Educational Technology Innovation and Impact/Edutainment/Radio Education

Radio Education

Radio had been used in education for a period of more than 80 years. It has in that time been used in many various ways. Its uses comprise school broadcasting, informal general education, social action programming and adult basic education and literacy.

In Australia, radio has been used for direct teaching, whereby radio schools are used to connect children in secluded farmsteads in the outback together with a teacher sited many hundred miles away. There are two examples of radio direct teaching 1. In the farmsteads having short wave receive and transmit radio, enabling the learners to partake directly in the lesson. 2. Parent offer the back up support, in this way a teacher operates in the same way to a classroom and the teacher except that the learners are at a distance (Bates, 2005)

Distance teaching universities frequently employ radio for its advertising and enrolment value, as well as for teaching. The Open University in Britain uses this system more often for discussion of course materials, alternative viewpoints to those contained in the printed materials, source material for analysis and for performance e.g. dramatization literature, etc.

Radio has been used lengthily as an educational medium in developing countries. The radio has supported educational programs in a wide range of subjects area and in many different countries. Below will follow some examples of how radio is been utilised in developing countries:

v	India, for rural development. v	Swaziland, for public health purposes. v	Nigeria, for management courses for agriculture sector. v	Kenya, in support for correspondence courses. v	The Dominion Republic, in support pf primary education. v	Philippines, for nutrition education. v	Paraguay, to offer primary schools instruction. http://cade.icaap.org/vol2.2/7_Nwaerondu_and_Thompson.html v	Namibia, in the Oshakati area of northern Namibia, local radio is part of non- formal education project entitled “cattle is our livelihood” to improve cattle keeping practice among local farmers. http://www.col.org/knowledge/ks_radio.htm

Radio like other available instruments and channels of communication and social action could be used to assist put across essential knowledge and enlighten and educate people on social issues. In addition radio can be mobilised to comprehend the potential towards meeting basic education for all. http://www.col.org/events/0006commradio.htm

Radio is an effectual system for delivery of education to larger numbers of people. In facilitates information exchange at the community level, acting as a “community telephone”. Radio plays a vital educational role as the sole medium for formal and non-formal education.

Further Research

Studies of children's radio programs, particularly educational programs, offers an area of research that brings new perspectives to social, cultural, and political history. Such research also expands investigations of children's increased visibility and status as a special group in society, for instance as reflected in the UN CONVENTION ON THE RIGHTS OF THE CHILD (1989). Children's programs provide material for inquiries into children's place in society as well as representations of childhood from a historical perspective, particularly during the period from 1920 to 1960, when radio was regarded as the major electronic medium in society. It is also a field well attuned to further developments of theoretical and methodological issues. In addition to actual programs, manuscripts, program sheets, and other documents concerning children's broadcasts, a number of studies measure children's reading and comprehension skills in relation to radio. Such materials could be used to investigate the systems of knowledge and meaning that have affected the child in different decades of the twentieth century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Christenson, Peter G., and Peter DeBenedittis. 1986. "'Eavesdropping' on the FM Band: Children's Use of Radio." Journal of Communication 36, no. 2: 27-38. Cuban, Larry. 1986. Teachers and Machines. The Classroom Use of Technology since 1920. New York and London: Teachers College Press. Lindgren, Anne-Li. 1999. "'Att ha barn med är en god sak': Barn, medier och medborgarskap under 1930-talet" ("Including children is a good thing": Children, media and citizenship in the 1930s). Linköping Studies in Arts and Science 205. Paik, Haejung. 2000. "The History of Children's Use of Electronic Media. In Handbook of Children and the Media, ed. Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer. Thousand Oaks, CA, London, and New Delhi: Sage.