Converging Media and Education

Instructional applications of networked interactive broadband synchronous, asynchronous, symmetric, and asymmetric communication technologies

Presentation at the National Association of Broadcasters convention, April 16, 2000.

This presentation may contain images, tradennames, etc.that are owned by various third parties. No infringing rights of creation or ownership are implied by their inclusion therein. Copyright of this presentation resides with Corrie Bergeron, Jr.

There will be a test afterwards. It’s called the rest of your career.
First a brief review of the concepts I covered here last year. One can define interactivity in any number of ways. These five levels are a taxonomy that I find to be useful

ah, fuggedaboudit!

You want to read about it, go here.

IT’S COMMUNICATION! THERE IS NOTHING NEW OR MYSTERIOUS HERE!

COMM 101 definition- Transmitting a message to create an effect.
The medium is irrelevant. What matters is the fact that a message is being sent with the intent of effecting a change.
 
Technology is irrelevant to human needs. It does not change WHAT people need…

…only HOW they get it.

Mind you, that doesn't mean that it WON'T change whole industries. People like to listen to music.

500 years ago, they waited for a minstrel to come to town.

50 years ago, they turned on the radio.

25 years ago they bought LPs

10 years ago they bought CDs

Now they swap MP3s, and there's no record company in the loop to control production and distribution.

So What? Why do we care about communicating? What is the change we want to effect?

With commercial programming, all we REALLY want to do is keep the viewers’ eyes on the screen long enough to see the ads we’ve sold. If cockfights generate Nielsens, then we’ll broadcast cockfights. (Well, that IS what Jerry Springer is, right? )

The difference between most commercial programming and instructional programming is that educators care about what the viewer can do after the program is over. They are accountable for that.

The funny thing is, people form communities around content. X-files, Seinfeld, ER, Disney, and so on. Another word for that, btw, is BRAND.

Umm, that should be, “Historical Context” (Don't use speech-recognition software when you have a cold.)

The challenges we are facing are nothing new. Every new mass communication technology in the last hundred years has faced the same set of issues.

  1. First, the thing is invented, and it’s used to do the same old things in slightly new ways.
  2. Then someone figures out how to do something new and different. The novelty is off-putting.
  3. The novelty wears off, and everyone asks, so what good is it?
  4. Then a master communicator figures out how to exploit the new medium, and eventually their techniques become part of the language.

Set up a camera in the middle of the auditorium and film the play, or the vaudeville sketch.

The first special-effects film was very simple - set up a camera next to a train track, and film the locomotive coming at you. Audiences were not prepared, and ran from the theater in panic.

But soon the novelty wore off. What good is it?

New tools like the dolly, the pan / tilt head, the zoom lens - great toys.

But it took visionary storytellers like Hitchcock and Eisenstein to USE them - exploit them - to tell stories.

And today, we all know what it means when the camera zooms in on an actor’s sweaty face while the music plays in a minor key.

Radio was doing the same old thing - concert-hall performances - for years.

Then something happened one Halloween evening in the late 30's: The power of MASS SYNCHRONOUS communication was demonstrated.

Changed the water on the beans.
TV was the same thing. In the beginning, it was talking heads with the same content that had been provided over the radio.
 
Seriously, we have an entire visual vocabulary related to television. It is part of the culture, to the point that it can parody itself with shows like South Park and Home Improvement.
So what’s next? There’s this thing called the Internet, and you can use it to communicate. What do we do with it?
Here are some of the ideas I’ve seen touted as revolutionary.
Just my opinion... snxkxkx.....
It’s the same old story - using a new technology to carry old ideas. (I have the parable backwards, BTW - it’s new wine into old wineskins in the Bible. But for my purposes the metaphor works better this way.)

Let’s go to Sesame Street - as a class.

Meet you in Zabu-land Tuesday at 1400UCT!

Let’s explore gravity at the Newton’s Apple site.

The cost of solid instructional features is incremental to the cost of production.

(I’m leaving out ad revenues, of course. A top-draw show like Cops makes a lot of money because you’re selling eyeballs to the advertisers. Xfiles loses money out of the gate because you can’t charge enough for the ads. But you make it up in syndication.)
These are non-trivial issues, mind you.
As are these. We’re still in the early days. People are running from the theaters, afraid they’ll be hit by the train. They’re reporting Martians in Battery Park. It’s going to take a while to get the common language of using networked communication technology. But remember - the technology only changes the HOW. Not the WHAT.
We’ve got a wonderful opportunity to create a new kind of communications - new kinds of communities (remember, another word for that is brand.)