A revealing article on the realities facing old media. Replace ‘training media’ for ‘media’ and the implications are very similar.
For old (training) media, the magnitude of changes equates to Galileo pointing out that the universe doesn’t revolve around the Earth. Traditional (training) media are being rapidly decentred as the key source of (training input) public information. Their historic status recedes each moment a new source for information, or an extra platform for advertising, joins the avalanche of activity already in cyberspace.
A key point in the new media landscape is that the tech ‘plumbing’ - or Yahoo! Pipes if you prefer - is forcing media to become social. It is no longer enough to just release content and push it down as many channels as possible. Be it a song, an article or a lesson podcast, new content is often the embryo of a new conversation. After it is released a community of users will (if you are lucky!) consume it, discuss it, link to it and even remix it. Therefore, it would seem the key to content producing success is to facilitate as much conversation as possible, by first enabling content (breaking content down into its smallest indivisible chunks and wrapping it in metadata to facilitate syndication) and then encourage discussion, linking, remixing, etc. The original content source, while important, is only one piece of a much larger social conversation, or in our case here at Praxis, the learning process just becomes another form of conversation that our podcasts hopefully spark.
With such a mass of content available, value (and therefore revenue) opportunities will exist for those who can act as agents for the end user to help make sense of all the options available and better equip them to engage in the various conversation flows.
Source: Mail & Guardian
中文 Chinese
Michael Butler Says:
April 12th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
The problem is that if the pieces are sliced too small they become decontextualized. And at this point they make less and less “sense”.
Take a quote out of context or even use actual pieces of what someone said and you can twist their meaning into something that they wouldn’t recognize. I think the key to education is not in decontextualizing information (or whatever you call it) but providing even richer contexts- moving away from syndication and towards the creation of more complete, more meaningful worlds.
And while I agree there is a great deal of syndication going on I think the greater transformation in the media is that trusted people who know a great deal about a subject (and not writers most of whom are generalists) are able to attract and talk to millions of people now whereas they couldn’t before. Large, centralized media can no longer control the conversation!
Hank Horkoff Says:
April 12th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
I fully agree that pieces can’t be sliced too small. For our Praxis products, we tend to see the smallest unit as a lesson (podcast, review materials, discussion) rather than an individual phase, word, etc. The importance of de-constructing into small units (such as a single, self-contained lesson) is that they can be re-combined by both human (e.g. teachers) and non-human (software) agents in a variety of ways - very much unlike a textbook.
Michael Butler Says:
April 12th, 2007 at 10:22 pm
Hank,
Here comes the question. Isn’t something lost when the listener isn’t familiar with the wonderful personalities behind Chinesepod and some of the continuing stories? Part of your attraction is the personal appeal of the poddies which is built up over many listenings. Deconstructed, part of this appeal disappears. Hmmm, great tread. It has got me thinking.
Ken Carroll Says:
April 12th, 2007 at 10:55 pm
There’s far too much information out there for anyone to manage. The proliferation will only get faster. Aggregating relevant content (which, I guess, is one of the things we do) has obvious benefits from the perspective of learners with a common purpose. The only way people will be able to cope with all that data in the future (and the future is now) is through trusted networks: networks of people and technology networks.
My money quote from that article:
“…much traditional media (even online) are still stuck in the mode of treating people as only consumers of content.”
I wrote a (hasty) post here on precisely that topic today.
Ken Carroll
Hank Horkoff Says:
April 13th, 2007 at 9:52 am
@Michael
I actually think good personalities will become more important as the limiting walls of the classroom are broken down by the distribution power of the Internet. My argument is more against arbitrary bundling of ‘micro-chunked’ content (e.g. songs into albums). Obviously, this has limitations when there is an over-arching narrative, but I would argue this only makes up a very small percentage of the overall media landscape.