Tuesday, October 15, 2002

News media platform
We have 60 students each year, who form three different desks: radio, television and newspapers. The equipment at the college is updated and good, and the students publish newspapers and broadcast television and radio locally and regionally. This runs along smoothly, floating on more than 25 years of experience in different media. The new challenge is the net. How to make the students see beyond the old technology-imposed limitations and towards the potential of new technology.

Adrian's two posts teaching and middlecasting are both relevant to this question, and his meeting with the dean of this department was quite interesting, as they were searchign for the solutions to the same problem, only through different medium.

Today Sverre elaborated on some of the technical problems which keeps the three media seperate. There is no really good cooperation/editing/publishing tool for net publishing of convergence news. We are not talking about making video, radio and print appear on a web-page here, but about handling the three classic media as one medium from production through editing and up to publishing. Unless the same people can produce and edit sound, image, video and text through the same software, it will be very hard to make the students see that computer technology creates a fourth medium, and not just a reproduction of the classic three.

It's an interesting problem. If anybody would like to experiment on live reporters in order to develop something like that, Volda College has all the facilities needed... all we need is a brilliant software developer. Got one to spare?

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