In the preparation of an future topic of our Podcast I slowly start thinking about barriers which have to be solved under the frame thought: „Imagine whole institutions like universities are really starting with web2.0″ – So, to allow the remark: The question of learning culture, deep educational benefit would be all set positive for ‚prosumers‘. Balancing the barriers it will focus on the technical ones. And inside the technicals there are specially bandwidth, storage, accessibility on creative, as well as on receipting site. But there is one more topic coming up on my list, which want to be the main part in this small blog post. What about the security thing? In my point of view there are multiple topics bound which are all generally important. First is the misuse of the given data from the students. It should be hand able by diverse rights and protocols. The second is the insurance of content and context. What means this? For instance a feed can be received by people of interest for personal use. But it can be rapped to multiple feed engines, where you don’t have control in which context your students work appears. Secondly – as you may know – platforms being powered by advertising don’t enable to ensure that advertising is a) political correct, b) context specific – i think you know what i mean and this is something to have in mind. What about the other security topics? Digital right recognition and handling could be set as rule in advance and should be a topic during the procedure phase. But there is one more thing. As more as i see the mass of data and information growing and people joining and leaving our AG Podcasting, i think also a question of security – a question of honour and a question of concept is security as sustainability. What is the leading thought behind this? In our understanding our podcast episodes are something the students spent a lot of time and worked hard on it. For sure it is also useful if they are proud on it. It is always in my mind, that they feel enabled to point on their work, their progress and development in later situations. And it is not predictable when they might have use for this situation. For this it seems to be a critical task setting up an infrastructure primary and secondary, when they have the chance to offer their work at an situation of their choice and this could be a very later moment. Seen so: If universities have entered the boat of creative prosuming, it should be in mind that this could be a critical task for security – to ensure the availability of data as real valued work to be proudly pointed later on! How do you solve this problem?
I think the best practice is probably to encourage learners to do two things:
1) keep multiple copies of things they produce, so that if a 3rd party app, or an institutional server, becomes unavailable to them, they can still access their materials.
2) keep an ‚index‘ of material they produce. If they can do this and include a reflection on what the material means to them, and what it provides as evidence about their learning or skills, then that is even better.
The reflections kept in step 2) above should be dynamic, I think, in that the learners should probably update them in the light of experience they gain later.
In this way, it should be practical to maintain pointers to all the work they have done – and if the institution needs to access those materials, all they really need is a list of the learners‘ index pages (which could be on an institutional server, or, better, on a couple of 3rd party applications which the user can continue to access after they have left the institution)