Will Brehm  1:08
We also realized that a lot of academic podcasts were professors or academics sort of leading the charge, and we sort of said, well, what if we actually put graduate students or students at the forefront? And so that’s what we did with Flux. There was some really good content that came out of that, and I think really pushed the limits of what we can think of as sort of acceptable and legitimate academic outputs. It’s not just a written journal article anymore. We can actually say podcasts should be valued to the same extent because they take as much work, if not more work, to make them well.

Will Brehm  1:43
There is this sort of recognition that, well, maybe they’re like nontraditional, which is kind of pejorative if you think about it. Like why isn’t a podcast traditional? But whatever. Films, audio, artworks, exhibitions, these things have value and merit when it comes to knowledge and ideas, and the institution of higher education needs to figure out how to count them and value them in similar ways. I think it does a disservice to the academic world to limit what we think of as knowledge as only being in textual form, and a particular textual form that has certain markers, long, complicated sentences with a lot of jargon, right? Like that’s not what we should be only valuing in the academic world.

Neil McPhedran  2:25
Welcome to Continuing Studies, a podcast for higher education podcasters who want to learn, connect, and get inspired. I’m Neil McPhedran, founder of HigherEdPods.com and Podium Podcast Company.

Jennifer-Lee Gunson  2:36
I’m Jennifer-Lee, founder of Jpod Creations. If you’re podcasting in higher ed, you’re not alone. There’s a fast-growing community out there, and we’re here to help you tap into it.

Neil McPhedran  2:45
That’s right, Jen. We want to hear from you. We’ve got an email in our show notes. Email us. Tell us about your ideas. Give us some suggestions for people that should be on the show. I got to say, Jen, one of the things I love about this is almost every single time we bring someone on the show, they give us one, two ideas of more people to get on the show.

Jennifer-Lee Gunson  3:04
Yeah, I love it. We always get to find out about people that we would never be able to find. It’s about networking.

Neil McPhedran  3:10
That’s right. So, Jen, in this episode, we are speaking with Will Brehm. In Australia.

Jennifer-Lee Gunson  3:16
In Australia. That’s right. He is an Associate Professor in Comparative and International Education at the University of Canberra, where I have two nephews and one niece that lives, but that’s a whole other side. He is also Adjunct Researcher at Waseda Institute for Advanced Study at the Waseda University, which is in Tokyo. Sorry if I mispronounced the name of that university. And he is Honorary Adjunct Professor at the Royal University of Phnom Penh.

Neil McPhedran  3:42
Wow. You’re thinking there’s an Australian voice coming, but it’s not. Actually, it’s an American voice coming. And he’s just such a fascinating guy. We learned a lot from him. So Will is the creator, host and board member of FreshEd, which is a weekly podcast that makes complex ideas in educational research easily understood. Actually, I think FreshEd is, and we’re going to get into this, is way more than a podcast. It’s turned into more of a network, but he’s also built an audience for academic and higher ed podcasts to access. Anyway, let’s get into it because it’s a really great conversation.

Neil McPhedran  4:14
Hello Will. Thanks for joining us on this episode of Continuing Studies. So FreshEd describes itself as a weekly podcast that makes complex ideas into educational research easily understood. So you’re 10 years in, over 400 episodes, you’ve interviewed 700 plus scholars and you’ve got a million downloads. Congratulations on all that. That’s quite amazing. So what does that mission actually mean to you in practice and has that evolved over time or is that where you started?

Will Brehm  4:41
Good question. Thanks for inviting me. It’s really wonderful to be here and talk to like-minded podcasters. It’s kind of crazy that this podcast exists and I love everything about it. I think that that tagline has helped us keep the focus on what we wanted to do because in podcasting, as you evolve your show, everyone has a different idea of what you should do. And you could actually have the mission creep and move into the different areas pretty quickly. It was really valuable for us to always say, no, no, no, this is what we’re trying to do. Even if we’re trying to experiment in many different ways, and we have over 10 years, we’ve always sort of kept the core of what we’re trying to do.

