by Derek Morrison, 6 April 2010
The following posting reflects the perspectives and opinions of the author alone and should not be construed as necessarily representing the views of any other individual or organisation.
In an earlier posting Are you digital natives paying attention? (Auricle, 6 February 2010) I highlighted the excellent US PBS Digital Nation project. Digital Nation has proved to be the tip of an impressive iceberg of high quality resources offered under the banner of the Forum Network a joint initiative by PBS and NPR. Forum Network offers different views of its resource collections with the Lectures and Series tabs providing a virtual cornucopia of material that’s well worth exploring. For example, there are some 40 audio and video lectures offered in the MediaShift series. MediaShift is a public media service of the US PBS & NPR which in short form: “tracks how digital media, from blogs to podcasts to citizen journalism, are changing society and culture, and raising legal and ethical questions in connection with their use.”. Or, in longer form, it describes its purpose as:
… tracking how weblogs, podcasting, citizen journalism, wikis, news aggregators and online video are changing our media world. MediaShift includes commentary and reporting to tell stories of how the shifting media landscape is changing the way we get our news and information, while also providing a place for public participation and feedback.
With the redesign in 2008, MediaShift now includes more correspondents and “embeds,” who are writing change diaries about the way organizations are dealing with digital disruptions. The embeds work at newspapers, radio and TV stations, and in journalism education institutions. (http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/about/)
MediaShift also has a sibling project Idea Lab which:
“… is a group blog by innovators who are reinventing community news for the Digital Age.”. Each contributor to Idea Lab is “a winner of the Knight News Challenge grant to reshape community news.”
In Are you digital natives paying attention? (Auricle, 6 February 2010) and in other Auricle postings I’ve also commented how the BBC could learn from how the PBS and NPR discharge their public mission despite the vastly different fiscal model which applies on this side of the Atlantic. In particular, I’ve commented how NPR’s On the Media is a worthy reference model because it has normalised the provision of a long life MP3 and transcript archive. It would also be good to identify some equivalent of the PBS/NPR Forum Network within the BBC’s current or future offerings. Although the BBC archive and its Learning section are welcome facilities neither are a Forum Network equivalent.
Try this little experiment. Type “lectures BBC” into your favourite search engine. Repeat the exercise with “lectures PBS”. Try other search terms if you like.
There appears to be no single aggregated source of public lectures presented via the main BBC web site although there are some notable lecture series, e.g. Reith Lectures, the Richard Dimbleby Lecture, Neil MacGregor’s History of the World series. I’m interpreting the term “lectures” broadly here but in the main I’m meaning a prepared articulation and or exposition, perhaps illustrated, which has educational intention. I personally have no difficulty in incorporating the idea of well prepared and delivered lectures into an overall constructivist or connectivist framework; so no fixed educational ideology here.
But back to the BBC.
To be fair, the BBC does have a unique relationship with the UK Open University most notably manifested via the Open2Net portal. Very worthy although Open2Net is, it’s oriented to gently steering users of the portal towards OU courses. And while the Open University certainly provides some outstanding open resources in its own right via its OpenLearn site what I’m comparing here is the way that two major national public broadcasters, i.e. PBS and the BBC directly aggregate, collate and present their educational material. At the moment I think that PBS/NPR are doing a better job and there are concerns that the forthcoming ‘rationalisation’ of the BBC’s digital and web presence announced by its Director General Mark Thompson will not improve the situation. The BBC’s own declared mission statement has been since its inception in 1927 “to enrich people’s lives with programmes and services that inform, educate and entertain.” At the moment I think it’s a mite too difficult for users to identify the inform and educate stuff withough wading through a veritable forest of radio and television programmes. The PBS/NPR approach in which they offer some aggregation and user friendly interfaces just seems easier to me.
