And for some reason when we think of that next best thing we are looking at some technomodified gadget or means of disseminating information that is iEnabled or, well you get the picture.

Too often we are looking too far afield for innovation when it is sitting next to us in the form of satisfying a need.

Take the site Hacker News as an example.

Loads of information but how do we cull the best from it so that we can actually give it the time it needs?

And of course the best depends on your particular standpoint.

Lim Cheng Soon the founder of Netizens was faced with this very problem and went from the net to magazine!

Yes he went from tech to hard-copy or digital copy but took the blog and moved offline so as to allow himself to consume the best of the week at his leisure.

That is what innovation is all about and as far as media goes that is also very cool.

Read more here.

Of course disruption can be a good thing and can provoke innovation in practice and thought.

But disruption can also be a challenge.

I sit here today with the bare bones of an information literacy project in front of me and wonder who will listen.

Europe, North America and Australia have been engaged in various forms of media literacy education for man y years now.

But the middle east, as it grips with fundamental political change and socioeconomic micro environments has been slow if not negligent on looking at ways to ensure that youth are communication literate.

A huge problem comes down to parents and educators who are simply not doing enough with the limited resources available.

Mimi Ito has re-energized my thinking.

Mimi Ito is a cultural anthropologist and expert in the field of digital media and learning, focusing on children and youth’s changing relationships to media and communications. She recently completed the Digital Youth Project, a landmark study supported by the MacArthur Foundation of the ways youth use new media. In September 2010, she was appointed as the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Chair in Digital Media and Learning at UC Irvine.

Learning is no longer the exclusive franchise of schools! Yet we seem to abdicate our personal responsibility in the education project to anyone who will take it on.

Ito makes a great point.

“We know that the learning outside of school matters tremendously for the learning in school…the question is: how can we be more active about linking those two together?”

Give Ito a look she has a lot to say.

No surprise the journalists, content creators, are not the people to look to.

And designers might also be caught in the hype of what was and this idea that new media is short, sweet and and and.

This month’s Monocle has some very interesting reading.

The question is what does our new media environment need to be?

There is no one answer and that in itself is a big hint.

Too many people are looking in one direction and that is a problem.

Too many people are dumbing down and that is a problem.

Designers and editors are losing track of their talent and focus as they try to do each others jobs.

In the end we are left with media that is for the lack of a better word, broken.

Maybe SLATE is an example of keeping on track.

What is happening in this case was the technology behind their web offering was not as good as the editorial product, what if that could be bridged?

The Neimam Journalism Lab has been looking at what is making Slate work.

But what is the key to success in the end?

Community, keeping it and growing it.

Alienate the audience, insult the audience, ignore the audience and they are gone and maybe for good.

If there was a simple answer journalism schools world-wide would be churning out new grads to rise to the challenge.

The problem is there is no clear road ahead and journalism schools are struggling to attract new students.

Journalism professors are quick to utter the word convergent when they talk about the future of journalism, but I am not sure anyone really understands what convergence is.

In fact the old-school thinking on convergence, which saw its rise during the dawn of the web-page was anything but convergence.

Today what we think of as convergence is really divergence with content being pulled together and contextualized from a variety of places that might be linked but not housed on a single site.

Today’s convergence is really about contextualizing links, audio, visual and social content and I think you will be hard-pressed to find anyone teaching this in a pure new media formatted manner.

Instead what we see is the square peg of convergent journalism being rammed into the round hole of old-school journalism.

What if we take the future of media down the infotainment route?

Jimmy Lai may be on to something when we talk about bringing new life to the media and the ideas of convergence.

What about re-enactments of the news, the stories we read about, using animation and graphics?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBJT80UlPhI[/youtube]

This is convergence at its best as we bring multiple forms of storytelling together, not to mention the convergence of information and entertainment!

I love the way Lai talks about what he is doing.

I started the animations because print media was going into a sunset business environment. It’s obvious that we have arrived at an era of images. I thought that if I could speed up the production of animation, I could make a big business out of recreating the amazing images of the news, because what we get on TV is always the last bit of image.

If we have our traditional journalism and this brand of journalism side by side I wonder which would get the most attention? No contest really.

The better question is whether NEWS-animation is a way to attract a new generation of information consumers and breath new life into an industry that many might see as stagnating in a large part because of attention grabbing technology that is only on the rise.

And at some point in the conversation the issue of quality is brought up.

The the issue of funding is tossed into the mix.

The conversation ends with a debate about distribution and we go nowhere.

I honestly find it shocking that every single student I teach is not creating their own little bit of UAE media content!

My thinking is that as we move well beyond the old media framework into the new social media paradigm there are no rules that constrain us.

Yes there is morality but the rules of the media environment today are being created as I type!

Yet students across the UAE sit on their hands and believe that they don’t have the equipment, ability or creativity to create compelling media content today!

Maybe what students need today is an example?

Where do you turn to for an sample of new Emirati media?

DJ Bliss and YouTube!

This is a great story.

In retrospect even Bliss will suggest he could have done this or that better.

