Leo Laporte made a wonderful daring presentation to TEDxDubai.

The media is changing but are we ready?

Do we believe the media environment is really changing?

Call our media environment converging, diverging, clouding,WEB2.0 but the reality is a whole new playing field is before us like it or not.

The problem is we media educators need to put our past on the shelf and go boldly where nobody has gone before!

The problem is it is easier said than done.

Leo Laporte spoke at TEDxDubai 2009 and offered an invitation to UAE media educators and students, all of us really, to go boldly into the media environment where we have never gone before.

Leo Laporte’s invitation, dare, to embrace the new media environment.

What will you do?

Lets face it we academics are without doubt experts in not only HOW teaching and learning takes place and is disseminated today but we are also experts in our own particular fields of study.

So why when it comes to making our knowledge available to the world to we tend to jump at obscure journals and even more obscure niche academic conferences?

My theory is we are simply following the old academic protocol.

Research to Publish to Present with little to no thought being given to the HOW and WHO or even WHERE of the process.

Well there is an alternative and that alternative is the TED model.

The scary thing is so many academics watch TEDTalks but so few actually try to do their own work and presentations in that format, right down to the audio/video and show.

Some might say that the TED format dilutes the content of a presentation, I don’t buy it.

Here is the clip talking about TEDCannes and there is nothing light about the content.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It is time for the academic world to awaken to the possibility before it and not stay crouched behind a podium in a room tucked away on an obscure University campus and jump feet first onto the world stage and the model for this is TED!

The 1st thing I love is the site.

When you go watch the upload counter and stop it to see the words!

00=limitations or zero limitations, very cool!

The second thing I like is the institutionalized idea of breaking the rules and thinking out loud all over the box, the box of your environment.

Idea paint is whiteboard paint that can be applied to any surface!

Imagine the ability to transform your office walls into idea space!

A hallway into idea space!

A floor into idea space!

Every surface becomes a creative tool! Institutionalized and encouraged use your environment to succeed.

Clever and cool!

Primary and secondary education is rapidly evolving in the UAE and trying to come to grips with the lessons from welfare states around the world as it crafts its own hybrid system.

One thing is for sure a complete hands off system does not work.

What if we retooled education from KG through University around the idea of significant interactions?

What if the issues of economy and society were encouraged to link and not sit alone?

What if we saw a vertical integration of KG through University education with partnerships on a global scale?

Of course this requires a true paradigm shift.

Dr. Chris Reynolds may be on to something as he talks about his vision of the education to come.

Dr.Chris Reynolds on the future of education as a business

Nightline a Conversation

The problem, and there is a problem, is that the space needs to function as a classroom, lecture hall, studio, think tank, recording facility, technology incubator, and new convergent media showcase all at the same time.

So who do you talk to?

Journalists have one idea.

PR people have another idea.

Academics have yet another idea.

Designers are thinking different,

The architects have a vision.

Nobody has asked the students.

And in the end what you can end up with is a pretty traditional space that might look like a CNN/BBC/CBC newsroom.

What are we looking at if we dream of a new space configuration?

A big open space with scattered technology in different corners to satisfy specific and rather non converged needs. This is the old way of thinking without a doubt.

One of the big issues with convergence is are we talking form or function. What we really need is a bit of both.

The form of convergence is the bringing of different, often old school technology, into one place, not very new thinking at all and really not very convergent.

The function of convergence is a way of thinking and this is the clever side, the paradigm shift, the bringing of content to different platforms simultaneously for focused, yet mass, dissemination.

So what will the space to teach and practice convergent media look like?

Click here to view the embedded video.

The d school at Standford has not only invented the space, with the proud insight of IDEO’s founders, but I would hasten to say perfected it!

As an academic and practitioner of convergent media when I am asked how I would design the ideal space to teach, learn and practice convergent media I say look at the d School!

If you put in a day digesting Seth Godin, Tom Peters, ChangeThis and then throw in IDEO, Diego Rodriguez and for good measure Mark Hurst you not only have a very sound reading list on business, creativity and leadership but also a question on your mind!

One of the common themes that is woven through all the blogs and sources I just listed is thinking about  the experience you are   engaged in with something.

Is the EXPERIENCE at the center of  everything you do?

If not why not? Because….. is the typical answer.

Take almost any university.

Is there a Chief Experience Officer to guide the way faculty, students, staff, visitors and the average person who happens on the ivory tower interact with the academy?

We spend a lot of time thinking about publications and ads.

We spend a lot of time thinking about how a stage looks for graduation.

We spend a lot of time cleaning floors, windows, parking lots and even lagoons.

So obviously there is an element of experiential thought taking place in many offices, but is there any coordination?

Why not?

When how we fall in love with the experience of an Apple product is a big part of the iPhone or iPad environment why are we not saying the same about our education environments today and especially the university?

To put the academic experience in the hands of an HR department or student services department is thinking too small and too narrow.