Will Brehm  5:20
We want to just talk about academic ideas, which we thought would make them more easily understood because we’ve all read academic papers that are esoteric, filled with jargon, long, complex sentences. I mean, I’ve written those as well, but there’s something about being in dialogue with academics that allows you to unpack the ideas in a little bit of a different way, make academic ideas sort of more accessible to a broader audience.

Jennifer-Lee Gunson  5:45
It’s great that you’re using a medium that is friendly to many different people. And I just love the titles of your podcasts because I really understand them right when I’m looking like unpacking the learning crisis and racialization, education, and quality, like they’re easy. They’re clickable titles, Culture Trap.

Will Brehm  6:02
Yeah, I try and not emphasize clickability because I think there can be problems in just trying to drive clicks. But I think you’re right about having things being concise and to the point and digestible is something that academics, you know, maybe it’s a caricature, but probably for good reason, we’re not so good at doing that. I think the defense from an academic’s point of view would be around, you know, some of these ideas are really hard and it takes time to sort of learn how to write about them in a way that is accessible. But I think the podcast sort of circumvents that because by putting someone in front of a microphone and saying, let’s just talk to each other as if we’re having a cup of tea, that changes things. People can actually say things in ways that might not get past peer review. And then it becomes a little bit easier.

Jennifer-Lee Gunson  6:46
Well, things can also get misconstrued. Anytime you’re writing anything, whether it be paper, text message or whatever, a lot of the times English language can definitely come off wrong. And so sometimes it is easier to understand somebody’s inflection and how they feel about the subject matter than it is reading it as well.

Will Brehm  7:02
Totally, totally. There’s an absolute limit between what text can do and what the voice can do. We had a student that we worked with who did this whole podcast on what is the sonic possibilities of podcasting in the academic space. And he had this little line around, like, the power of silence is actually profound when you speak and in the sonic world. But what would that actually look like in text? Like blank pages? I just wouldn’t have the same power that silence does when we’re speaking.

Jennifer-Lee Gunson  7:29
That seems so simple. But when you put it that way, that’s very thought provoking, actually, you’re right. Silence can be uncomfortable, too. But I’m always amazed how people can use silence strategically in their communication. I’ve always admired that.

Neil McPhedran  7:42
Why don’t we take a step back here? How did FreshEd start and what was the original impulse behind it?

Will Brehm  7:48
Yeah, I had recently finished my PhD and I was about to move to Tokyo, Japan to start a postdoctorate at the University of Tokyo. And I never had been to Japan before. It was a daunting idea. At the time, I was actually living in Australia, in Melbourne. And my partner said to me, why don’t you start a podcast to sort of give yourself an excuse to reach out to people and talk to people? And I had no idea what I was doing. I basically recorded episodes in an apartment that was about 25 square meters. And so it was kind of insane to be recording.

Neil McPhedran  8:22
Classic Tokyo apartment.

Will Brehm  8:23
Classic Tokyo apartment. My partner, she would be like sitting on the bed behind me. I would be at the desk at the foot of the bed and I’d be interviewing people. And I had no idea what I was doing. And if you listen to some of those first episodes, they’re pretty terrible.

Jennifer-Lee Gunson  8:38
I feel like nobody knows what they’re doing though when they first start a podcast. It’s funny.

Will Brehm  8:42
And for me, I had no training ground. All I had was a childhood of listening to the National Public Radio in the States. And so the person that I always had in mind was Terry Gross, who is the host of a show called Fresh Air. And so I literally stole the name. I was like, I want to be the Terry Gross of academic podcasting. And therefore I’m going to call my podcast FreshEd, right? Like I mean, it was not subtle in any way in my mind. Like I knew exactly what I was trying to emulate.

Neil McPhedran  9:09
I love hearing origin stories and where they are now. So speaking of evolution, FreshEd started as an interview show. That’s still a component of it, but it’s really growing into something bigger. It’s kind of a network now, if you will, with I think it’s five distinct shows. So maybe take us through that a bit. That’s a really interesting journey that you’ve taken there.

