28.1 Embedding student expectations  (Page 2/7)

At the same time, other media industries are actually starting to get it. For the longest time many of them have either ignored the power of the web or dismissed it as the land of the criminal. It appears that some of them are starting to see that there is huge potential for letting people participate. The lessons from a space like youtube.com has not only transformed the ease with which one can publish online, it has totally shattered the notions of presence, conversation, and ownership. The fact that I can easily, with a couple of clicks, publish video with a global audience that can be instantly mashed up, commented on, and embedded in any website on the planet is pretty staggering. The fact that big media has ignored this opportunity is, to me, even more astonishing.

My problem with this is that I believe higher education is further behind accepting these simple facts.

The best example of big media getting it I can point to is the emergence of hulu.com as a real player in the online TV distribution world. Not only can I do almost all of my TV watching online for free, but I am now able to do something that I never thought I’d see from the likes of NBC — embed real TV content on my own site legally. Not only do they give you the simplicity of the embed tags, but they even let one embed custom versions of the content. If I only want to point to 30 seconds of a Saturday Night Live piece, I can do that. With this simple affordance, the future of personalized media just took another step forward. Where are the tools for education that take advantage and promote these ideas?

Imagine what that does to student expectations? If a student can control NBC, why in their mind can’t a faculty member respond to email on her terms? The future is happening right in front of us. I think it creates some interesting questions for our course and learning management systems, our policies, and our responsibility to promote open access to content. With the rise of blogs, with easily embedable media, and the explosion of point and click user-generated content what should the new tools look like for teaching and learning?

I have, for the most part, abandoned the notion of the walled garden as the assignment dumping ground via CMS drop boxes and have instead fully embraced the concepts of student centered creation. As we attempt to drive more students towards portfolio thinking via open platforms, what will it look like to turn an assignment in? Should we be rethinking a model built around aggregation that allows content to be “owned” by the creator and more easily shared to the faculty and the learning community? What does it mean for life long learning and an ability to connect with a broad community? How is moving towards a distributed set of resources that are easily reused going to challenge our control over curriculum? These are just some of the questions I am asking my administration and staff. People wonder if the print media folks are listening … I am more concerned if we are paying attention as well.