Students increasingly find themselves teaching. Peer production is moving from just producing content for others, to producing fuller learning experiences.
Easy to learn, hard to master?
Ian Bogost argues that our familiarity with table tennis prepared us for Pong — not the ease of learning the game itself.
EA has floated the idea that too many video game releases are crowded around the holidays, creating a sub-optimal sales situation.
While this may be true, it’s worth evaluating whether video games are like movies (which are staggered throughout the year with considerable success) or tech hardware (which follows a pretty rigorous yearly release cycle). Unfortunately, they occupy the middle space in a number of ways: they’re a mixture of intellectual property and tech development, but they’re also stuck in the middle pricewise. Manipulating the price lever might yield more success than rushing or slowing down release schedules, as some recent experiments have shown.
And, at the end of the day, do we really want a “blockbuster” game season and a “serious” game season like we’ve got with the movies?
YouTube EDU launched last week - the consequences of this launch are tremendous.
Some schools already had YouTube channels for releasing lectures, but YouTube gets millions and millions of visitors - more than even a tech-savvy school like Berkeley or MIT could hope to attract to its own free courseware/video site.
What are some of the consequences of this new lecture video aggregator?
- Free education. This is the most obvious one: can’t afford to go to Dartmouth? Listen to the lectures in the privacy of your own home.
- Supplemental education. Maybe you can afford to go to Dartmouth, but you just can’t stand that CS professor. No problem, try a programming methodology course at Stanford.
- Comparison shopping. In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell wrote something to the effect that students can evaluate a professor’s performance in a matter of seconds - without even necessarily hearing them speak. With YouTube EDU, students can preview professors in their discipline of choice and evaluate them before they decide to commit to a university, or even to the costly application process.
- “Capturing tribal knowledge.” B.J. of eLearning Weekly points out a tool like this would be very useful in a corporate environment, for “capturing tribal knowledge.” This is true both in an inward- and outward-facing way. Companies can use a local YouTube channel for sharing knowledge within their walls, while using another to showcase though leadership, like some already do on their own sites.
Got further ideas on what YouTube EDU will evolve into? Let us know in the comments.
