When I was in college, I was very fortunate to have Rob Kapilow as a choral conductor and music history professor. Rob has an uncanny knack for boiling down the brilliance of a piece of music so that anyone could hear it in just a short snippet. “Anyone else would have written this,” he’d say, playing four or five bars of familiar but uninspiring music, “but Mozart wrote this.” He’d play the same four or five bars, changing one note, or one chord, or one rhythm, and suddenly you would understand. It was a revelation every time. Rob has gone on to become a star on NPR and PBS, with a series called What Makes It Great. (I highly recommend the podcast.) I have never forgotten my experiences in his classroom and his choir.
Which brings me to the present. I’m toying with the idea of doing a “What Makes It Great?” series with educational technology, starting with LMSs but not necessarily ending there. It would work something like this:
- I would work with a product vendor or open source community representative.
- I would solicit from that person and from my readers the one or two features that really make that platform stand out as a teaching tool.
- I would then do a 10-minute screencast and interview with the person demonstrating those features.
That’s the basic idea, but I have a few questions. First of all, are you interested in something like this? If you are a user of a platform, would you be willing to suggest ideas? If you are a vendor or open source community member, would you be willing to partner with me on an episode? Do you have any suggestions to fine-tune the idea?
My other concern is technical. I have had absolutely lousy luck in the past when I have tried to record interviews. It is hideously embarassing to have to tell your guest, “Well, that was a terrific conversation, but I’m afraid that it’s been lost forever.” Does anybody have good suggestions for idiot-proof system by which I can capture both a screencast and a phone interview (since I expect to do these remotely)? I need something that can make a 10-minute recording, so that rules out Jing.
Now that I’ve had a little while to think about it, I’m ready to distill my initial enthusiastic reaction to Google Wave down to a manageably short (and hopefully non-fanboi) post. Let me say at the outset that I have no idea whether Wave will succeed. I am convinced, however, that something like Wave will succeed, in part because much about it is not new. My initial thought was was, “Hey, somebody finally got Apple’s OpenDoc to work.” Scott Wilson twittered that Google had reinvented ActiveX. In some ways, Wave is, like many great inventions, an old idea with some new twists. This is not to minimize the value of those twists. To the contrary, they are astonishing. My point is simply that the essence of Wave will survive whether ore not Wave itself is a success because many of the core ideas have been proven to be compelling in the past.