By Shell C 
Here’s my latest attempt at podcasting. When I first started on this journey of creating content for social media, I had a whole heap of ideas I wanted to explore (hence the name of my blog). The first assignment, about online identity, was perfect for me, because I struggle finding my persona. The second assignment topics didn’t thrill me as much. Not until we started talking about having a title, and maybe a title for the series. I realised gamification (one of the topics) makes Duolingo a great travel resource, and travel is one of the topics I want to create content about.
Suddenly, I could see the whole vision: a podcast series about travel tips and tricks, of which one of the episodes could introduce Duolingo as a great language learning method, because gamification enhances motivation and engagement. I even decided to make it the second episode, so I could sort out some of the mechanics in the first episode (it’s here if you’re interested). Therefore, I present to you: Things I know about Travel. Episode 2 Play your way to confident conversations.
There were two ways I used references:
- Present theories which might explain why gaming motivates. These references are old and aren’t all available online. Luckily I was exposed to them when studying psychology.
- Describe studies into Duolingo’s efficacy for language learning, and its value from a gaming perspective.
Doing that first episode the week before was really helpful, because I was able to build a “container” for the content (with intro and outro music), so all I had to do was add the words from this episode. I say all, but between stumbling over words, taking long pauses and trying to fit in everything I wanted to say, it was still a struggle. Oh, I loved Audacity’s functionality for cutting out sections (long pauses and big stumbles) and silencing the verbal tic that has annoyed me whenever I watch my presentations for decades. As to the other components:
- The intro/outro music was chosen for our task on audio postcards. I started searching for “postcard”, found one called “send a postcard” which was perfect, then discovered I must have done something wrong in my search because it was not for commercial use. I finally found an instrumental piece called “Send Me” which I quite like the sound of and the title somewhat implies travel. Another challenge I faced was getting the music to fade out and in underneath the speaking. Helpful advice from my lecturer was that I needed to create audio line to separate it out. Once I knew that, it was straightforward. Google helped me realise I needed to change my settings to stop it deleting certain temporary files.
- The thumbnail photo I took to reference my story about living off croissants and orange juice in France because that was all I knew how to order.
Stay tuned for Episode 3: Standing out and blending in!
Credits from podcast
Music Credit:
‘Send Me’ released by JBlanked (CC BY 4.0)
Photo Credit (thumbnail): Shell C
References:
Corona Martínez, D., & Real García, J. J. (2019). Using Malone’s theoretical model on gamification for designing educational rubrics. Informatics, 6(1), 9. https://doi.org/10.3390/informatics6010009
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York, NY:Harper Perennial
Loewen, S., Crowther, D., Isbell, D. R., Kim, K. M., Maloney, J., Miller, Z. F., & Rawal, H. (2019). Mobile-assisted language learning: A Duolingo case study. ReCALL, 31(3), 293-311. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0958344019000065
Miller, J. A., & Cooper, S. (2021). Case studies in game-based complex learning. Multimodal Technologies & Interaction, 5(12), 72-72. https://doi.org/10.3390/mti5120072
Rachels, J. R., & Rockinson-Szapkiw, A. J. (2018). The effects of a mobile gamification pp on elementary students’ Spanish achievement and self-efficacy. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 31(1-2), 72-89. https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2017.1382536
Vygotsky, L. S. (1980). Mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. 1979. Journal of Reading Behavior, 12, 161-162.
Zimmerman, B. J. (2000). Self-Efficacy: An Essential Motive to Learn. Contemporary educational psychology, 25(1), 82-91. https://doi.org/10.1006/ceps.1999.1016