Will Brehm  9:28
Sure. Yeah. And it really has been a journey. I mean, now we definitely a network, an umbrella, something like that is how to think about FreshEd because there’s all these different podcasts under there. The one I do is the interview show. We still do that. I love doing it. It’s a big part of my own career now. So I’m absolutely going to keep doing that. But by doing that interview show in English, based on who I knew and the people that I wanted to speak to, we quickly realized that this was rather limiting. It was my perspective, my language, my interests were being highlighted. And so particularly with the language, we realized there are so many other language, of course, that are doing academic work and we’re limited by only focusing in on English.

Will Brehm  10:16
And so at first we sort of thought, oh, maybe we could do like live translation, like the UN does. But then, you know, there’s one, there’s a cost to doing that. And then two, there’s a technical side to it. Like how do you actually record and do it? And this is before all these fancy website apps that have now made it a lot easier. And so we realized that doing that probably isn’t going to work. Then we thought we would just do translation of transcripts. And we did that for a while. But then we started realizing like, well, that’s actually still just privileging the English language. We’re doing the audio in English and then the text in different languages. So we eventually settled on, we actually need to just have non-English speaking podcasts, which presents a whole bunch of issues around bringing the right team together. How do we do it? And creating sort of new podcasts.

Will Brehm  11:06
But we ended up doing it in, first we did it in Portuguese with a podcast called Eduque. And we worked in partnership with a Brazilian organization. And then we created a Spanish podcast called A La Divergente. And that was with some colleagues at FreshEd. And then we brought in a few other people to work on it. And what was interesting is we sort of experimented with the form as well through these two podcasts. So the Portuguese podcast, there was two hosts. What we ended up thinking, like the podcast was supposed to be like the academic plus the practitioner as hosts. And so they sort of played a caricature of these two different roles. And then anyone they brought in, they sort of asked questions from these two different angles. And so that was sort of a slight variation of what I was normally doing.

Will Brehm  11:52
With A La Divergente, we decided to make it a series-based podcast. So over multiple episodes, they would sort of look at a single topic. So one of them was the constitutional reform in Chile. Another one was migration out of Venezuela across Latin America. And so over multiple episodes, they sort of put together different shows around that topic. And then we also realized at some point that there’s a limit in the form of just doing interviews. So it needs to be, you know, to live up to the sonic possibilities of what sound can do and what podcasting can do.

Neil McPhedran  12:26
I’m sorry to say, but all three of us are like in the business of doing interviews, which are kind of the simplest way of doing a podcast, even though it’s probably the dominant way. Most people coming from broadcasting are not good interviewers. Everyone wants to do it because it’s the sexy one that you see all the time.

Jennifer-Lee Gunson  12:41
You see it all the time. I’ve learned that a good interview is sort of an art form, but it’s the lowest hanging fruit. It’s so easy to get into it. All you need is your cell phone, basically, and you can all of a sudden do interviews with people.

Neil McPhedran  12:53
Do not record on your cell phone. You’re making me cry right now. Stop it.

Will Brehm  12:57
I don’t think he’s saying that. The cell phone has created a level of accessibility that I think we can’t deny. And that’s a good thing, right? And so I actually think it sort of democratizes the ability to make a podcast. And I think there is value in that. We see that probably happening with, what is it, 3.5 million podcasts in the world these days. Most of them, no one really listens to, but it’s great that they exist, right? There’s so much niche content out there now that I think that even if the sound quality isn’t so good, I’m still a big fan of more people doing podcasts.

Will Brehm  13:31
And so we were doing it and we were learning a lot and having a good time, but I was just getting into like sound art, basically. And it’s like sound can do so much more than just what I was doing with interviews. And so we then decided like, well, why don’t we explore that? Like what can we, can we make an academic podcast that is sort of using sound to maybe its fullest ability or at least using the affordances of sound to a greater extent than just an interview? And so we created what we call Flux, which is a podcast on narrative-based podcasting. So storytelling through sound.

Jennifer-Lee Gunson  14:06
Love it.

Will Brehm  14:07
And then now you’re working on the Thinking Ear, which I think opens this up even further.

