Teach42

After reading Guhlin’s post about his fears that Discovery Education is taking over the digital media world, I had a very interesting IM conversation with Hall.  To be honest, at first I wasn’t going to touch the conversation.  I think Hall is going to respond on our own blog.  But the conversation we were having generated a few ideas that seem to be sticking.

MIguel is calling for a rebellion.  And I can dig that, I’m always up for a good rebellion!  The goals of the rebellion?  To bring low cost digital video distribution systems (DVDS) to school.  Makes perfect sense.  Distribution systems are cheap, storage space is cheap, and bandwidth is cheap.

The million dollar quesiton is:  Where is the content coming from?

My first reaction is to say that ‘the people’ would generate the content.  Yes, ‘the people’.  Heck, ‘the people’ have created an entire encyclopedia.  ‘The people’ have created incredible amounts of digital media on community sites like YouTube.

However, I’d hardly consider most of the content in YouTube to be worth showing in your classroom.  The potential is there, but it’s raw potential. 

So the next question is, could somebody create an open community for user generated educationally rich digital media?  Yes they could, but would it be something that could replace the likes of unitedstreaming?  Right now, I’d have to say no.

This is the age of digital empowerment.  Most computers have the hardware and software to create digital stories right out of the box.  Digital camcorder prices continue to drop.  Every step in the process continues to become easier and easier.

And yet there’s still a significant amount of time that needs to be spent in order to create a quality educational video clip to be shown in a classroom.  It ain’t easy to script it, shoot it and edit it down to a point that other teachers will be able to use it in their lessons. 
I certainly don’t see it happening on a large scale in 2006.

That’s not to say I don’t see it happening soon.  Maybe in about 5 years, I can see classes teaming up to create media to accompany lessons (think WikiBooks but for educational video).  While students can do it now to demonstrate their learning about a topic, I’m not sure if they can do it professionally enough that other teachers would use it for their own learning just yet. 

While the revolution may be coming, it’s coming in stages.  I think we’re in for a few more years of Diet Coke and Mentos before we get to people posting high quality videos about Atomic Structure on YouTube. 

Please note: These are my own personal thoughts and in no way represent the thoughts or opinions of Discovery Education or Discovery Communications Inc. 

technorati tags:digital, storytelling, media, education, streaming, video

Blogged with Flock

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

Enable CommentLuv?
If you have supplied a blog in the URL above, it will include a link to your most recent blog post.