I keep concentrating on the media and citizen end of the explosions in content and distribution. But here‘s a post from my friend Will Richardson, the educator who understands blogs and citizens media better than any I know, and here‘s another from a a librarian looking at the question of who wants to own content from their perspectives.
Says the librarian:
So, one thing this suggests is that the parts of the content industry that have experience with relationships and trust–like libraries–should be in the ascendancy. Are we dismantling the fences and walls and expanding our trust circles? Slowly.
Says Will (my emphasis):
Schools used to own the content they delivered, but no longer. There is better content, in most cases, to be found on the Web than in standard texts. There are richer databases of information, more knowledgable experts, and more diverse sources of uniquely pertinent material that we can draw upon now. And that renders the one-textbook-for-all approach basically irrelevant. While these resources may at first blush appear more unwieldly and complex than those comfortable, traditional texts, we do our students a disservice by not tapping into their diversity and timeliness.
We need to create our own texts, because we can. Our students need to help us, because they can. We need to ask relevant, diverse, living sources to participate, because they can. This is a totally changed world we’re entering, and we need to begin serious conversations at our schools as to what those changes mean and what strategies we can use to take advantage of them.
It helps to analyze the future of media from more perspectives than just the newsstand or the bookstore: like the classroom and the library.
: SEE ALSO: Libraries offering downloads.