myamusementpark.blogspot.com
I read this when you published it, Martha, and listened to the Glass piece right away. Wow. I’ve been thinking hard for several days about what story we tell our students to get them thinking about the wonderful short movies (so to speak) they’re making for each class assignment, in fact each curricular experience. Glass’s powerful reframing of the work is exactly the kind of transformative metaphor I search for constantly in my own teaching–and in my own learning. I’d argue that learning to find transformational metaphors is one of the core benefits of a liberal arts education. And it’s fiendishly difficult to teach, since so much relies on preparing the student for his or her own discoveries.
Thanks for blogging this!