The OECD is having a Ministerial meeting in Seoul on June 17-18 on ‘the future of the Internet economy‘. Can’t afford to get on a plane and head over there to give your opinion? Well, they’re offering you the chance to have your say via YouTube. There is a YouTube channel inviting people to send their opinion/question in and there’s a chance that these leading policy makers will respond to it as part of the conference.
If you’ve got something to say that you think will make a difference, why not give it a go?

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back

There are some brilliant examples on the Web illustrating just how important the read/write web is and the culture of remix. Along with these examples are also some really interesting stories. Take for example, the story behind the funtwo “Canon Rock” video on YouTube. This video was put up on YouTube about two years ago and has been viewed over 33 million times. Another version of the same funtwo video has been viewed over 1.7 million times. By any measure that is a staggering number. Canon Rock was a remix of a piece of classical music (Pachelbel’s Canon in D major) ‘published’ by a Tiawanese guitarist (Jerry Chang) several months earlier. Chang (JerryC) took the classical piece of music, made orignally for violins and applied his electric guitar to it. The result was sensational. Inspired by this effort, funtwo recorded his own effort at JerryC’s work and an Internet phenomenon was born. Do a search on Google Video or YouTube on ‘canon rock’ and there will be thousands of results. Have a look at some of these and you can see that a massive number of amateur musicians and learners have been inspired not only just to try and learn this great piece of music, but to publish their efforts.

They are remixing, adapting creating, participating, and most importantly, learning. You will find all ages, all abilities and people from widely different backgrounds having a go. Its not just those with electric guitars either - acoustic guitars, keyboards and all manner of ‘instruments’ are being used. One guy is teaching himself how to play it on his acoustic guitar for his daughter’s wedding - he is giving himself plenty of time to master it as she is only three!

If, as Garry pleaded in ‘We watched TV…they make TV‘, you viewed the Lawrence Lessig video he refers too, and you take a look at what is going on here you will really start to understand the notion that people are producing/remixing for the love of it and how important it is to our culture. So…. back to all those amateur musicians, and as Lessig very importantly points out, amateur and not amateurish, here is a sample of participation and remix:

In how many ways does this relate to learning? For a start, its giving classical music a new life with a new generation. As stated before, it is inspiring others to have a go and learn something new. As a personal learning aid, some of the efforts published on Youtube, particularly from those who are not guitar geniouses and are brave enough to publish themselves, you can really pick up (sorry about the guitar pun) on the techniques that are being applied and demonstrated at a level you can understand. How about participation itself. Those who are are learning all the time and benefiting from it.

If you played the funtwo video linked to earlier in this post (and I recommend you do if you appreciate music want to see an amazing performance ) and want to find out more about funtwo see the NY Times article ‘Web Guitar Wizard Revealed at Last’.

technorati tags: remix, read-write web,YouTube

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back

YouTube has been around for quite a while now and there is obviously some great content on it. In education there seems to be continual debate on it however. Many of our school systems ban it and have all manner of reasons for doing so but this morning I was really struck by the change in attitude to it in the broader environment. Over the last couple of months or so it has been interesting, some would say amusing to see how our politicians are using it to reach potential voters in an upcoming federal election. We have seen how traditional media and content owners have challenged YouTube on content and have derided it etc.
This morning though, it was interesting to listen to an excerpt from a YouTube video played on one of our major radio broadcasters of the Prime Minister delivering a message about APEC. What struck me was just how important YouTube is becoming to media and politics. Here we have the Prime Minister of a country (not the first by any means) using it to deliver a serious message and traditional media picking up that content for its own news coverage. Not too long ago, the service would have really been seen as a way to parody or send up politicians and traditional media would have been more concerned with scouring the content to find breaches of its IP rights rather than seeing it as a news source.
YouTube is so much more than a platform for anyone to publish - it is a very serious part of our communications infrastructure. The challenge is how to successfully exploit this within education while maintaining all the integrity of our systems, duty of care etc.

technorati tags: YouTube

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back

It seems these types of calls are still appearing quite regularly. This BBC article reports on a Professional Association of Teachers conference in Scotland. There is a desire here not just to ban sites such as YouTube in schools, but to shut them down. Locally we have seen a number of States banning sites such as YouTube etc from use within schools for a number of reasons.
The problem in this case is cyber-bullying, both of students and teachers. In response to the problem, the demand seems to be to shut all such sites down, at least in the short term. It is not clear whether a (long term) solution was discussed.
Clearly the problem is not the sites themselves so shutting them down isn’t going to stop bullying from happening in the broader context. A spokesperson from the Beatbullying charity goes on to say:

“”Calls for social networking sites like YouTube to be closed because of cyberbullying are as intelligent as calls for schools to be closed because of bullying.

…Cyberbullying is flourishing for two reasons. First, society is not adequately preventing bullying behaviour…
…And secondly, it seems to be easier to type something hateful to a school friend rather than say it to their face…” “

Sadly, history and society is riddled with examples of individuals/groups using technologies to hurt others. Banning those technologies is a response but doesn’t address the cause of the problems though.
This is a really difficult issue - we can see so many positive examples from appropriate (there’s a value laden term) use of social networking sites but put yourself in the victims (students, teachers, families etc) perspective and try to see how they feel too.

Cheers,
Jerry.

technorati tags: cyber-bullying, YouTube,Social Networking

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back

Well, SEOmoz’s 2007 Web 2.0 Awards have been out for a couple of weeks now. All the usual suspects are there such as technorati, bloglines, magnolia, furl, yahoo! local, craigslist, google docs, feedburner, 43 things, google maps, frappr, ning, flickr, picasa, linked in, digg, del.icio.us, pageflakes, and of course, YouTube. As you can see, there are quite a few google and yahoo! services in the mix. If you have a look at all the awards, you will find even more google and yahoo! services. What surprised me was the number of ’same old same old’ in the list. Some of these have been around for quite a long time now and perhaps are just part of the fabric - we really depend on them and use them all the time. If you have a look at the criteria by which they are measured (usability, usefulness, social aspects, interface and design, content quality) it is easy to see why they are there (again). Since there are ‘over 200 sites in 41 categories’ there is a lot to look at so quite a bit of time and effort must go into producing these awards. It’s really worth checking them out and seeing if you can find something that works for you. Here’s a few interesting ones:

1. donors choose - teachers submitting ideas for funding
2. be Green - highly topical at the moment - look at the carbon calculator
3. a couple of interesting hosted wikis (wetpaint, pbwiki) - check out the student/teacher example in pbwiki
4. twitter - my views here

Of course there are many more to look at and it would take hours to go through the lot of them.

technorati tags: Web 2.0 Awards

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back