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!

I received an interesting announcement today via an email, regarding an upcoming presentation on using Second Life as a learning environment. I havent thought about 3D multi user environments since I was working at techbc back in the day, and one of the first projects we undertook was a VRML learning space. Remember VRML? This was waaay back before blogs (so there are no links), when virtual reality was all the rage. There is a video however that I should go dig up and repost on this site. I’m sure it would be good for a few laughs seems as it would be almost a decade old! (gad is that how long I’ve been in this business?)
The announcement for this latest incarnation of 3D collaboration was listed on the elearning forum and described by them as…

Since opening to the public in 2003, Second Life has grown explosively and today is inhabited by 560,000 people from around the globe. Almost every week, articles are appearing in the press or the blogosphere exploring various aspects of Second Life. However, relatively little analysis and discussion has so far taken place regarding the future potential of Second Life to transform corporate learning and training as we know it.

So this is going to be from a corporate angle, but if you are thinking that 3D animated gaming environments have no place in a university setting, think again. I haven’t looked into this much myself, but Alan Levine, began a project with the nmc back in april using secondlife, which I have been meaning to find out more about.

The NMC Campus is an experimental effort developed to inform the New Media Consortium’s work in educational gaming. In early 2006, the organization made the decision to create a space for experimentation in a virtual 3-D world and began a search for suitable platforms, with a special interest in massively multi-player environments.

An interesting sidenote. Alan ended up having a slight disagreement with flickr about the terms of use, since screenshots from the seckr grouondlife playing environment do not technically count as “photographs”. THis must have sorted itself out because I see the special user account he set is still operational and the flickr group is choke full of “photos” of people learning in second life. I wonder what they are learning in there anyway?

If you are really interested in the potential uses of Second Life, you could do worse than checking out Eric Rice and his extensive use of the site for doing interviews, podcasting vlogging, and whatever other technology he is forging ahead showing others the potential of. He often gets in the news for such things, and also takes photos of his exploits on second life.

Given the amount of videos I have been watching online lately, I couldnt resist following up on this, and sharing some of my recent favs.

Starting with the icing, Abject Learning highlighted a post today from Gardner Writes that makes this relevant to education. My own take is going to be a bit more off topic educationally speaking. Brian then follows to make my week with a link to one of the coolest home produced vids I’ve seen. Just amazing, particularly if you have done that drive.

This took me back a couple weeks to a gem from geek entertainment tv interviewing Tom Green. They discussed his recently launched vlogging, ‘deputy’ community, and promoted vloggercon. The interview is hilarious for one thing, and green does a classic commentary on “old media”, that kills. Essentially the point from both the interview”er” and “ee”, was, “look out TV and Hollywood, the internet is ours”.

Proving the point on a larger scale this post via Screenhead, the first “open movie”, Elephants Dream,

“…made entirely with open source graphics software such as Blender, and with all production files freely available to use however you please, under a Creative Commons license.”

Their process is available on wikipedia, and serves as a model for collaboration between open source software and filmmakers, and who knows, maybe an entirely new industry just for good measure.

Lastly, these two virals that speak out humorously against the history of oil, and conspiratorially question the events of 9/11. This new media thing certainly has the potential to stir things up. I’m curious if that will be the case on campus and in the classroom.

Oh, and not to leave things on a somber note, you have to see Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros

yay screenhead!