Podcasts, the medium by which people can receive words of wisdom straight through their earbuds, appeal to many people, Lisa Bryant writes.
Here is a secret that I’ll let Bedrock readers into as long as you each promise not to tell a soul. I am not one of those people.
How you reacted to this secret, depends if you know that I am one of the co-hosts, along with Liam McNicholas and Leanne Gibbs, of Australia’s longest running early education podcast. It’s clocked up 100 episodes since it started three years ago.
If you know about the podcast or are a regular listener of The Early Education Show, it must seem weird. How can someone who publishes a podcast every week not enjoy listening to them? You know that now debunked theory that some of us are visual learners, some are kinaesthetic and some are auditory? I reckon part of it must be true because auditory learning has never worked for me – I stop paying attention after the first sentence.
But luckily there are people who love listening to podcasts! The Early Education Show has been downloaded over 80,000 times, so we must be doing something right.
So what is the podcast about? Essentially in every episode Liam, Leanne and I discuss a different topic about the policy and politics of young children and early learning in Australia. We also have Patreon* only episodes where Liam is doing an element by element explainer of the National Quality Standard.
Being a podcaster is a wonderful, but sometimes strange, experience. People can listen to a podcast whenever it suits them, and believe me they do. We have an insomniac listener who we apparently keep company in the early hours. Another listener has us playing when she cooks dinner. Her husband is now becoming an expert on early education policy. Another uses us to get her through her long commute every Friday morning. We even have listeners who play us during their showers!
Where and when people listen to podcasts creates a strange intimacy between listeners and hosts. I’ll never forget the time I rang a bureaucrat and when she heard my voice she got way too excited saying “It’s the voice from the podcast, but it’s… it’s interactive!”
The Conversation website named The Early Education Show as one of the eight podcasts people should listen to in 2017. They said it was “an engaging and informative podcast for everyone with an interest in early childhood education and care policies, news and practices in Australia and beyond. The presenters are passionate and knowledgeable, bringing diverse perspectives and just the right amount of disagreement, self-deprecation, irony and humour.”
Of course not everyone likes us. One listener wrote “I could not believe how much the presenters waffle on with this inane banter and how little they actually present the information”.
Why not take a listen and see if you like our banter or not? Not sure how to listen to a podcast? Go to www.earlyeducationshow.com/newtopodcasts for a really simple guide.
The best thing about podcasts, apart from the fact you can listen to them whenever and wherever you want, is that they are free!
* A Patreon is someone who for reasons known only to themselves voluntarily donates money to the show in recognition of the value of the content we are creating.