Not your father’s internet
“The Machine is Us/ing Us (Final Version)” provided by: mwesch
One of the strengths of social software which can’t be emphasised enough is its depth and capacity to serve learning and teaching via a variety of different mediums including text, video and images. Furthermore the speed with which you can develop and disseminate information means minimal time investment is required to technically develop the content as compared to traditional websites.
In the case of the latter, in the past, static web content could only be made available after coding up pages in HTML, locating a hosting provider, paying for a hosting deal and then beginning the process of content development and uploading to the site. With social software the barriers to use have been drastically reduced.
The emergence of powerful search engines such as Google, as well as collaborative technologies such as wikis extend this capacity by establishing existing sources of reference material that can augment original content.
As a case in point, I am an amateur guitar player in my free time and have taken to sharing my performances on YouTube. Initially this was the end-all and be all. I’d capture a song on a web camera or digital video camera, upload it to YouTube, perhaps add a brief description and that would be it. However over time I realised the video clips were themselves learning objects that could be put to a greater purpose.
Furthermore YouTube offers the capacity to link to - and more importantly EMBED - videos in external sites, meaning the video can be viewed on a third party site such as a blog. The YouTube video clip at the beginning of this post, “The Machine is Us/ing Us (Final Version)”, is an example of an embedded video clip. It is posted and hosted on a different application entirely, however the availability of a code snippet enables me to reuse the content in a different context.
Making this connection, it becomes clear that YouTube clips, as well as many other digital media hosting provider in general (Flickr, PicasaWeb, Photobucket, and Google Video to name a few), can be used to graphically illustrate and more easily convey the information being presented in text - thereby re-inforcing the message.
In the example of my guitar video, I’ve included my version of Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” as an embedded video in a blog post that outlines a tutorial on how to play it. This provides beginning guitar players with not just a textual tutorial, but a video one as well.
Further depth is added to this tutorial through linking to reference sites such as Wikipedia’s entry on Travis Picking, as well as a tablature site featuring the chord progression to “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas.
What this ultimately presents is a cohesive and indeed complete lesson plan that includes text, video and reference material for further study. And the most time intensive part of the process was the creation of the text. The posting of the content took only minutes using Blogger’s WYSIWYG creation tool. (WYSIWYG = “What You See Is What You Get”).
Furthermore, the collaborative nature of social software facilitates interaction and two-way communication. This provides readers of the content with an opportunity to not just view it, but discuss it and even synthesize it on their own blogs it as well.
This is not your father’s Internet, this is something much more.
Reference:
Analysis of Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright
Saturday, May 19th, 2007
