Putting the Printing Press in Perspective

This is an incredible time! It seems like every day brings news of some new tool or an easier way to do something that extends our ability to communicate, interact, and publish online. Today on the wizards list-serv someone mentioned Stickam, a website that creates an easy way for anyone to include a live stream from their webcam onto the Stickam site or onto any other webpage. This new tool certainly adds to the challenges that schools face in teaching kids what is appropriate, safe, and for that matter, useful.

This revolution of communication tools is allowing anyone with an internet connection to publish in any medium, and allows people to network and connect in new ways [text, audio, video, synchronous, asynchronous, one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many]. Content is subscribable, taggable, and popular content bubbles to the surface of user-created folksonomies. It makes the revolution which the printing press wrought seem almost mundane... and we're only on the cusp of this change. This is an incredible time. For my own little publishing contribution this week in this brave new world of online presence, I just put up a home movie [Windows Media Player required] of our new dog, Gilmore, from our trip to Hilton Head. He wasn't quite sure how to pick up a frisbee that lands face down :)

This new publishing phenomenon also raises sticky issues about intellectual property and copyright -- my video uses clips from three songs as background music. Since they are each only a short portion of the song, I felt okay about including them. I came across an interesting rule about copyright of music for online radio last week (can't remember the source), but as I understood it, it said that providing music online is acceptable so long as the user cannot control the stopping or starting of the songs, or save them. I guess this is how the internet radio station Pandora is able to operate. Speaking of Pandora, and new ways of connecting-- it's a customized radio station: you tell it what types of music you like and then it sends you a stream of music based on your taste.

So all this new media leaves me wondering if we even realize the impact it is having and will have on our society. Working within a school it certainly seems imperative to address it and deal with some of the thornier issues with our students. Unfortunately, as many ed-tech gurus have noted, our students are getting very little exposure inside school, and almost all of it, on their own at home. We do lecture them about the dangers of giving out personal information on the internet, but meanwhile, they may be streaming their lives to a new network of like-minded computer-connected users flung far and wide. In some ways it feels like the train has left the station and we're still sitting in a coach & buggy wondering what that loud noise was.