iPod's, Audio blogs,
Globalization of Education & the Creative Commons - E-Learning Christmas
Wishes from Canada: December 19th,
2003
By Paul Stacey
With
Christmas fast approaching I've put together a set of e-learning Christmas
wishes.
I
changed jobs in November and now work in downtown Vancouver a one hour bus ride
from where I live. I use that bus ride to play games on my cell phone. It took
me a week to come first in the African Grand Prix motorcycle racing game. I've
moved on to AstroSmash but long for something a little deeper, more thought
provoking. Let me start my Christmas wish list right now - e-learning games for
my cell phone.
Ah,
but its music and audio I truly think is best suited to that bus ride, so all I
really want for Christmas is an iPod.
I'm definitely impressed with Apple's new iPod product. Small and portable the
iPod picks up where the Walkman left off. To quote the iPod web site:" It's
lighter than 2 CDs, can hold up to 10,000 songs, thousands of digital photos and
works as a personal voice recorder".
Complementing
the iPod hardware is some equally well designed software, iTunes,
recently written up in Times magazine as the invention of the year http://www.time.com/time/2003/inventions
This coming year I'm going online with music in a big way. No more CD's. Apple's
iTunes store lets you buy and download any song for 99 cents. Song purchasing
through iTunes is currently restricted to the US so I'm looking at Canadian
alternatives like Puretracks http://www.puretracks.com.
Here in Vancouver Telus is also offering this service at http://www.mytelus.com/music/display.do.
One
of the things iTunes has that I've found particularly captivating is Radio
Stations. You have to download and install the free iTunes software (available
for Mac & Windows) to see these but check them out! A fantastic array of
radio stations are a click away providing a great range of web delivered music
from Blues, to Jazz, Holiday and International. I've been listening to Persian,
Latino, Top 40 Italian hits, popular music from Hungary and irreverent Xmas
music from San Francisco.
For
me audio over the web is one of the major innovations of the past year. One of
my Christmas wishes is for more widespread adoption and use of audio in
e-learning. Audio is "low threshold", easy to do with minimal system
requirements. In the context of audio in e-learning I've been using audio voice
boards from Wimba http://www.wimba.com/tools/vboard.php,
Voice-Over-IP in products like VClass from Elluminate http://www.elluminate.com,
and recording "on the street" audio using a handheld digital audio
recording device - Olympus
DS-330.
Audio
provides emotion, personality, and context, essential elements in the
personalization of e-learning.
I've
written before about weblogs and I'm delighted to report blogs are being
extended and enriched via audio. Audblog enables audio posting to your blog site
with any phone, at any time, from any where. You call the number, record a post,
then your blog is updated with an audblog icon and a link to your recorded
audio. Check it out at http://www.audblog.com.
A
major Christmas wish for me is greater dialogue and exploration of the issues
surrounding the growing globalization of education. There is a large
international demand for North American education. E-learning opens up new
opportunities for fulfilling that demand.
As
public and private suppliers of education enter in to the education export
business a dialogue needs to open up on the impact and efficacy of this change.
In
January I'll be hosting and moderating a debate on "Globalization of
Education" at the World Bank's International Forum on Investment in Private
Higher Education in Washington. The format for this event reflects the new world
of possibilities of web-enabled digital audio. Here's how things will work.
Prior
to the debate delegates and online international participants are invited to
discuss the pros and cons of globalization of education in an online forum. The
discussion is seeded with questions like - Is education a merchandisable,
for-profit commodity, or a public service? How effective will globalization of
education be in addressing the divide between haves and have nots? Is
globalization of education merely market distribution of content or are there
aspects of diversity, social networking and cultural exchange in the mix?
As
part of the online discussion, in advance of the debate, online participants are
invited to post questions they think should be put to the debaters.
On
January 23rd the debate will occur "live" for World Bank delegates in
Washington and simultaneously webcast out to online participants around the
world. Debaters will be John Dawkins, former Australian Minister of Education
and Minister of Finance, and Terry Ryan a Director with the African Centre for
Economic Growth. As moderator I'll ask the debaters to address questions from
the pre-debate online forum, as well as "live" questions from both
onsite and online participants. Think you might want to participate? Watch for
news on this event in LearningTimes http://www.learningtimes.org.
The
topic, globalization of education, is thought provoking so I expect this to be a
lively exchange. The debate will be webcast using software that allows the whole
thing to be recorded. At its conclusion an "archive" of the debate
will be available on line for subsequent review by anyone interested.
This
kind of bridging and mingling of a face-to-face audience with a virtual audience
is exciting and creates a new hybrid form of doing events and conferences. Event
organizers can significantly increase the number of participants and broaden the
reach of their event well outside of the country in which it is physically
taking place.
As
e-learning goes global one of the major issues revolves around creative control
of content. Here in North America we've already seen how explosive this issue is
in the recording industry. Let me express a final Christmas wish for a more
balanced approach to sharing, distribution and reuse of e-learning.
So
far, we've got the heavy hand approach where it seems virtually everything is
regulated and all rights reserved. In September, the Recording Industry
Association of America filed more than 250 lawsuits against people who uploaded
or shared files using software like Kazaa. Here in Canada just this past Tuesday
the head of the Canadian Recording Industry Association gave notice that they
will file lawsuits against individuals similar to ones launched in the United
States.
At
the other extreme are more anarchic approaches like the free software and open
source movements.
A
welcome voice of reason and balance in the midst of all this is the Creative
Commons http://www.creativecommons.org.
A Creative Commons license allows you to specify conditions for use of your work
by others.
You
can specify things like:
- permit
others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work but only with
attribution. Use by others requires you to be acknowledged and credited as
the original author
- use of the work for commercial purposes
requires your permission
- your work can be altered and modified but
only if the changes are shared with others
Once you are finished making your choices a
license is embedded into the work itself. For specifics on use of Creative
Commons by educators check out: http://creativecommons.org/learn/artistscorners
The Get
Content area of the Creative Commons provides links to educational sites
that have already started using the Creative Commons license approach. Sites
like:
The Connexions Project at Rice University in
Houston providing engineering related content http://cnx.rice.edu/
Berklee Shares providing music lessons you can
download and share. http://www.berkleeshares.com/
So there you have it, my e-learning Christmas
wish list. Of course these aren't all just for me, I wish on behalf of all
e-learners everywhere and invite you all to be Santas for learning. Have you got
a suggestion related to my Christmas wish list? Let me know.
Paul
Stacey, is Director of Development for BCcampus, a collaboration of
post-secondary institutions in British Columbia providing a central portal for
online access to post-secondary online learning courses, programs and resources.
Paul also helps host & produce LearningTimes
an online community for education professionals. Contact: Paul
Stacey
What Do You Think? Talk Back To Paul
Stacey
E-Learning: An
opinionated monthly column exploring the current use, future potential, and
commercial value of e-learning in BC’s high tech sector.
E-Learning
Archive: an index and links to all the E-learning columns Paul has written
for T-Net going back to April 2000.
