Netflixisation, is that even a word? – Weeknote #40 – 6th December 2019

Gringotts Dragon
Gringotts Dragon at Harry Potter Studio Tour

At the weekend we went to the Harry Potter Studio Tour. The first time I went to the Warner Brothers Harry Potter Studio Tour was in 2015, just after they had added the Hogwarts Express and Kings Cross set to the tour. We made a return visit, mainly to see how different it was dressed for Christmas and with snow. Last time we were in the foyer waiting to go in, suspended from the ceiling was the magical flying Ford Anglia. This time there was a dragon!

Fetter Lane
Fetter Lane

The week started off in London for my Jisc Senior TEL Group meeting. This is an invited meeting in which we discuss various issues and technologies relating to teaching and learning. We had an informative discussion in the morning on curriculum analytics, what it is, what it isn’t, what it could be used for and some of the serious and challenges in analysing the curriculum. In the afternoon we were discussing some of the challenges relating to Education 4.0 and what the potential issues are in relation to preparing for the future that may be Education 4.0.

Image by Karolina Grabowska from Pixabay
Image by Karolina Grabowska from Pixabay

On the way home I read this blog post (again) form Lawrie Phipps which I enjoyed.

I have written myself (recently) on innovation

Digital should be a choice…

“Innovation is defined as new or different, but it isn’t defined as been better that was there was before.”

I find that there is an assumption across EdTech that “innovation” means always better. Not always the case.

Image by Pexels from Pixabay
Image by Pexels from Pixabay

On Tuesday we were talking about community and building communities, something I have done in the past with some success (and sometimes not so much success). I don’t believe there is any one way to build a community, but in a similar way I don’t think doing one thing such as a mailing list, or an event, or a Twitter hashtag will result in a community. I have found you need to do a range of things, as some stuff works for some people and other stuff works for others.

Back in 2008 or so, when I was a MoLeNET Mentor working with people such as Lilian Soon, Dave Sugden and Ron Mitchell (and others) I was helping to build a community of FE people interested in mobile learning. The sort of things I did back then including using tools such as Jaiku (and then the Twitter) to us micro-blogging to connect and communicate. We also did online webinars, which were interesting and fun to do. We did a lot of podcasting as well. Another thing we did was blogging. Those were in the main broadcast mechanisms, so to back those up we also used a mailing list and ran workshops and events. It wasn’t just one kind of event either, there were workshops, as well as conferences and meetings. The key I think was about connecting, communicating and sharing.

I did a similar thing when I started to build the Intelligent Campus community. I started off using Twitter in the main, using a hashtag #IntelligentCampus to connect what I was saying. I posted relevant and interesting links (well I thought they were interesting) to Twitter as well. I also blogged a lot, sometimes it was about what the project was doing, but I also blogged about stuff other people were doing. These posts were shared on Twitter, but also through an embryonic mailing list, well people still like e-mail. I made a point too of posting a monthly digest to the mailing list. I also ran community events where as well as me presenting, I also got members of the community to present as well. Another thing is to attend other events and present, something I did for both MoLeNET and the Intelligent Campus.

Waterloo Tube Station
Waterloo Tube Station

Wednesday I was back to London, I was delivering a session at LSBU about the future of education. A lot of the discussion was about change and transformation. My overall summary was, taking a phrase form Lawrie that “digital is people”.

This link from the Guardian caught my eye. Apart from conflating content with teaching and learning, this isn’t really news is it? Recording lectures has been around for a long time now, even lecture capture isn’t really that new.

Lecture capture had uses for students who want to repeat a section of the lecture they didn’t understand, or want to see again for clarification. It is useful for those students for whom English is not their first language, or who struggle with the technical language aspects of a subject. Those students who have an hearing impairment or visual impairment may find it useful to review or repeat a lecture. Then there are those students who are having life issues, have a job or something like that.

I also think that the term Netflixisation misses the point of what even Netflix is about and the impact it has had on broadcast television. Netflix isn’t just about having a collection of video (films and television) to choose from, it’s also about having the whole series of something, the ability to watch at a time and place to suit the viewer, device and ecosystem agnostic (in the main) and recommendations (though they could be improved) Another important aspect of Netflix is the impact it has had on traditional media and broadcast television (and probably less so on films).

I saw this tweet and it made me smile.

I noted from my photos on Amazon that it had been ten years since I was in Auckland in New Zealand for Ascilite 2009 where I was delivering the final keynote of the conference.

Auckland, New Zealand
Auckland, New Zealand

From what I remember it was a great conference, and very different to the ones I had attended in the UK. My keynote was well received and I had fun delivering and using Twitter at the same time.

My top tweet this week was this one.

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