jenny weight, RMIT

Harry makes some interesting points. Why don’t universities embrace social software more than they do?:

… gracing the front page of YouTube for the past week or so has been the University of New South Wales’ channel. And community channel. Not to mention its eLearning channel. As daggy as they sound, they’ve garnerned a more than decent amount of hits, comments, and in turn, exposure. Certainly a rare result as far as Australian university social software endeavours go.

What strikes me the most is that UNSW’s videos aren’t just a sporadic collection of ‘how-tos’ and promotional pieces either — the UNSW eLearning channel in particular has full-length recordings of live lectures, with subscribers numbering in the thousands. Subscribers that aren’t even a part of the greater UNSW community.

There’s so many reasons that institutions don’t use social software more, and most of them are not particularly good ones. Intellectual property is a huge one–most unis like to protect their knowledge; they want to make people (students) pay for the privilege of access to it. Another reason is workload. Nobody is employed to to do the work of publishing our content this way. Finally (and my reason for not videoing my own lectures). It is simply bad media. Watching an unedited lecture is like pulling teeth … and nobody’s going to edit it. That’s why I transcribe my lectures to my blog. I think it’s better media that way, and at least you can scroll through it and search it for the bits you want.