edna.edu.au

Putting the C before I (as in T).

We've all heard the acronym. 'ICT', Information and Communications Technology, they say. What they mean is I cT. And never, ever, ever, do 'they' mean real time communications (RTC), unless it's something to do with their new iphone, and something like twittering with it. I know i shouldn't be critical. My comment is more about me becoming a grumpy old man who learnt that technology is a fashion accessory a few decades ago. Would someone tell me when flairs come in again, so i can get back to being cool. (Forget the long hair; that's over). 

I promised Pia that i'd put something together because we were going to catch up with Jonathan from NICTA and Nick from aarnet, and have a quiet discussion about collaborating. Yeah, there's that word again. So first step first; let me go through what is happening in the grown up world of Real Time Comms. This is not (just) to prove that my pipes are bigger than edna's elluminating dim dims. It's so NICTA and aarnet can see about putting together an open standard for RTC social networks in Oz that any group can be use to be inclusive, while making it easy to build an archive of common conferences.

Let's begin at the backend, where the archive of conferences might be stored. This might as well be held at the online address where the streams - there might be a number of feeds from different conference sites a la publicsphere3 - can be mixed, switched, streamed and recorded. I won't go into the social dynamics here - about whether you'll be thinking Eurovision or a distributed qanda. This rave is just to cover the stage of technical evolution (acceptance) we're up to when running a series of conferences, editing and archiving the proceedings on a social site, and perhaps providing a stream to a playout room (for broadcast). What we are after is a way for the process to be systemized, simplified and provided cheaply.

So, straightup, let's consider this a shared resource, which can be shared between subject specific groups, one in each country. This is so that, should a publicsphere be run in one state, the group could use the same tools as another (state). We need a way to classify the archive, firstly so it can be found (by any librarian). So that stupid idea I've been banging on about - i.e. using a dewey number instead of a meaningless domain name - comes into its own especially if we have a country full of different languages  (like we do). So, as an e.g., questnet.edu.au becomes, according to me mate at the national library, 607.940.edu.au.

OK, so the asynchronous tools that can be loaded on this domain are what the groups in each state agree upon. = blog, wiki, forum, twitter feed, etc. The RTC stuff could be, in time, as complex as opencast in the future (if they ever reach their matterhorn), or mediasite like the questnet organisers used. But the main consideration that we need to have is that our domain is for the librarians who must also support the community's tool builders. It's a destination as well as a channel. I'm really confused about explaining this idea as EVO is in the back of my mind; accessgrid is another fairly mature toolset which could be downloaded to an IP address, and IMS seems so attractive because it accepts one of my main precepts = A function is not a node (hardware box) .

That enough about the technical considerations. Let's bring it down to "who's the customer?" At least who is the customer that is going to change the cultural iceburgs fairly quickly. Remember Disreali's "we must educate our leaders"? Well these days our primary learning groups are in aph.gov.au, and are called committees. We need to get them the best tools possible so they can share their learning, and include a few others. The one whose role it is to try new stuff out is called the Procedures committee in the House of Reps. Although, knowing how switched on Kate is, we should include this committee from the Senate.

If parliamentarians don't want to use this stuff, then we'll just have to accept that all the money spent to connect classrooms is just $158M down the tube. Giving these guys more pennies to run a CRC is an attempt at having parliamentarians outsource their learning. Much better that the money was spent helping the PEO to share an education.

"Role-play is our principal teaching strategy", they say. Perhaps we should try to pretend that including people in the proceedings is a bit more real.

Tags: comms
Posted at 02:36PM Oct 17, 2009 by simon fenton - jones  |  Comments[0]