What every university needs, especially today is a Chief Experience Officer to guide, mould and roll out a consistent experience for everyone who comes in the door of the academy, how hard would that be?

But a list in and of itself is a pretty useless thing.

The value of your inspiration list is it might open the door to a whole new set of ideas for others.

So don’t just make a list SHARE it!

And please share it with me!

My list of 2 great resources for the month is as follows.

Cory Doctorow, one of the co-editors of BoingBoing, and a fantastic author has a content rich website where he has also resumed his podcast! I like Doctorow because he is the perfect example of what I tell my students!

1. trust yourself

2. be amazing at what you do

3. share

4. make it worth while

5. dare

Changethis is one of my favorite idea sites.  What I love about CT is the contents are brief and they come in the form of a manifesto. Here is what it is about.

Are you an optimist?

Sometimes it seems as though our disagreements—over everything from politics to business to the designated hitter rule—are more serious and more divisive than ever before.

People are making emotional, knee-jerk decisions, then standing by them, sometimes fighting to the death to defend their position.

And yet, we’re optimists.

People call the team at Change This optimists because we don’t believe it has to be this way. We don’t believe humans evolved to be so bad at making decisions, so poor at changing our minds, so violent in arguing our point of view. We’re well aware of how split our country and our world have become, but we don’t think the current state of affairs is built into our very nature.

The problem lies in the media.

In the old days, we had the time and inclination to consider the implications of a decision. Everyone wasn’t in quite so much of a hurry. At the same time, most conversations (and most arguments) were local ones, conducted between people who knew each other.

Today, it’s very different. Television demands a sound bite. A one hundred word letter to the editor is a long one. Radio has become a jingoistic wasteland, a series of thoughtless mantras, repeated over and over and designed to fit into a typical commute.

What I also love about the site is it shines a light on ways to use technology or WEB2.0 tools to communicate better!

For instance how do we manage comments in a more public manner? What about disqus.com and I learned about this on the Changethis site!

OK your turn!

Some may ask why change?

The media environment is changing and many, including me, will say the change is for the good.

But others will say journalism is on a death march why even consider it as a career?

Journalism, the art of telling a story is not changing just the focus and delivery is changing and that change has a lot to do with technology, space and time.

There are a few people today who are saying the well worn corporate path to conglomerate journalism is not the way forward.

Wilf Dinnick of OpenFile is one of those people.

Wilf has suggested that what we need today to make journalism relevant is a true local focus, think your neighbourhood.

Wilf also suggested we need to think of journalists as curators of today’s social media.

How do we do this?

New paradigms and in the case of OpenFile a new journalism institution.

Wilf Dinnick talking about OpenFile.ca.

What Wilf has described in his conversation is the path ahead for journalism education in general and what we are doing at Zayed University in the CCMS program.

I had the pleasure of meeting Ian Gilbert about a year ago.

I instantly knew that Ian had a story to tell and many people with ear plugs in need to listen and hard!

We have a global education crisis today because bureaucrats, CFO’s (chief failure officers), accountants and academic leadership in general has failed to do what needs to be done!

Maybe we all need to listen a bit closer to what Ian Gilbert is saying?

And maybe those education leaders who are failing our youth need to either stand up to the challenge or step aside!

Ian Gilbert Live at TEDxDubai 2009.

You know I am a TED fan and will be going to TED2011 as well as co-curating TEDxDubai this coming December.

But there is another group that you might not have heard of and need to also look at!

GEL  Short for “Good Experience Live”

You are scratching your head right?

Well here is what it is all about.

Gel is a conference and community exploring good experience in all its forms – in art, business, technology, society, and life.

Gel was founded by Mark Hurst in 2003 and has run a spring event in New York City each year since. Gel 2010 was the 8th annual event.

Instead of focusing on just one thing (design, technology, user experience, business, etc.) like many conferences, Gel touches on many things. This challenges attendees to find, and learn from, the patterns that underlie good experience, even in disciplines vastly different from their own.

The best way to understand the Gel experience is to attend.

I have not attended yet BUT like TED I do love the videos.

You can find the videos on VIMEO

One of the recent greats is this one!

Matt Haughey

Founder, Metafilter.com

Tags: business, community, technology

Posted: 05/26/10 | Recorded at Gel 2010

As the founder of Metafilter.com, Matt Haughey has created one of the most successful and vibrant online communities in the world. At Gel 2010 he describes some of the lessons he’s learned along the way. Matt is a longtime Gel attendee and it’s a privilege to spotlight his outstanding work.

(Coincidentally, just days after Gel 2010 the online community of Ask Metafilter stopped a human trafficking attempt in New York City. See also the Mother Jones article on the incident.)

See also: Matt Haughey on Twitter

The point is there are a bunch of people doing great things and making it available, live, learn and pass it on!

I really love this little talk and for me it frames a lot of where I think education in the field of media needs to be going and fast.

David Bornstein at Gel 2010 (author, “How to Change the World”) from Gel Conference on Vimeo.