More Like this

1. Results and Discussion from Two Seasons of the Talking Technicians Podcast

   https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7765142  

   Kazarinoff, Peter; Billie, Copley; McCue, TJ (January 2023, Journal of advanced technological education)

   This study analyzes the first two seasons of the Talking Technicians Podcast, which consists of 24 episodes with working technicians. The study aims to demonstrate that podcasts featuring working technicians provide unique insights into technological education that other methods cannot easily obtain. The themes that emerged from the interviews include the importance of soft skills, teamwork, and when in a large company environment, it pays to be aware of opportunities for professional advancement. While wage and benefit comparisons were not made between the technicians interviewed, the study found that podcasts offer a powerful tool for sharing knowledge and connecting with audiences, enabling listeners to focus on the content and engage with the ideas of presenters and guests. 

   more » « less
2. iDRAMA-rumble-2024: A Dataset of Podcasts from Rumble Spanning 2020 to

   Balci, Utkucan; Patel, Jay; Balci, Berkan; Blackburn, Jeremy (June 2024, International Workshop on Cyber Social Threats 2024)

   Rumble has emerged as a prominent platform hosting contro- versial figures facing restrictions on YouTube. Despite this, the academic community’s engagement with Rumble has been minimal. To help researchers address this gap, we intro- duce a comprehensive dataset of about 6.7K podcast videos from August 2020 to December 2022, amounting to over 5.6K hours of content. Besides covering metadata of these podcast videos, we provide speech-to-text transcriptions for future analysis. We also provide speaker diarization informa- tion, a collection of 168K unique representative images from podcast videos, and face embeddings of more than 400K ex- tracted faces. With the rise of the influence of podcasts and populist figures, this dataset provides a rich resource to iden- tify challenges in cyber social threats in a relatively underex- plored space. 

   more » « less
3. Rhapsody: A Dataset for Highlight Detection in Podcasts

   Park, Y; Diwan, A; Harwath, D; Choi, E (May 2025, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2505.19429)

   Podcasts have become daily companions for half a billion users. Given the enormous amount of podcast content available, highlights provide a valuable signal that helps viewers get the gist of an episode and decide if they want to invest in listening to it in its entirety. However, identifying highlights automatically is challenging due to the unstructured and long-form nature of the content. We introduce Rhapsody, a dataset of 13K podcast episodes paired with segment-level highlight scores derived from YouTube's 'most replayed' feature. We frame the podcast highlight detection as a segment-level binary classification task. We explore various baseline approaches, including zero-shot prompting of language models and lightweight finetuned language models using segment-level classification heads. Our experimental results indicate that even state-of-the-art language models like GPT-4o and Gemini struggle with this task, while models finetuned with in-domain data significantly outperform their zero-shot performance. The finetuned model benefits from leveraging both speech signal features and transcripts. These findings highlight the challenges for fine-grained information access in long-form spoken media. 

   more » « less
4. Investigating the impact of research-based professional development on teacher learning and classroom practice: Findings from computer science education

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2022.104530  

   Mouza, C.; Codding, D.; Pollock, L. (January 2022, Computers and education)

   As the field of computer science (CS) is gaining increased attention, the need for qualified teachers is rapidly growing. Yet little is still known about the design features, implementation, and outcomes of professional development programs in computing. The purpose of this study is threefold: (a) examine a CS professional development program built around high-quality design features reported in the research literature, (b) investigate the impact of the program on participating teachers’ learning and classroom practice, and (c) identify specific design features that facilitated changes in teacher learning and practice. The study employed a mixed-methods design. Data were collected from multiple sources including, pre and post survey data on teacher knowledge of CS content, pedagogy, and technology (N = 94), as well as interviews and classroom implementation data from eight case study participants. Findings from this work indicated that participants reported improvements in their knowledge of CS content, pedagogy, and technology. They also applied new learning into their practice, though implementation varied among participants. Responding on the value of the professional development design features, teachers noted the importance of focusing on CS content knowledge as well as opportunities to engage with pedagogical practices for teaching computing. Findings also indicated the important role of contextualized follow-up classroom support in the implementation of new learning into practice. These findings have implications for the design of professional development programs grounded in best practices with the potential to support broad efforts intended to prepare teachers with the knowledge and skills needed to deliver CS education. 

   more » « less
5. Learning to teach computer science: Professional development design and teacher outcomes.

   Mouza, Chrystalla; Codding, Diane; Pollock, Lori (January 2018, Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education (SITE))

   With the increased attention on integrating computer science concepts into K-12 curricula, there has been a growing investment into professional development opportunities that prepare teachers to teach computer science principles. Yet, little research exists on design features of professional development that help teachers gain the computer science content, skills and teaching pedagogy that ultimately make an impact on student learning and participation in the classroom. In this work we present a professional development model for helping K-12 teachers integrate computer science principles across the curriculum in a variety of content areas. We subsequently investigate the ways in which the design features of the model promoted teacher learning of computer science content and pedagogy. 

   more » « less