Podcasting has been a bit of an accidental specialism. I originally started it as a personal hobby, and then found it a useful tool to patch up holes in my pedagogic knowledge, connect with colleagues and attack my dreadful imposter syndrome. 

What was originally going to be 'pedagogy for potplants', me alone in a room - talking to a plant to try and figure out pedagogic theory, transformed through the sheer luck of running in to the fabulous Dr Mark Childs beforehand into a fun space to learn about pedagogy and bring a bit of my authentic, geeky self to my practice and development.

Doing it led to conversations and interactions with peers within the university, and wider educational sphere. It turns out it wasn't just useful for me - other people were listening to it and finding the subject useful and how we were articulating it approachable.

Since then, I've supported other teams within the OU, and peers without, in getting started with their own podcasting for professional development - and have made it my mission to give the brilliant folk in the HE community a playful platform to pod their powerful pedagogic ponderings. I've also run a three day long podcasting activity at the Playful Learning Conference. Crikey that was intense, but great.

Building on skills I developed in my personal podcasting pursuits I'm a happy end-to-end podcaster, able to:

• Plan episodes

• Draw in interesting guests

• Record, facilitate and host

• Treat and repair dodgy sound (and oh boy is there a lot of that about, god bless you iZotope RX9 Advanced)

• Edit, and pull out narrative

• Build and maintain a WordPress site and syndicated podcast feed

• Publish and publicise (although I'm terrible at this last bit - see reflections).

Podcasting was a real lifeline to me at a time where I was suffering from dreadful imposter syndrome, and thought I had made a terrible mistake in my choice of career. As well as giving me a creative way to blow off steam it became a tool I could use to teach myself the supporting research of my profession - discuss it in a playful, safe environment with peers - and start to build up confidence in both the understanding and articulation of it. Almost everything useful I've learned about pedagogy started off here.

The impact on my own development has been huge, and I've been gratified to discover that it's also had a positive impact on the learning of others. Over the years I've had people get in touch saying that they'd listened to the show, and that we managed to demystify a subject for them (our one on Ontology and Epistemology was a real winner). The show is a regular feature of Mary Jacob's Weekly Ed-tech roundup, and has by all accounts started showing up in references of assignments submitted by PGCE students.

Looking back through our stats, I'm reminded that the demystification of the components of pedagogy was the original aim of the show - and seems to be what attracts the most downloads and conversation. I've taken a slight detour over the last six months to bring in voices from the wider community, and while I feel it's made the discussions richer (we've met some absolutely brilliant people) the listener numbers have dropped a tad - suggesting that we need to re-tighten the focus of the show.

Saying that, as it's my show and I'm not getting paid to do it, I can darn well do what i want. Ha!

If I could have my time again, I'd teleport back to 2006 - study sound engineering and narrative journalism, and then gamble my life on radio and podcasting. Failing the invention of a time machine though, I'm going to keep trying to find ways to draw it in to my professional practice going forwards.