education building

I was pleased to see the new online tv series ‘Your Education Matters‘ launched with much acclaim while I was away on vacation in Thailand. Produced with the exceptional talents of the ‘media folks‘ here in the LIDC, in collaboration with the Faculty of Education.

‘Your Education Matters‘ TV Program

Together with Faculty of Education, Media Design is producing a television program called “Your Education Matters“. It is the only TV program in BC dedicated to addressing education issues beyond the headlines. Hosted by Dr. Paul Shaker, Dean of Education at SFU, the program provides insight and opinions from practitioners and scholars on education issues that matter for parents, students, educators and policy makers alike. Your Education Matters will air a new episode with a new topic monthly and rebroadcasts three times a week on Shaw TV Cable 4: Mondays 6:30 pm – 7:00 pm, Sundays 9:00 am – 9:30 am and 7:00 pm – 7:30 pm

“We have created this program to provide insights and opinions from practitioners and scholars on education issues that matter for parents, students, educators and policy makers alike,” said Dr. Paul Shaker who will host the new program. “Our guests are people who know the key issues and who can help our viewers be prepared to actively participate in making the education experience a successful one for learners today and in the future.”

What I was even more pleased to see, is that along with the televised broadcasts, that they made the videos available online using the social video sharing site VIMEO. Of course, I had to immediately sign up for an account and add SFU education as my first contact. Vimeo seems fun! =) Among the very simple but useful features it boasts (besides your typical social networking stuff) is the ability…

to “Like” a video thereby recommending it to your other contacts,

to ‘Embed‘ a video onto your own blog or website much like you can do with YouTube (excpet i cant right now due to some unfortunate bugs in my Wordpress installation. )

or to add an ‘RSS feed‘ of a members vids, which will allow people to subscribe to SFU Education videos using Google Reader or Bloglines or whatever and keep up on the latest SFU education videos from the comfort of their aggregator.

Now, the LIDC has a bit of history with video, particularly webcasts and maintains an extensive archive of videos produced within the department. As well, it has been involved in the SFU TV project in collaboration with Media and PR, but each of these has lacked the extent of features and user experience that comes with a full fledged ‘Web 2.0‘ application such as VIMEO. I for instance like to post videos on my own blog (when i ca) and although this is possible with videos from the archive, there is no GUI support for it, and it in fact requires some funny scripting to make it work. Clearly, this new initiative shows how the third Party sites can be used to increase the reach of media produced at the university, as well as open up access to ‘amateur’ media producers who want to enrich their website content. The revolution continues!