Much research on educational technology reforms in the twentieth century has placed emphasis on the idea that their inception and implementation has often been accompanied by a feverish excitement that sooner or later subsides. What is left, some of this research has argued, has been an all-too-common story of misuse and misguided aspirations. [1]

There have been many such reforms attempted in education since the end of the nineteenth century that have elicited widespread excitement about the potential for new forms of learning. Many of these reforms were backed by progressive educators in the early twentieth century. Edgar Dale, a professor at Ohio State University and a researcher at the university’s Bureau of Educational Research, identified himself as part of the progressive education movement. His instructional philosophy can be understood through a pyramid-like structure that he called the “Cone of Experience” (pictured right) in which he classified and detailed his beliefs about sensory and experiential learning.

Dale placed learning through direct experience at the bottom of the pyramid. Moving vertically up the figure, illustrated a shift in learning as it began to occur less through immediate experience, more through mediated means, and also became more conceptual and abstract. At the bottom of the cone, direct sensory learning provided students with rich experiences that included field trips, bird watching, fishing trips, and other types of worldly excursions. Next, came models and mockups of real experiences, such as miniature versions of airplanes, ships, and landscape scenes. These had educational value because they provided students with opportunities for scrutiny and analysis of structures, processes, and systems that could not be recreated through lecture and textbooks. Dramatic participation was the next up the pyramidal diagram. School plays were an example of this in which students either participated as actors or watched as spectators. Next came demonstrations enacted by the teacher, then field trips to cultural centers, and museum exhibitions, all of which had students function more as viewer than participant. Near the top of the cone was instruction that employed educational technologies including radio, film, newspapers, and phonograph records. [2]  To Dale, instruction with technology did not occur on a “direct sensory level”, but he saw this type of learning as important and necessary because it allowed students to encounter and examine the intellectual and emotional elements that were interwoven into many carefully devised media programs.

Dale spent much of his corpus examining the use of motion pictures in education, but in a large number of his writings he argued for the value of learning through all the senses, including the ears. [3]  Dale was also involved with the the Ohio School of the Air educational radio program at Ohio State University. In the 1935 inaugural issue of The News Letter, he argued for more research into the aural nature of radio programming. [4]

A nameless author, affiliated with the Ohio School of the Air, wrote a paper called “Will King Textbook Be Dethroned,” which illustrated Dale’s ideas about auditory education. In the paper, the author proclaimed that radio “become[s] a new sort of textbook – aural instead of visual.” [5]  The author illustrated this point in a cartoon (pictured left) that depicts a textbook, aptly named “King Textbook,” perched on a throne.

Educational radio was often characterized as a medium that encouraged passive listening and learning. The criticism was that students who listened to programs on the radio tended to sit lifeless in their seats while a radio instructor came through the ether into their classrooms to play music and authoritatively tell them what to think and feel. At a 1932 conference, Edgar Dale struck back at these sorts of characterizations with the argument that there was no such thing as passive listening and that listening should be seen as an activity in itself.

In the 1940s, numerous research studies investigated the efficacy of sensory learning. In a meta-analysis on audio-visual education, written in 1945, one author looked at learning with radio versus learning without radio and studies that compared learning that involved visuals with learning without them. [6]  The writer concluded that these studies “were inconclusive” and did not provide “definite proof” on the efficacy of auditory or visual learning through their respective technologies. Another group of researchers three years earlier had commented on studies that compared aural to visual learning, most notably one study by Paul Lazarsfeld from the Office of Radio Research at Columbia University called Radio and the Printed Page, in which he stated that “for every study which shows that the ear is more receptive, another study can be quoted which attributes the same advantage to the eye.” [7]  Lazarsfeld had concluded, according to the researchers, that what was most important was how well people concentrated on the medium at hand and their present context.

