broadcast
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How do I? video search
Tony Hirst has created a neat little search interface using Google’s Coop customizable search engine. It searches a number of video archives to find instructional videos – he seeds it with the phrase ‘How do I?’ He explains it here, so I won’t bother, and thus save myself potential embarrassment by getting it wrong. I will say it returned some very good results for me. I put in a search for How do I.. create a podcast. And the resources it came back with were great. Having just written a piece on podcasting for a course, this reinforces to me the point that increasingly there is little point in me…
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The future of content -Pt 1
[Note – this is part of a distributed article, see previous post for explanation] The Future of Content In this section I am going to argue that digital content will move toward being free and widely available because of two complementary arguments: the argument from economics and the argument from quality. The argument from economics Where content can be digitised, it is having a profound effect on the economics that underlie the business model of that content, and the way society uses and thinks about it. In this opening section I want to look at two examples of how the digitisation of content has led to significant changes in a…
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Why headlines don’t matter
A few people have blogged about this report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism. They compared what constituted the headlines for online stories, and traditional media. They put it like this: If someday we have a world without journalists, or at least without editors, what would the news agenda look like? How would citizens make up a front page differently than professional news people? Which they did by looking at the top stories on sites such as Digg compared with those from traditional providers. The takeaway (amongst some interesting stuff) is "In a week when the mainstream press was focused on Iraq and the debate over immigration, the three…
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My first slidecast
As part of the broadcast strategy review at the OU, I wanted to show the different types of outputs that academics can produce which might be considered broadcast in some sense. One of these is slidecasting (the combination of powerpoint and audio). I upload my powerpoint files to Slideshare regularly, so thought I’d try adding the audio to one too. It’s a bit fiddly – you have to upload the audio to a different site, as Slideshare don’t host it (yet). Synching the audio with slides took a bit of getting used to (I even had to look at the help splashcast), but once I had the hang of it,…
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NYT enters education market, and the changing nature of newspapers
The New York Times has announced an inititiative that will provide content and social networking to students and educators. They claim it is "a new online initiative that pairs Times content with faculty course material for both credit-bearing and continuing education courses. Educators will now have the opportunity to select Times articles, archival content, graphics and multimedia content, including videos and Webcasts, gathered around specific subjects, and make them available to students online, along with other course materials" Perhaps more interestingly they edge towards a ‘Facebook for learning’ when they propose "In addition to enhanced course offerings for college students and lifelong learners, the Knowledge Network will serve as a…
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BT Vision – the sound of failure
A while back, as part of the Broadcast strategy review, I was in a meeting with BTVision. Their new broadcast package sounded interesting, you get Freeview through the aerial and then they use broadband to deliver on demand services, and some subscription. I liked the hybrid nature of it, so I decided to test it out. What followed was a catalogue, no, an encyclopedia, of errors. You have to subscribe to BT Broadband, so I did this on the phone and signed up for the BTVision package I wanted. The chap set an installation date for me (morning of 8th August). The broadband hub arrived and I installed that reasonably…
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The content law
Through the various projects I’ve been involved in recently (openlearn, broadcast strategy review, Flosscom), I’ve come to the realisation that something very significant has happened to the nature of content. It can be summarised thus: "Digital content wants to be free, and will seek the path to maximum access." Let’s call it the content law. It can be seen as a variation on Dan Gillmore’s ‘the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it’. Evans and Wurster have argued that the digital marketplace has seen the unbundling of the economics of information and physical product. This is most readily seen in retail, where you have to see the physical…
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Flickrvision and glanceability
I spent rather too long gazing at Flickrvision today (via Alan Cann). In a kind of web 2.0 orgy, I had some americana music playing through LastFM also which made it an audio/visual experience (of course I should have been twittering about it to really be 2.0, but I’ll blog instead). Tony Hirst recently blogged about the concept of glanceability which we picked up from James Cridland. This strikes me as a good example, although I didn’t so much glance as lose myself (perhaps we need another term such as procrastinatability or gazeability). I could dip in and out as I worked but it was more than just radio, and…
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A critical mass of tagged, subscribable content
I haven’t looked at Pageflakes for a while and went there the other day. I registered as a new user, and it impressed me with the default content it provided. It picked up I was in Cardiff from my IP address and provided me with a decent set of Cardiff related content, including: Cardiff news stories Cardiff photos A google map with Cardiff events marked on it Cardiff weather Several things struck me about this, apart from thinking ‘that’s cool!’ (as an aside can a 40 year old actually use the term ‘cool’ in any context without embarrassment?). The first was that considering it only had one bit of info…
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Open as to…
The OU’s internal curriculum and technology conference ran over the last couple of days. As with all such events it is both inspiring and a bit deflating. Inspiring because you get to hear of all the good stuff going on and see the enthusiasm of your colleagues. Deflating because things you want to happen still seem a long way off, and some of the same old arguments keep coming up. One of the thoughts that occurred to me (not for the first time) was that the OU now needs to establish a new definition of openness, and by extension, new identity for itself. The OU’s mission statement is: open to…