Neil McPhedran  14:12
That’s right. That’s right. It’s essentially an audio journal where researchers can submit their own episodes. So this is really fascinating. So tell us how that works.

Will Brehm  14:21
So after we did Flux and we started really working with narrative-based podcasts, telling stories through sound, and the other thing we did there is we also realized that a lot of academic podcasts were professors or academics sort of leading the charge. And we sort of said, well, what if we actually put graduate students or students at the forefront? And so that’s what we did with Flux. I loved it. We’ve, you know, we’re nominated for some awards and there was some really good content that came out of that. And I think really pushed the limits of what we can think of as sort of acceptable and legitimate academic outputs. It’s not just a written journal article anymore. We can actually say podcasts should be valued to the same extent because they take as much work if not more work to make them well.

Will Brehm  15:09
But then we started realizing like, hmm, everything we’re doing is basically from us, right? It’s like we are, we’re building the team, we’re doing it, which I loved and it ensured a certain quality. But we also started realizing that as we were just sort of saying, so many other people wanted to make podcasts and we just simply couldn’t work with everybody that wanted to work with us. So we got the idea of like, well, what if we had an audio journal where people could submit ideas or finish pieces to us and we would supposedly somehow quality control this like peer review and then put it out on a platform of FreshEd that would ensure that they would reach a far larger audience than if this team of academics just made their own podcast that would have no audience or would upload it to YouTube, which often happens. Like you can find these graveyards of academic podcasts on YouTube that have like two or three listens. They must’ve spent a ton of money making these things because they got a grant to fund it, but then they just don’t get the audience. And to me, that is such a sad reality. Like you want people to listen to these creations that take so much time, so much passion goes into them. The audio journal in our mind is trying to start that a lot harder said than done. This opens up issues of like people simply don’t have, like academics don’t have the skills to do this. They don’t necessarily need to. So there’s all sorts of issues that have come out of doing it. But I still think the idea at its core is a good one and sort of opens up the possibility for more academics to have outlets to do podcasting in legitimate ways.

Jennifer-Lee Gunson  16:52
But I guarantee you, they’re like, I created a podcast. Everyone should come listen. But nobody knows they created a podcast because they don’t do anything about it. So I like the fact that you bring the podcasters to you.

Will Brehm  17:02
The key for us is that I’ve seen a lot of research grants get written that include a budget line to create a YouTube video or create a podcast because academics, I think there’s a recognition and funders recognize that just putting out this knowledge in a journal article or in a book isn’t actually going to have a wide dissemination. And so there’s this assumption that then if you make sort of like something on YouTube and that’s enough to get public dissemination. But as Jen is like rightly saying, just because you put something on there doesn’t mean anyone is going to see it. The other way is if you take channels that already have a built-in audience and we’ll give you access to that audience, but you have to sort of give us the content that’s high quality. I think there’s issues there around how do you ensure the quality? What does that look like? Are we simply replicating the academic peer review? And there’s all sorts of problems with that. That needs to be worked out. I admit that. But I do think there’s something about saying to an academic, hey, do that grant, make that podcast, bring the people together you need to make that podcast. But we can be the platform. We can be the audio journal as an outlet to guarantee that there’s going to be this audience that you probably wouldn’t get otherwise, right? Without spending a ton of money on marketing, which they’re probably not going to do.

Neil McPhedran  18:23
You’ve got a built-in audience. Yeah. You’ve been doing this for 10 years. You’ve been building your audience.

Will Brehm  18:27
Exactly. And you can go to an academic who has no audience, but has the research and is going to do the work.

Neil McPhedran  18:33
Exactly. And then we sort of follow the ideas around the creative commons. So the idea is that we would play the episode on our platform, but the academic or whoever else co-owns that episode, they can play it anywhere else they’d like to play.

Jennifer-Lee Gunson  18:45
I like that. That’s good.

Neil McPhedran  18:46
How do you do all this? Because obviously this takes a lot of people power and it’s not easy work, but you don’t have ads, you have no paywalls, and you actually say you’re free forever on your website.

