Subject says it all as they say… who are “they” anyway?

I expressed my skepticism about the Citizendium Wikipedia fork at TechCrunch… Clay Shirky has thoughtfully dismantled the most fundamental flaws in the conception of the project. Is there some new way around them I’m not seeing?

Whatever amount of sympathy I once had for Lee Siegel, former blogger at The New Republic, has largely evaporated after reading his smug, self-satisfied words after the fact…

Robert Scoble takes on the vlogging naysayers in To Videblog or Not to Videoblog. Like a lot of things, the shortest and most accurate answer to most of the negative observations (it takes more time than podcasting, it’s more expensive, etc) would be: it depends.

But the bigger picture here is one of a process that we educational folks have already– to some extent– gone through. There was a time when a large part of the educational technology arena was centered around videoconference and video delivery, with all the kind of hype we see today about vlogging. Everyone was excited, the tech issues had been largely resolved, the audience was in place and accessible… it involved a lot of cool toys. Eventually most of us learned that videoconference has a small– but vital niche– in the grand scheme of presentations. In some cases, where there is a necessary visual component (not just any visual aspect there happens to be, as Scoble implies), or where one wants to share a process over time, then video is practically irreplaceable.

But for the most part, video presentation has pretty low ratio when it comes to return of effort. People physically and mentally tire of video more quickly because it has an appearance of demanding continuous attention (even when most video doesn’t) so it isn’t as amenable to being part of a multi-tasking environment in the same way audio feeds are, it demands more bandwidth to upload and download, and though the technology needs for video are often overrated it is still more demanding than audio.
The killer issue, though, is that fourth wall and its cognitive effects. People have a different expectation of audio than they do video– on both the production and consumption ends. Creating good video– like teaching over a video link– isn’t as much about good technology as it is learning to deal with the transactional distance. Creating faster and bigger videoconferencing (which I often refer to as “polishing the poo”) doesn’t help this one bit.

And this leads to a more subtle problem: substitution of apparently interesting but ultimately less useful video for other media. There are many topics where the initial impulse to just shoot a video and be done with it is best ignored in favor of taking time to create a more thorough (though albeit less sexy) resource using another media. Likewise, there are times when a quick couple minutes of video is just the key and trying to do otherwise would be difficult– not to mention a real waste of time– and less effective. In other words, it depends.
Clearly, I think vlogging is fantastic in some circumstances. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have spent as much time working with the Bethel faculty whose exploits vlogging from their remote Alaskan wilderness science camp garnered bewildered attention from passing cruise ship folks touring the untamed wilderness. And I’d keep bringing it up even if I didn’t because nothing helps get good bandwidth to remote places like the promise of video… bandwidth that can be subverted later for more broadly useful tools like blogs, podcasts, web conferencing, etc.

D’Arcy Norman’s edublog reading list is now available through Blogbridge’s Topic Guides service. What’s not there is almost as interesting as what is… the echo echo chamber chamber lives lives but somehow the information gets through.

Thomas Merton:

Hence it becomes more and more difficult to estimate the morality of an act leading to war because it is more and more difficult to know precisely what is going on. Not only is war increasingly a matter for pure specialists operating with fantastically complex machinery, but above all there is the question of absolute secrecy regarding everything that seriously affects defense policy. We may amuse ourselves by reading the reports in mass media and imagine that these “facts” provide sufficient basis for moral judgments for and against war. But in reality, we are simply elaborating moral fantasies in a vacuum. Whatever we may decide, we remain completely at the mercy of the governmental power, or rather the anonymous power of managers and generals who stand behind the facade of government. We have no way of directly influencing the decisions and policies taken by these people. In practice, we must fall back on a blinder and blinder faith which more and more resigns itself to trusting the “legitimately constituted authority” without having the vaguest notion what that authority is liable to do next. This condition of irresponsibility and passivity is extremely dangerous. It is hardly conducive to genuine morality.