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Where was that option?

A teaching colleague in Australia asked a question on a mailing list the other day about ways to incorporate ICT into the teaching of literacy and numeracy for her students. She received a rather sensible suggestion (from a teacher/librarian) that her own school’s teacher/librarian should be able to help her with such a request. That seems sensible… after all aren’t librarians supposed to be trained in the use of literacy resources? Don’t librarians deal with information-based resources on a daily basis? And don’t most of our information-based resources come in a digital format these days? Logically then, wouldn’t a librarian be the best person to speak to if one wanted to some assistance with the use of ICT for assisting literacy?

So the suggestion was made. “Ask your friendly teacher/librarian. They should be able to help you.”

The answer came back… “Our teacher/librarian is not really into ICT”

“Not really into ICT?” Sorry, but when did the luxury of being “into ICT” become one of the choices? As a teacher, or a librarian, but especially as a teacher/librarian, you can’t just be “not really into ICT”. You’re free to choose many things… you can be “not really into heavy metal music”, or be “not really into black jelly beans” or be “not really into Dan Brown novels”, but to be “not really into ICT” is not an option you have. It makes me a bit cross, because it seems there are still librarians, and teachers too for that matter, who pick and choose what aspects of their job they decide they will “be into”.

I’m not really into writing programs and registers, but I have to. It’s part of the job of being a teacher. I’m not really into standing in the playground in the middle of winter, but supervision duty is part of the job of being a teacher. I didn’t used to know a huge amount about developing literacy skills, differentiating the curriculum, or dealing with peanut allergies, but I had to learn these things because it’s a part of the job of being a teacher. Not “being into” these things was not an option for me. It was “deal with it, or find another career”.

I’m not sure why being “into ICT” is still seen as optional for so many teachers. This is 2006. The use of digital technologies is so deeply embedded into our students’ cultures, lives, thinking and day-to-day existence, that for a teacher or a T/L to simply be “not into ICT” amounts to what I can only describe as professional negligence.

There I said it.

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Living on the Long Tail

One of the interesting concepts I’ve read about is The Long Tail. It’s a phenomonon I’d noticed and had kinda thought about but had never really heard it explained in such an obvious way. The term was coined by Chris Anderson from Wired magazine.

One of the interpretations of the Long Tail basically refers to the notion that if lots of people are able to publish content to a small specialised audience that is so niche and so targeted then the collective sum of all these small publications will start to eat into the audience share of the mainstream media publications.

If you map this phenomenon as a graph of the popularity of various publications versus the number of actual publications, then the graph looks like the diagram here… a chart that has a small number of publications with relatively high levels of popularity on the left, and a large number of publications with low levels of popularity as you move to the left… giving the shape of the “long tail”.

It’s occurred to me lately just how much I’ve been living on this “long tail”. I hardly watch mainstream TV or listen to mainstream radio anymore… I listen to lots more podcasts now than live radio, because I get to listen to what I want to listen to, when I want to listen to it, and don’t have to rely on the mass media who really has no idea about what I’m interested in. Same with blogs… I read blogs regularly and rarely read mainstream newspapers, so I’m really feeling the effect of the long tail. Every minute I spend watching YouTube, listening to podcasts, reading blogs, is one more minute that I’m not giving to the major networks. And as more and more people move away from the mainstream media for the information that interests and entertains them, this notion of the long tail is having a huge influence on the economics of the way we have traditionally consumed media.

Take this snippet from the New York TV website for example…

For years, networks have trembled at the idea of selling individual episodes because it fundamentally undermines the way TV works—or used to work. But after the success of ABC’s bold toe-in-the-pool partnership with iTunes, NBC and CBS last week announced plans to sell their own shows through video-on-demand services for 99 cents an episode. And suddenly it’s not so hard to envision a future (by which I mean two years, not twenty) in which you buy most of your TV shows the way you do, say, magazines – subscribing to some, picking and choosing others. At which point there’s no more need to stick to the half-hour/hour-long model on TV than there is for magazines to publish each issue at precisely 100 or 200 pages.

There are plenty of other implications of the Long Tail. It’s a classic example of the way the web has democratised the world we once knew, changing many of the old rules forever. There are now millions of people sharing their ideas, having a voice, expressing opinions and putting their thoughts “out there” for anyone to pick up on.

The thing that many folk find somewhat hard to understand is that there are people out there who do pick up on this stuff. It seems that no matter how specialised or offbeat your interests are, the web is enabling people with similar interests to get together. It’s creating a whole new breed of media publishers – bloggers, podcasters, videobloggers, Flickr sharers, etc – who can now have a voice, no matter how small, and are still finding an audience that is interested to hear what they have to say. The vast majority of this “publishing” would be totally economically unviable under the old mass media model, but are now totally feasible thanks to the web.

It’s no wonder the big media networks are getting nervous about losing their audience. They ought to be. The long tail is only going to get longer.

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That Pesky Rabbit, and other Flashy Stuff

Flash is an amazing authoring environment, able to combine both artistic creativity and sophisticated mathematical programming skills. At it simplest, Flash let you draw stuff using a rather clever use of vector graphics that can scale gracefully to any resolution, and it also has incredible depth that lets those wanted to challenge their skills to explore the world of Actionscripting to bring high levels of interactivity to the objects it creates.

One great example of this dual personality that Flash has is shown in this amazing animated page I discovered while browsing Michael Cridland’s class blog site. Check it out… sure, it’s purely entertainment value but it’s very cool.

Of course, for a more corporate use of Flash, you can’t go past Inside the House, a wonderful virtual tour of the Sydney Opera House. Although this site has been around for a few years now, I think it’s a good use of Flash that goes beyond just using Flash for entertainment value and makes good use of interactivity to meet a corporate purpose.

What other cool, but useful, sites have you found that use Flash? Tell me about them in the comments…