More recently, studies have shown that there has been “no scientific evidence backing up the idea” that teaching should be augmented for various learning styles even though “an entire industry has sprouted” up to support it. [8]  Other contemporary research has shown that learning is more effectual when it is varied and integrates various styles than when it targets only one mode of communication and one style of learning. [9]  What is important, as Dale argued, is that in order for sensory learning, involving educational technologies, to be useful, educators must have an explicit understanding about the types of lessons that make these technologies educational, how to use them in productive ways, and have clearly defined objectives that will result in effective educational experiences for students.

[1] David B. Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering toward Utopia : A Century of Public School Reform (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995) 111

[2] Edgar Dale, “Coming to Our Senses,” The News Letter 5, no. 1 (November 1939).

[3] Audio-Visual Methods in Teaching (New York: The Dryden Press, 1946) 48

[4] Edgar Dale and I. Keith Tyler, “Foreward, the Radio,” The News Letter 1, no. 1 (November 1935).

[5] OSU Ohio School of the Air (RG 8d6), Box 1. Ohio Teaches School By Radio, n.d.

[6] Arthur C. Stenius, “Auditory and Visual Education,” Review of Educational Research 15, no. 3 (1945): 246.

[7] Seerley Reid and Daniel Day, “Chapter Vi: Radio and Records in Education,” Review Of Educational Research 12, no. 3 (June 1942): 313.

[8] Patti Neighmond, “Think You’re an Auditory or Visual Learner? Scientists Say It’s Unlikely,” http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/08/29/139973743/think-youre-an-auditory-or-visual-learner-scientists-say-its-unlikely.

[9] Richard E. Mayer, “A Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning,” in Multimedia Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

FM transmitter tower

Post by John Anderson
Brooklyn College at the City University of New York

For more than a decade now, a spectrum-grab of impressive proportions has been taking place on the FM dial in the United States. While services such as Low-Power FM and HD Radio have dominated many discussions about future paths for broadcasting, the proliferation of FM translator stations has dwarfed them both.

The Federal Communications Commission created the FM translator service in 1970. Translator stations are limited to 250 watts of power and can only rebroadcast the signals of other stations. The original intent behind the translator service was to help noncommercial FM stations located in areas with challenging terrain provide a mechanism by which to address coverage gaps.

In 1981, the Chicago-based Moody Bible Institute petitioned the FCC to allow translators to be fed with programming other than a locally based full-power FM station. The FCC initially denied Moody’s request, in large part due to worries that “some parties” were engaging in practices with translators that smacked of speculation, such as filing applications in bulk to preclude competitors from certain markets. The agency also noted that many broadcasters were stretching the existing rules by siting translators to extend the reach of a full-power station.

But by 1990, after a well-coordinated lobbying campaign, the FCC fundamentally overhauled the FM translator service, effectively opening it up to commercial development. Translators were also unchained from local parent-stations and could be fed remotely. These changes spurred the rise of broadcasters who used FM translators to build out their own networks of stations. Since there’s no office to keep or staff to pay, costs of operation are low. Religious and public broadcasters took the greatest advantage of these rule changes to expand their reach.

Then LPFM got in the way. In 1997, as the FCC began receiving petitions to legalize a local low-power radio service, it froze new applications for FM translators on the majority of the dial. From a purely technical perspective, the only real distinction between FM translators and LPFM stations is that LPFMs must be live and local to some degree, while FM translators cannot. But incumbent broadcasters fervently opposed the creation of LPFM because they believed that the band was running out of capacity to accommodate more stations.

There is a grain of truth to this argument; the Reagan-era FCC opened up the FM dial to an increasing number of applicants and liberalized the rules regarding the movement of existing stations between markets. By the time LPFM came on the scene, spaces for new development of the FM dial in most markets had been reduced to crumbs, typically doled out as full-power FM licenses in rural and exurban locales and translator stations elsewhere. Yet while incumbent broadcasters railed on LPFM stations for asking to be “shoehorned” onto the dial, they prepared to make their own grab for all the crumbs they could.