But you know what?

Bliss got off his hands and did it!

This is the 1st, second and 3rd steps toward the New face of UAE media.

[youtube width="325" height="244"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FY2ExoxKvs[/youtube]

I would love to see every CCMS student at Zayed University making their own piece of New UAE media!

We live in an edited world.

We live in an environment that is designed.

And even the learning process at Wendy’s is put to music and made fun.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3IIve-t4bI[/youtube]

So what is happening with our education?

Why are we not pushing the teaching envelope?

I think it is because we are comfortable with the ‘old’ way, the way were were taught.

The world we are educating for is changing and there is no question we need education but we need to consider how we are delivering it.

Maybe Wendy’s is a harbinger?

Of course the follow-up question is am I teaching what is useful and needed or just what I am comfortable with?

For the most part I think most professors are guilty of teaching int he comfort zone and muttering the popular refrain, “when I was in the industry or at school or…. that is how it was done.”

The reality is that while the art of telling a story has not changed much since the printed word was embodied in mass media the dissemination process has changed.

And of course the construction of the story does evolve as the process of dissemination changes.

I loved this article about social media, interns and companies!

What does a company look for in a social media intern? The 1st point is to realize that few if any academics have walked that path!

1. good communication skills

2. good writing skills

3. excellent social skills

4. enthusiasm

These are pretty basic and any student should be able to check them off.

There are jobs out there and they are ready to be had!

Here is a partial list for some cool jobs from Mashable. Are we educators preparing our students adequately?

As much as we talk about new media and new education both seem to be caught in the mud of their old ways.

TV/radio/press/film all talk new but are doing very little that is new. New media is not putting a paper on an iPad! New education is not just changing the content.

New is re-imagining.

New in today’s context involves interaction, delivery, outcomes and social action.

The irony is that we are really only at phase one of the implementation of new media and new education.

We are stuck at interaction and hoping that the rest will follow.

We have tools to enable new but we are not yet in the mind space to make it happen.

Take my own classes as an example, students still file in and sit in rows and most of the time I stand and talk to them, why?

Because it is easy, it is as simple as that. The standard school lecture has been the mainstay of education for 100 years so why even think of changing things?

Because today we have the opportunity to take education to those who want it where they want it in the context that they may actually make immediate use of it! Time and space are no longer king the content, its delivery and the interaction provoked is what matters.

To mix things up a bit I am recording my classes for delivery over an iPhone or Blackberry, but the true convergence of the education I am responsible for guiding from the school to the private realm is still very much a work in progress.

It is a work in progress because of resistance to change from the providers and fromt he consumers.

I often feel the media, the educator and the consumer are asking for permission to think new but they don’t know who to ask!

What I find incredible is we the media, and educators, talk convergence, new media and new education BUT are not following through.

Why isn’t every professor making their class available online, on Facebook, on YouTube and linking them to others and their content via twitter?

I imagine a time when education is as much a meeting of a group of people in a classroom as it is a meeting of people in a coffee shop or on the beach or in an jet crossing the Atlantic.

The convergence and new aspects of media and education are not difficult to imagine or realize, yet we resist because it is not what we are comfortable with.

The video of my own class below was recorded and within an hour posted online!

The start of making new media and a new education involves considering how and where people will consume your ideas int his case and making that process of consumption easy and accessible.

The illusion is that this process of delivery and acces is hard.

My own recordings are formatted for a mobile phone so the quality of the image is pretty poor if viewed on a large screen, but the audio is good and that is really all that matters.

Here is my DIY guide.

1. activate your webcam, I am using iSight on my Mac.

2. use a capture software for audio and video, I am using Quicktime.

3. edit the front and back of the video, add a title, I am using iMovie.

4. export video to a useful format, I am using iMovie and exporting for mobile device.

5. post for download or viewing, I am using Vimeo

Take a look at the beta test below.

[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/15293428[/vimeo]

Sure the quality of the image could be better.

Sure the camera could be placed differently.

We can critique this video for a week, but it is out there.

We cannot talk new and converged media and education if we are not trying it!

What stops others form following my lead?

The illusion that creating online, converged, new media products is hard and takes a lot of equipment and know how.

Wrong,wrong,wrong!

What we need is for the media and educators alike to take the challenge and lead the way for the consumer instead of waiting for them to tell us where they have been and what they like.

We need to embrace the opening lines of the original Star Trek series, “to boldly go where no man has gone before!”

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?

The real issues comes down to what is media today and what will media be tomorrow?

Content is pretty much the same BUT the delivery has changed and because of the new delivery the length of exposure to content and environment where consumption is taking place is rapidly changing.

But, and the but is big, are we as educators listening to the ceo’s like Mr. Sultan and retooling what we are doing to not only meet the wants but the needs that are just now beginning to be demanded by content consumers?

Watch part 5 of 6 of the Osman Sultan presentation.

Here is the last 3 minutes!

I 

I ask again are we as educators ready to meet the challenge and are our students ready to rise to the challenge?

Again I hope so.