Reel-to-Reel Tapes, Cassettes, and Digital Audio Media: Reverberations from a Half-Century of Recorded-Audio Response to Student Writing

This article applies Everett M. Rogers’ diffusion of innovations model to analyze how instructors have adopted the method of recording audio responses to students’ writing. The analysis focuses on five attributes of recorded-audio response—its observability, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and relative advantage—that, in Rogers’ model, influence the pace at which an innovation is adopted. I examine these attributes by drawing on a half-century of literature discussing recorded-audio response. The analysis reveals that recorded-audio response has elicited a mixed set of perceptions of the innovation's five attributes even among those who have adopted it, many perceptions that would tend to boost its adoption rate, but some that would tend to suppress it. Such an analysis provides both a systematic perspective on why audio-recording has remained a marginal method for responding to students’ writing, and also a heuristic by which writing instructors can consider adopting this and other pedagogical and technological innovations.

► Literature on recorded-audio response from the 1960s through the 2000s is examined. ► Recorded-audio response has elicited both positive and negative perceptions. ► Recorded-audio response is analyzed using Rogers’ diffusion of innovations model. ► The diffusion model explains recorded-audio response's long-standing marginality. ► Rogers’ diffusion of innovations model offers a heuristic for adopting innovations.