In 2003, the FCC opened up an application window for new FM translator stations, and more than 13,000 were filed. A goodly portion were tendered by established religious and public broadcasters, though individual speculators came primed to play big. One enterprising man in Idaho, who had previously worked to build a large network of translators for Calvary Chapel churches, wrote software to spam the FCC’s electronic filing system, filing some 4,000 applications under two corporate names. In all, the FCC issued more than 2,000 new translator construction permits, but many who got them never intended to build the stations—or, at best, they only planned to build them out just enough to sell them to someone else.

Willis Tower in Chicago

In the intervening decade, as proponents of LPFM fought a protracted battle with Congress to expand the service to a point of technical parity with FM translators, the trade in translators became a market all its own, now worth tens of millions of dollars. Single construction permits now sell for five to six figures each, and in major markets they’re more valuable than some full-power AM stations. Last June, a 10-watt translator licensed to broadcast from atop the Willis Tower in Chicago sold for $4.6 million, while in December, a 4-watt translator in Long Island City, Queens changed hands for $3.5 million.

Far removed from their original intent as supplemental repeater-stations, most FM translators are now widely employed by broadcasters as “new stations” built and programmed on the cheap. Since the FCC considers translators a secondary service, they don’t count against the agency’s caps on media ownership. It’s a loophole in the law that’s widely acknowledged with a wink and a nod. An executive at mid-market conglomerate Saga advises his sales staff to call translators “metro stations” in pitches to advertising clients, so as to deemphasize their relatively weak signals and “make them sound more legitimate.”

Furthermore, transactions in the translator marketplace demonstrate a curious financial symbiosis between noncommercial broadcasters and some of America’s largest radio conglomerates. For example, in multiple markets, the Educational Media Foundation—parent of the K-LOVE and AIR-1 music networks—has sold or leased translators to iHeartMedia, who uses them to relay programming previously available as an HD-only subchannel. (HD Radio’s proprietor, iBiquity Digital Corporation, openly urges stations to set up their own “HD-on-translator play” as way to make some analog hay out of the stalled U.S. digital transition.)

Other major broadcasters use translators to relay out-of-market stations, or to provide a foothold on the FM dial for their AM properties. In fact, AM broadcasters are clamoring for the FCC to open one more translator filing window just for them, as a way to provide “relief” to their “beleaguered” band. It’s the beginning of a trend toward the ultimate settlement of all over-the-air broadcasting on the FM dial, something already underway in several Latin American and European countries. While they may be small and secondary, the rise of translators speaks volumes about the state of broadcast innovation. Like most natural resources, broadcast spectrum is finite, and we’d be wise to utilize it effectively. Instead, we’ll deep-sea drill and frack it to exhaustion—spare no expense to suck those last crumbs.

This is a story of a particular time at KXCI, Tucson’s community radio station and a reflection on the role of community radio in a community. On January 8, 2011, there was a horrific shooting at a “Congress on Your Corner” event outside a grocery store in Tucson, Arizona. Six dead, more wounded physically and emotionally, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords shot in the head. KXCI’s slogan – “real people, real radio” – had particular resonance that January as KXCI responded to the crisis from its position as a local station with 70 djs, diversity in music, and locally produced public affairs programs.

The shooting occurred on a Saturday, a day of DJ specialty shows – Ruby’s Roadhouse, Kidd Squidd’s Mystery Jukebox, and Marty Kool’s Blues Review. Carol Anderson (aka Ruby) was live on the air while fragmentary news of the shooting circulated. Prepared in advance, she had the day’s music at hand. Ruby recalls, “We do our shows in real time and without any pre-recorded segments, so I was in the most difficult position of trying to keep my emotions in check so that I could still operate the broadcast equipment and keep the flow of programming going until I could get more information.” She experienced a huge dissonance between the horrifying events playing out and rockin’ roadhouse tunes. Musically, the show was “upbeat and positive” yet the dj experienced “intense emotions: confusion-fear-sorry-anger.” Ruby reflected, “My belief was that having continuity of programming took precedence over the (still unfolding) events of that day, and perhaps even offered a source of comfort for some.”

