wu heping's Public Library

So, what do these sites mean for educators? What might it offer classrooms? I spent several days browsing YouTube, and I found tons of fun things, and lots of potentially beneficial classroom video clips, as well as the usual eye-opening experience when dealing with the world’s population and the things people want to share.

If you’re new to the site, search for a favorite musician, or a specific date, or even an old movie. There’s everything from video footage of a 1940s school picnic to a frightening (and controversial) look at Hurricane Katrina issues. The most subscribed channel at YouTube is that of an English widower who muses on everything from growing up during WWII to his experiences during college.

One critical issue to keep in mind when sharing and discussing these videos with your students is media literacy, including general Internet reliability. Are the videos truly what they say they are? Might some of these clips violate copyright? What constitutes “good” video?

My main concern in using any of these video sharing sites is that what makes it so powerful is also what makes it a tricky tool to use with ease. There are great discussions and commentary on many of the video clips, but those discussions are, for the most part, completely unfiltered and only mildly moderated. However, using and showing YouTube clips, then having your own classroom discussion about the clips, is an incredibly robust classroom tool. Working with students to create and upload their own videos is an even more powerful application.

I think that taking advantage of the excitement this kind of technology brings to our children is a worthwhile endeavor. Children love to produce, and teaching them the skills to make good productions takes advantage of their interest, and provides them with a wealth of skills. See “Film School,” from the December 2005/January 2006 issue of Edutopia magazine, for a look at the use of video in the classroom. In addition, weaving in good media literacy and skills for navigating the new waters of the Web helps us all.

One last note: To learn more about video sharing on the Web, see the USA Today article “Video websites pop up, invite postings.” the Digital Video Guru site’s comparison of ten video-sharing services. RateItAll.com’s Video Sharing and Download Sites.

Share your thoughts on video sharing sites and the potential they hold for classrooms.

F: Can you elaborate further on this leap from CMS to OS? In
particular, what will this transition mean for educators?

MP: At least two metaphors for course management systems preceded the notion of an "operating system for education." The
first metaphor viewed CMSs as course authoring tools. The author was the
individual instructor, and the technology was largely about creating and
managing a single online course environment. This view emphasized
functionality but missed the importance of institution-wide adoption,
integration, scalability, and more.

The second metaphor viewed CMSs as enterprise software products. Much like SCT,
Peoplesoft, or Datatel for administrative systems,
CMSs were enterprise academic
systems for teaching and learning. This view emphasized campus-wide deployment,
integration, and administrative capabilities but missed the notion that, unlike
administrative systems, the instructional process cannot be bounded?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùit is
infinite in its features, so to speak.

The metaphor of CMSs as operating systems for education is meant to convey
that the technology is as much about enabling a wide range of home-grown or
third-party instructional tools as it is about the features that come with the system on download. The fragmentation of
CMSs in higher education means that
students and faculty have to relearn the basic layout of an online classroom,
much like computer users had to back in the days of multiple desktop operating
systems. Similarly, they cannot share content or tools. CMS vendors try to load
tons of features in each release, failing to recognize that while innovation is
important, the long-term strategy must enable others to innovate on
the platform as well.

In sum, I view course management systems as operating systems for
education because I believe that their value lies as much in the standardized user
interface and open architecture for third-party developers as it does in the
particular tools with which they ship.

JF: By considering itself an OS and by requiring external
developers to adhere to its own Building Blocks development protocol, is
Blackboard trumping the evolving industry standards in favor of its own
proprietary one? What will become of the acceptance of emerging standards like IMS
and the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM)
in the world of higher education?

MP: Innovation requires both industry collaboration
and company-specific ingenuity. Building Blocks is Blackboard's implementation
of an architecture that we think is highly sophisticated for integration,
interoperability, and extensibility. But it was not developed in a vacuum. In
fact, the lead architect for Building Blocks (Bob Alcorn) was part of the original IMS
specifications team. A lot of Building Blocks comes from IMS and
other standards groups, and our goal is to make it 100% standards-based as the
industry reaches agreement. In the meantime, our clients need something that
works today. So our hope is that we can satisfy them and provide the industry with a
reference example at the same time.