The HG2S Training Blog

The notion of Teacher as Disc Jockey goes back at least to the time Apple’s iTunes introduced the concept of Rip, Mix, Burn to the world. Since then trainers, educators and instructional designers have been inundated by reports on social media, Web 2.0 and collaborative learning while fending off rising demands to crank out more educational media in less time, with less money. Now the prevalence of open source media and courseware has exceeded a critcal mass with thousands of open source courses being distributed by organizations like Open Courseware Consortium and ccLearn.

With that in mind educational technologist Scott Leslie of Victoria, BC, has gven an excellent talk on the current state of web-based open source tools and techniques available to teachers who need to rip, mix and burn a new course or presentation. Using the metaphor of the DJ, Leslie’s basic work flow follows these steps:

Search – finding the PLE diagrams

Sample – grabbing ones that weren’t already easily saveable

Sequence – tumblr? how to get in a mediaRSS feed

Record – my own PLE diagram

Perform – cooliris and wii controller?

Share – blog it

The reader should be cautioned: If you are not familiar with Web 2.0 concepts in teaching, this talk will be the proverbial ‘drink from a fire hose‘. Leslie presents dozens of sites and tools that designer and educators can use in the preparation and dissemination of a whole course or simple talk. Having considerable experience with these methods, Leslie suggests that we pick and choose among the sites and services for those that match our objectives and personal style.

“You may find the metaphor of ‘educator as DJ’ doesn’t work for you – fine. Maybe it’s ‘educator as mashup artist’. Maybe it’s ‘educator as painter.’ maybe it’s ‘educator as architect’. But…

I URGE you to seek out the metaphor YOU ALREADY BRING to your teaching practice, because inevitably you do. Becoming conscious of it is important not only because of how it lets you expand on it, but because the act of teaching IS the supreme metaphorical act; just as metaphor allows us new understanding by using a familiar vehicle that conveys attributes to a specific tenor, so do you as teachers seek to help your learners move from their existing understanding to somewhere new.”

Leslie’s talk is presented here in both slide and video formats. Notes and references are also included.

Designers and authors of educational materials are constantly in need of quality content for presentations and courses. Given the ease with which media can be “borrowed” and used in courseware, the question of what is acceptable to use in a document or web site comes up frequently among designers and managers. Although it is not acceptable to use copyrighted materials without appropriate licensing from the author, the Creative Commons license does allow creative media to be shared and used in many educational applications. From the Creative Commons About page:

Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright.We provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.

Look for the Creative Commons license. View this introductory video to get a better idea of what Creative Commons is and how to use it as both a consumer and producer of digital media.

Click to play