Will Brehm  18:56
This was also really an interesting sort of evolving conversation that we’ve had over many years. Originally, there was no funding. It was just me doing everything. And then we got some small little grants to do one-off things like transcription or whatever it was. And then we ended up getting some really good funding from the Open Society Foundations. And that basically allowed us to really sort of experiment and branch out and do things because we didn’t have to worry about running ads or whatever. And in fact, a lot of our appeal to the Open Society Foundations was that we were open access that we didn’t have advertised. And so that actually quickly became to us a red line. We do not want to advertise e-cigarettes, which seems to be the company that always comes in, wants to advertise on FreshEd for whatever reason. And so we just sort of have a hard no on that.

Will Brehm  19:49
And then, so it’s actually quite funny. There’s also been things where book publishers of academic books or even books that you would find in like a school would reach out to us and say, we want to use some of your audio, get the transcript and put it into the book. And of course, these are books that are being then sold on to like school systems. And they’re saying, oh, we’ll give you a small amount of money to use it. And it’s really nice to have the Creative Commons because you say, well, you can use it for free, but your product that has to be Creative Commons as well. And that quickly, you know, the publishers are like, well, no, no, no, we would never make our books open access. And I say, oh, well, then sorry, you can’t use the content. So it’s been a funny journey in that sense. Like our ethos was really clear. And then we created these red lines and we just haven’t crossed them. So no advertising from for-profit companies. We have advertised other things like different events that might be coming up, but we’re not sort of doing Juul or BetterHelp.

Jennifer-Lee Gunson  20:47
So that’s more like featuring other academic events or things like that are kind of worthy that wouldn’t, your listenership wouldn’t go like, oh, that’s an ad.

Will Brehm  20:54
Exactly. And then we have recently started a membership campaign. And my understanding of the podcast sector is that this is rather common these days. Advertising has gone way down in commercial podcasting. And so podcasters are sort of looking for other sources of money. And so drawing on sort of that Patreon model is becoming more common. And we’re doing the same thing and we’re bringing in some money. We still have some grants, you know, some key donors that give us money. Last year was the first year where we actually were completely sustainable, which was really great. We’re bringing in the amount of money that we need to produce the show. It has meant we reduced sort of how much we make, but we don’t need to open it up to advertising.

Neil McPhedran  21:37
When we chatted previously, you’re based in Australia, but you mentioned the Nitro framework. I think that might be unique to Australia, but from what I understand and what you were saying, it sort of recognizes creative and scholarly audio as research output. Yeah. I’m curious about that.

Will Brehm  21:52
Yeah. So Nitro stands for non-traditional research output. And academics to different extents and different systems are measured by their outputs. And so these often are connected to how many papers you put out in a year or how many books. And often they’re sort of ranked like, you know, having four journal articles in Q1 journals is seen as better than having one book, which to me is insane because a book takes so long to write. But anyway, there are these certain metrics. There is this sort of recognition that, well, maybe there’s like non-traditional, which is kind of pejorative if you think about it. And I do think there’s certain similarities in places like the UK as well, where they’re beginning to recognize that films, audio, artworks, exhibitions, these things have value and merit when it comes to knowledge and ideas and the institution of higher education needs to figure out how to count them and value them in similar ways. I’m all for it. I think it does a disservice to the academic world to limit what we think of as knowledge as only being in textual form and a particular textual form that has certain markers, long, complicated sentences with a lot of jargon, right? Like that’s not what we should be only valuing in the academic world.

Jennifer-Lee Gunson  23:12
No, it opens it up so much more. But you remember too, our audience is constantly changing, like how they’re doing it. Phones, touchscreens, like the fact that you’re able to read books on a Kindle or a Kobo, it’s just changing, but it’s always going to have traditional roots. Maybe the way that we talk to the audience or talk to our niche is a bit different, but at the end of the day, we’re not really doing anything different than radio was. Same thing with textbooks.

Neil McPhedran  23:34
So fired up today. There’s a lot of tradition and when people are like, oh, I don’t want to go this route, it’s like, it’s not scary. We’re not doing anything different. We’re just changing the vessel.

