tech-ed collisions

on YouTube

YouTube has been around for quite a while now and there is obviously some great content on it. In education there seems to be continual debate on it however. Many of our school systems ban it and have all manner of reasons for doing so but this morning I was really struck by the change in attitude to it in the broader environment. Over the last couple of months or so it has been interesting, some would say amusing to see how our politicians are using it to reach potential voters in an upcoming federal election. We have seen how traditional media and content owners have challenged YouTube on content and have derided it etc. This morning though, it was interesting to listen to an excerpt from a YouTube video played on one of our major radio broadcasters of the Prime Minister delivering a message about APEC. What struck me was just how important YouTube is becoming to media and politics. Here we have the Prime Minister of a country (not the first by any means) using it to deliver a serious message and traditional media picking up that content for its own news coverage. Not too long ago, the service would have really been seen as a way to parody or send up politicians and traditional media would have been more concerned with scouring the content to find breaches of its IP rights rather than seeing it as a news source. YouTube is so much more than a platform for anyone to publish - it is a very serious part of our communications infrastructure. The challenge is how to successfully exploit this within education while maintaining all the integrity of our systems, duty of care etc.

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