Continuing the 'every educator is a broadcaster' theme of recent months, I'm pleased to point you at the OU YouTube channel. It has two main parts (with a third 'Research' coming on line soon): OU Life which has videos from students and staff; and OU Learn which has clips from OU courses.
It'll be interesting to see how it develops. There are only a handful of videos up at the moment. Unlike a conventional university we can't just point a camera at a lecture and get a (quite boring) video. While we have a large archive, the (swear, curse, shout) rights clearance on this stuff is more difficult than it would be in a sane world, so there is something of a bottleneck.
I'm really excited about it though. What I hope is that its very presence is enough to make educators start to think of 'icasting' and producing a range of videos, and even better, getting their students to do the same.
The video above was produced on request from Laura.
I was asked to provide some thoughts on digital literacies for the Vice Chancellor, but rather than just do a dead email, in keeping with the spirit of the topic, I thought I'd put them in a blog post.
This isn't the research related view, but rather a personal perspective. Here are what I think are interesting about what we might term new digital literacies:
<Now Broadcasting Live, Jose: http://flickr.com/photos/raveneye/2473034500/>
I was part of the broadcast strategy review at the OU, where we looked at what broadcast meant to us in the internet age. The OU has partly defined itself by its relationship to broadcast, and so it seemed like a good time to reexamine that. You won't be surprised to hear that my basic line was 'forget traditional broadcast and put it all online' (that was a step too far for most, but we made some progress).
Anyway, there is a Director of Multi-Platform Broadcasting post being advertised. We struggled over the title - the broadcast part is appropriate if one views it as working with the BBC, but less so if the role is to help educators become self-broadcasters. So, I think it's a bit of a compromise because what the title reflects is that this is a shifting landscape.
This relationship to broadcast is something I've been pondering recently. On Friday I happened to spend nearly all day in broad/narrowcasting activities. I didn't intentionally bunch all this activity into one day, and it's not typical, but it is telling. Here's what I did:
This was, of course, all done by myself, on my laptop, with no support and using (mainly) free software. This is far removed from any notion of 'broadcasting' we have, it's focused on individual activity - iCasting.
I was never much of a fan of the term 'digital literacies' - to me it seemed like an excuse to say people needed training and development in using new tools, rather than just encouraging them to use them, e.g. we needed to create courses on becoming digitally literate before we would let our students use them, and then we could tick a box saying this was covered, like basic numeracy. I still think encouraging people to play is the best approach, but my recent dabbling with making videos has made me appreciate that this may be approaching a digital literacy.
This is about more than technical or design skills, more significant is the mental shift to thinking of iCasting as the route for distributing ideas. We have so long been subject to the tyranny of paper, that to conceive of an output in any other form takes a real effort. In fact, we often mistake the production of a paper artefact for the actual output of a project. So my message to the incoming Director is this - help us become iCasters.
Accusations of flogging dead horses may well be justified, but just in case you thought my Future of Content was some randomly assembled clips, the annotated version is now up on YouTube (again you have to click through to see the annotations).
So, I've now done the article, made a video of it, then added textual annotation to explain the video. Erm, full circle anyone? Still, you do now have a choice of medium.
Tony has posted a follow up to his original vid, so in the spirit of friendly competition, I'd best follow suit. I have taken my Future of Content post and done an eduVJ (as Patrick dubbed it) mix. I'm not sure it works as well as the first one, mainly because this is trying to make more of an academic point, so maybe the fit to the song isn't as neat.
I'm enjoying doing these though, and this one taught me some more about using Camtesia (such as save your file because it might crash out half way through). The last one was a Camtesia recording of Powerpoint, this one was all done in Camtesia. I hope you'll forgive this experimenting in public approach, it's a good way of learning.
Anyway, here it is, I'll do a YouTube annotated version later too, but this is the Blip.TV one:
YouTube now allows you to add annotations to your uploaded videos. It's very easy to do (to go back to my previous post, another example of lowering the 'cost' to the user). So, I took my edupunk video, and added some annotations, see below.
What adding comments does is potentially transform any video into an educational one. Much of teaching can be seen as providing commentary, analysis and interpretation on the world. YouTube annotation allows this second order decoding. If you combine that with the discussion permitted by comments and you've suddenly got a pretty compelling learning application. At the moment (I don't know if there are plans to change this), you can only add annotations to your own, uploaded videos. It would be much more powerful for educators if you could add annotations to other videos.
So here is my edupunk video with annotations. By adding these comments it changes from being a jokey nod to some of the people involved and edges closer to being an edupunk 101, ie you could use it to introduce the concept to novices now, in a way you probably couldn't with the original. You have a comparison now, the original unannotated version on Blip.tv and the annotated version on YouTube. I prefer it without comments, since any humour that may have been present in the original is destroyed by explanation. But the latter is a better teaching device.
[I've just tested this and despite what YouTube says, the embedded version seems to lose the annotation - click on the vid to go to YouTube where the annotations do work]
The other day I mentioned that I like to Twitter when I'm watching football on TV. My wife doesn't watch, and if I'm not in a pub, it's a way of sharing the experience. Then on Saturday it was the Eurovision Song Contest. I started to watch it, but put a DVD on, then when I looked at Twitter it was awash with Eurovision comments. It struck me that Eurovision was in many ways the perfect Twitter event. It is, in fact, quite boring (none of the songs are any good), so there is plenty of time to Twitter. At the same time, it is quite enjoyable and provokes comment, so there is a desire to share. And you know that it is a communal event, so others will be watching too.
There's not much broadcasters can do with this, except maybe set up a Twitter id (e.g. Woganesque commentator during Eurovision), but this ability to share the experience online may be the the thing that saves scheduling. Sky Plus and the iPlayer have pretty much destroyed the notion of scheduling, but for programmes and events you want to share, then it has to be done at the allotted time. This obviously applies to live events (sports mainly), but also to any programme people might congregate around. It could be The Apprentice (AJ likes to tweet about this), or Eastenders.
Gapingvoid may have been dismayed by the Brits twittering about Eurovision, but in this respect his talk of social objects is correct. The future of television is not in it being a solitary experience, but in being a social one.
Think of these as 'flash social networks' - Jyri Engestrom argues that "social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object.” Around TV we may see these social networks form for the duration of a programme and then dissipate. The key challenge for broadcasters is to facilitate this without stamping all over it, or going creepy treehouse on it.
[Update - Darren Waters had beaten me to it on this]
I was involved in the Broadcast Strategy Review at the Open University. We produced a website as the output (not a 100 page report!), most of which is for internal viewing only. I've taken my bit though, and uploaded it to Blip.tv. I am talking here specifically about how the changes in broadcast affect OU academics, but most of what I say applies across the board. My aim was to emphasise how the changing nature of broadcast is an exciting opportunity for educators. Unfortunately, even at its most excitable pitch my voice has all the enthusiasm of Clement Freud on valium, but as Billy Bragg said 'in a perfect world we'd all sing in tune/but this is reality so give me some room.'
Here it is (ignore the text at the end, that applies to the OU site):
PS - Blip.TV was much better than YouTube for this. For a start the audio didn't work in YouTube, and the text from screenshots is just awful.