Will Brehm  23:44
I totally agree. I mean, there’s a long history that podcasting is sort of building off of. What’s actually different with podcasting? Maybe it’s just the RSS feed, right? Maybe it’s just the technical thing that allows something to get pushed to cell phones. And if that’s the only difference, that’s really just a technical issue. The medium is more or less exactly the same. And I would sort of talk about traditions of orality and, you know, where I’m from, there’s 60,000 years of oral history traditions. I follow someone named Walter Ong who sort of talks about second orality. And I think that’s how I would position radio and podcasting. These aren’t sort of going back to traditional oral cultures. What they’re doing is they’re sort of being built on top of literate cultures. To do a good interview, I’m sure you wrote down a lot of questions and you did a lot of reading. And so you had to be very literate to get into the world of sound. And the same with storytelling and the flux episodes that we created. Those are all written first, right? It’s a lot of work to get the writing correct and then you transition into how do you use sound in a creative way to help you tell that story? But it’s absolutely built on a written literate culture. And so that’s why it’s second orality. It comes out of that literate culture.

Jennifer-Lee Gunson  25:04
I like that. I hadn’t thought about it that way. But you’re right, I guess, like the original oral storytelling where it was passed along in an oral non-written manner, that would have been different versus what you just described.

Neil McPhedran  25:16
So 10 years of doing this, what do you know now that you might have wished you’d known when you first hit record back in your Japanese apartment?

Will Brehm  25:23
Yeah, gosh, one of the things I think I realized is persistence is kind of half the battle. You just kind of keep going with it and you get better at it, right? I feel like through doing, you know, 400 plus interviews, I have really gained this appreciation of what a good interview is. I sort of feel like Sisyphus pushing the ball up the mountain and never getting there. I want to do the perfect interview and I’ll never be able to do it, but I love the pursuit of trying, right? Like, I think it was Camus who said you have to sort of recognize that Sisyphus was happy, even though he was sort of deemed to eternity to be pushing up this rock that’ll never get to the top. I kind of feel like that. I absolutely love and feel privileged that I get the ability to chat with people and try and do a really good interview, even though I listen back and it’s always a bit cringey, you know, but somehow I just keep going. So I think persistence is what I would tell myself, you know, I’m on this journey to learn a ton, not just about the content of what I’m speaking to the person about, but the actual form of interviewing and podcasting or broadcasting.

Jennifer-Lee Gunson  26:24
You are listening. Good on you. But that’s the best part of learning is the cringe factor and that’s how I learned to be a broadcaster. You’d get the clips off the radio and you’d listen back all the time and that’s how you learn and most people don’t want to listen to themselves. But that’s the biggest key. And I tell people to listen to their podcasts as well, because how can you get better if you don’t know what you’re doing?

Will Brehm  26:42
Exactly. It took a long time for me to be able to listen to my voice, but now I’m so used to it. And I listened to the rough cut on the bus ride to work. I’ll put on my ear buds and like listen in and then I take notes of what needs to sort of change as I’m going in. Now I’m totally used to it and I love being sort of self-critical on what I’ve been saying.

Neil McPhedran  27:00
That’s great. What still needs to change for podcasting to get a proper seat at the table in academia?

Will Brehm  27:07
I feel like the more you talk to people, the better. I’ve been on a bit of a mission to speak at different universities. One of the things that I found amazing is I sometimes talk to grad students about podcasting and about how it’s actually should be valued and legitimate. And you know, if you feel like you need to express yourself in this medium, then by all means you should feel comfortable doing it. And some of them come up to me and just are like, thank you. I felt like I never had permission to do it. You still have to be writing and sort of in the academic conventions, but those conventions should and do need to change a little bit. So other ways of doing it, if there’s academics listening to this, is get into the conversations in your university about the policy of promotion and making sure you can actually say, yes, I’m allowed to put forward my non-traditional research outputs, whatever they may look like, and they should be valued the same. And if you can get like one little line in a policy that says that, that opens up the possibility to actually hang your hat on that and say, look, I’m doing what the policy says. We need to value it. That then will take a bit of a culture shift within the academic space where, you know, it’s not just policy that determined promotions, it’s humans reading people’s applications. And so I think we probably have a long way to go with that, but you know, little by little, your podcast, my podcast, you’ve made this massive collection of academic podcasts online. All of those people are doing the work, right? If we do that more and hopefully do it collectively, we can start seeing some change.