Music Director Duncan Hudson was at first conflicted about KXCI’s response, thinking they should air PSAs about mental health and interview guests on air. Hudson “came to realize that KXCI’s role in the community at this difficult time was to keep things consistent and dependable. KXCI’s core philosophy is to be an alternative to news and to talk.” While there are featured albums each week, KXCI does not dictate playlists. In the aftermath of January 8, each dj reacted in her/his own way, connecting with community and healing through music. Hudson commented, “KXCI creates a culture of self-expression and djs express themselves through their shows, through music that is meaningful to them. What we do every day made what we did in the crisis the right way to respond.” KXCI’s structure meant that 70 individuals created their own playlists, going live to express the inexpressible through music. General Manager Randy Peterson estimated that calls to the station were 50-to-1 thanking KXCI for the music.

While KXCI did not have the wherewithal to cover breaking news, KXCI’s locally produced public affairs programming was able to explore the local situation in depth. KXCI Community Engagement Director Amanda Shauger produces 30 Minutes, a weekly public affairs show. The day after the shooting, 30 Minutes covered the first press conference. One week later, 30 Minutes explored a local memorial for healing. In the months that followed, Shauger produced podcasts about mental health first aid in Tucson and the first “Beyond” community-wide event that commemorates loss, celebrates togetherness, and recommits to building a future. In podcasts where voices speak at leisure rather than in sound bites, 30 Minutes helped to close “the gap between national and local knowledge,” an issue that Joy Fuqua examines in her study of “national media as official narrators” in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Leonard Bernstein, writing in November 1963, in the aftermath of President Kennedy’s assassination: “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.” [i] One may think that the music of comfort would be sad songs in a minor key. That wasn’t the case at KXCI. Musician and neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin notes, “Whenever humans come together for any reason, music is there” (6). He explains how music channels the inexpressible, arousing complex interconnections with memory. Levitin writes, “We take pleasure in the sensory experience, and find comfort in its familiarity and the safety that familiarity brings” (242). “We surrender to music when we listen to it” — we let ourselves become vulnerable. Levitin cites “groove” as the quality that connects us to music: “When a song has a good groove, it invites us into a sonic world that we don’t want to leave.  Although we are aware of the pulse of the song, external time seems to stand still, and we don’t want the song to ever end” (170). Pleasure, safety, familiarity, vulnerability — these words describe the music listener’s state of mind.

Peter Brooks’ concept of the “mute gesture” of melodrama intersects with music in many ways. The mute gesture articulates the inarticulate nature of grief and response to trauma. It is the gesture that speaks when words cannot. The mute gesture calls to mind Roland Barthes’ “third meaning … I cannot name it, but I can clearly see the features … of which this sign … is composed.”[ii] The emotional and collective affect of music brought comfort and hope to the grieving subject. Music spoke for the dumbfounded and helped the community cope through those days of trauma and disbelief.

Inspired by impromptu shrines, local musician Mitzi Cowell wrote Shine From the Valley “to honor the positive response of the community, the potential of humanity to rise to a higher state.” Her hybrid pop-country tune crossed the demographics of Tucson. Local musician and documentary filmmaker Beverly Seckinger produced the music video. The setting — a desert chapel at sunset — calls upon regional iconography of peace and hope. Cowell commented, “music is the closest thing to magic that the human race has.” On her Media Praxis website, Alexandra Juhasz explores “the [feminist] distinction between one’s own voice and the voice of history.” Music around Tucson’s tragedy offered both voices: a voice for this ineffable and emotional moment in history; and the invitation to “self-name,” to find one’s way in and through the music. Notes [i] Bernstein’s statement graces the mission statement of Luz de Vida/Light of Life, a Music Against Violence album that benefits the fund for the victims of January 8. [ii] Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning” (trans. Richard Howard) Artforum 11:5 (January 1973), 46-50.