Learning Partner Update: digital_content education_technology learning_environments
by Fritz
leave a comment
Some ideas about broadband and higher education
The folks at NextGenWeb.org and USTelecom asked for my thoughts on broadband and higher education and published this report. Please give it a listen and share your thoughts.
Learning Partner Update: digital-storyteller digital_content DMU education_technology educator learning_environments learning_partners
by Fritz
leave a comment
Did you hear the one about the educator, the recording executive, and the cell phone executive
Okay, here it is: A record company executive, an educator, and a cell phone executive all go to a meeting in at the Venetian in Macau….
Clearly by now, you’ve figured out the joke: educators don’t have a travel budgets that let them go to Macau. So the educator wasn’t there! So instead, we rely on media and blog reports of the event.
Media Post, MacUser, a PC World staff blogger, and Slashdot picked up the quote from Warner Music Group CEO Edger Bronfman about their company’s mistakes in understanding content and consumers.
Take it from us music industry folks. We used to fool ourselves. We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding.
And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find…and as a result of course, consumers won.
Today there’s a new consumer war being waged on the mobile front. And the perceived wisdom that consumers are “complacent” or that the “stickiness” of mobile services—established billing relationships, breadth of network coverage, brand loyalty—is enough to grow or even preserve your subscriber base without continually providing compelling consumer experiences, will prove to be wrong, dead wrong.
Bronfman’s corporate mea culpa was urging the mobile phone industry leaders not to imitate the failed business model of the recording industry. When I substitute “higher education” for “music industry” and “lifelong learners” for “consumer” or “customer”, and I see amazing parallels and similarities to what we do.
A group of my colleagues were involved in an email exchange over the weekend which included a citation that is similar to my earlier blog on EDUCAUSE Connect about the “producer” role of faculty. My colleague shared this from Lynch’s The online educator: A guide to creating the virtual classroom.
“To use a theater analogy, the traditional instructor serves as the lead actor- the one who must carry the show, even though there is allowance for other characters to interact. In contrast, the online instructor is more like the director- one who ensures that all the characters play their part and that the show moves smoothly from beginning to end, adding his or her expertise only when the actors seem to need assistance”
As educators, much of what we do is the creation of knowledge (content) and the delivery of knowledge (content). Whether the new role of the educator is director, producer, or some new iteration, there is significant strategy to learn from the missteps of the music business.
If you like, you can grab a .pdf version of Bronfman’s speech directly from Warner Music Group’s web site.
Learning Partner Update: broadcast_television digital_content hirschorn learning_partners video_network
by Fritz
leave a comment
Looking back, looking ahead
Learning Partners,
I’d like you to reserve about 8 minutes before busy holiday break to watch a short presentation. It’s like a movie on the Web, and more about it in a minute, but first, a prologue by me.
As you know, I was a Journalism undergrad and began working on the Internet in 1993. I’m not quite the inventor, but I was an early adopter. The marketing hype might even say “Pioneer”
But the Internet is not about technology — it’s always been about content, and more selfishly, “What’s in it for me?” As a user and creator of digital content, after you got over the “oh wow” of the Internet, it became a choice (or chore) of “what can it do for me?”
Which brings me to the 8 minute presentation. It is titled EPIC 2014 ( there is also a re-cut version, EPIC 2015) (This has been around the Web for a while)
This is a fictional “what if” about the growth of information and a fictitious merger between Google and Amazon and how it impacts media as we know it. It is not a condemnation. To me, it is a genre similar to John Lennon’s “Imagine”. He doesn’t propose that there is no heaven, he just asks to “Imagine there’s no heaven….”
There are several sites which host this presentation, but you might try:
http://www.robinsloan.com/epic/
there is a link in the middle of the box on that page which reads: Click Here to watch EPIC 2014
After you view the presentation (only 8 minutes) you may be interested in reading this month’s Atlantic Monthly:www.theatlantic.com/doc/200612/hirschorn-newspapers
PS: Hirschorn describes the decline and fall of the press media. I note, however, he is silent on the pending fall of broadcast television, especially since Hirschorn is the VP of original production and programing at the cable video network: VH1.
Hmmmmm.
