Changes within educational technology are complex and uncertain in how they may ultimately impact the institutions of teaching and learning. But (as I’ve stated many times), we are not without guides in determining potential paths and directions. We have the experience of other industries that felt one of their primary products was content and discourse around content: newspapers, TV news, magazines, music, and movie industries. While we can’t directly apply all the lessons of those fields to education, we can certainly gain insight from how different modes of interacting with content and with others may influence education. Mark Glaser provides a quick overview of changes in media and how communication tools have shifted control/power…and the impact on reduced circulation of newspapers and advertising (advertising follows energy and eyeballs, making it a good indicator of macro trends in media habits of consumers).
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MSM getting the picture ‘as if through a glass, darkly.’ Interesting stats but I’d expect some skew.
The comment that ‘Bloggers can learn (from journalists) about being fair and having ethical standards…’ brings on a bit of a clench.
Some bloggers may be able to learn some of this from some journalists.
Thanks for this link to Mark Glaser’s post.
Glaser does a good job of demonstrating that things have indeed changed substantially in the news media. He also does a nice job of identifying several current features of the changes. Both these aspects are useful, but they don’t in any way explain why the changes occurred or even describe the institutional circumstances that existed when the changes occurred. Without this level of explanation, drawing analogies between print media (for example) and education can only be tentative.
Consider, for example, Glaser’s 2nd rule that “people are in control of their media experience.” That seems plausible, at least for some people. What we don’t know, at least from his post, is how that happened. What circumstances existed to make this change possible? Do these circumstances currently exist in education? Even if they do exist, are there also dissimilarities between education and media that would lead us to believe the changes in education will play out differently? Without knowing these things, we cannot say much about whether we’ll ever see “people in control of their learning experience” based on the experience of the news media industry.
I’d love to see some work along these lines, identifying points of similarity and dissimilarity between changes occurring in education and changes that have already occurred in other industries. Does anyone know if it exists?
Here’s a related piece by Henry Jenkins at MIT called “Public Intellectuals in the New-Media Landscape” (http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i30/30b01801.htm). It’s from the Chronicle of Higher Education, but is not behind their subscription firewall. The article actually begins in paragraph 3.