Neil McPhedran  28:41
I really like that insight. It’s not trying to convince, you’re coming at it from a subtle change in the policy or addition to the policy. It’s a very interesting way to do it because then once it’s there in writing, you’ve got something to point to now as well too. And you can bring others along who can then see that that’s also the policy as well too. So that’s a really good insight. If we could get that disseminating throughout institutions around the world, then that could be a big way that we could make this change. And I think the other point you made, Will, about inertia and just keep going. It’s funny because, you know, Jen and I work with a number of different podcasts. I hear myself saying to new podcasters, like, this is not a viral medium. And Jen and I, I think have come to this realization three years into this podcast that that’s really what we’ve been doing. Like, we’re not making any money off this and we’ve done this beginning as a labor of love and a way to sort of connect people. But we feel like we’ve turned this corner where we’ve actually gained traction and we don’t have a huge audience, but we’ve got a decent sized audience. And Jen, maybe you tell your story about you when you went to the London podcast show.

Jennifer-Lee Gunson  29:46
Neil tasked me while I was in London last year to find someone to be on our show. They don’t have a huge amount of higher ed podcasts, but they do have one from London City University and they have a podcast class. So they have a little booth there. There was a guy and he’s like, I know who you are and I’m like, no, you don’t. And he’s like, yeah, I do. I listen to your podcast. I was like, no, you don’t. So he actually had to pull the podcast up on the app and like prove it to me.

Will Brehm  30:09
I love it. I mean, what’s great is to see conferences like that, that are bringing people together. And I think the more we do that, the more it just becomes normal, right? The reality is that it’s already normal for most people, right? I see every day people listening to, you know, whatever they’re listening to. I don’t think a lot of people are like listening to music because they’re not like dancing down the street. They’re probably listening to podcasts. I always wonder what they’re listening to, but it just shows you that like so many people are using this medium. I think the last figures I saw, it’s like 600 million people are listening to podcasts on a regular basis. That’s enormous. So it’s normalized in many ways. The question is, how do we get the institutions where we work to sort of recognize that it’s normal and okay and valuable and legitimate. But it’s just getting it to be recognized everywhere. People don’t realize the power of it until they get involved in it.

Will Brehm  31:05
We organized the live podcast in 2019 at an academic conference and the conference said no. They were like, that’s not an academic thing. So then what we decided to do, this is when we had like good funding. We were like, okay, we’re just going to rent our own place next to the hotel. And so we booked a place with the equipment and I interviewed somebody live and it was packed. And so many people came and people still talk about it to this day. They’re like, oh, that was such a great thing. And now I haven’t gone back to the conference in a long time, but I don’t know if they have done this yet, but I would imagine it’s more acceptable six years later, you know?

Neil McPhedran  31:40
Yeah. I’d imagine. I hope so. So this has been great. I really enjoyed hearing about your journey and it’s been great to chat with you just about podcasting, academia and the opportunity we have moving forward. Thanks for joining us today.

Will Brehm  31:53
Thanks so much for having me.

Want to help translate this show? Please contact info@freshedpodcast.com

Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word

Scholarly Podcasting: Why, What, How?

Podcasting and Education: Reflections on the Case of FreshEd

Scholarly Podcasting for Research Dissemination: A Scoping Review

Broadening Legitimacy of Scholarly Podcasting as Knowledge Dissemination

Podcasting for Public Knowledge: A Multiple Case Study of Scholarly Podcasts at One University

Podcasts as Pedagogy in Higher Education: A Scoping Review

Podcasting Comparative and International Education: Reflecting, Reframing, or Reorienting the Field?

The Future of Scholarly Podcasting Can Still Be Whatever We Want It to Be

HigherEdPods.com

Have any useful resources related to this show? Please send them to info@freshedpodcast.com