TECHNOS

August 29, 2008

TECHNOS QUARTERLY Fall 2001 Vol. 10 No. 3

Together Again? The New Case for Public Telecommunications and Education Partnerships

by Michael Connet and James Fellows

Many public broadcasting organizations have a long tradition of serving educational needs through partnerships with educational institutions.

Through the early uses of radio and television to provide live or recorded broadcasts of concerts, language programs, drama, history, and science instruction, students and teachers together benefited from experiences not readily available to most schools and classrooms. Some of these experiences were primitive by today's standards, but many others were very high-quality productions.

Building on a Solid Base of Experience

Today, as the Internet and computer-aided instruction have shown, instructional technologies must incorporate not only what public broadcasters have provided in the past but also another dimension: interactivity that allows users the opportunity to control and direct the experience.

This is not to suggest that public broadcasters will be any less important to the task of improving educational quality and access; rather, that their role and services must change to meet the needs of today's students and teachers. It is encouraging to see that this transformation is already well under way.

Many public television stations today provide multimediated resources beyond their broadcasts. This is accomplished through partnerships with community groups, including a broad range of resources: museums, libraries, arts organizations, local schools, colleges, health institutions, and businesses.

The reason for such engagement is to create and deliver broadband instructional resources that serve the young learner and the experienced teacher. These resources are then distributed via the Internet, DVD, CD, satellite, cable, in-person, and by over-the-air television. Millions of Americans span the digital divide because of these partnerships.

The Shift to Digital Technology

This nation’s conversion to digital television is quietly picking up steam. As mandated by the federal government, public television stations are re-equipping themselves to be capable of broadcasting their signals as digital bit streams. The result is greater efficiency and productivity in the use of the spectrum, a condition that yields the capacity to broadcast a greater volume of television-like material.

But it will also radically shape how we define what we have traditionally expected from television.

Through this technology we will have the ability to transmit a new type of service known as high-definition television (HDTV). The picture quality of HDTV is nearly film-like, allowing for a richness and detail of image as never seen before on television. The picture is displayed in a new size and dimension, or aspect ratio, so HDTV has the shape of the screen in most movie theaters. In addition, the sound quality is dramatically improved, re-creating an experience that matches the quality of CD music.
However, digital television (DTV) is much more than the extraordinary picture and sound quality of HDTV. The digital broadcasts can contain data that more closely emulates a computer program. In fact, DTV offers the distribution path to carry an extremely high-speed version of the Internet: large data files, which through conventional means (such as telephone and modem) would take hours or even days to distribute. But perhaps the most exciting dimension is twinning the interactivity of the computer with the richness of a television experience. This integration of the two media is now being defined as interactive television.

Public Television and Education: A Closer Look

Here are some examples of the unique partnerships and educational technology applications that are already under way around the country.

America’s Instructional Television Online (AITOL). This project was developed by Kansas City Public Television (KCPT) and WSIU with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The AITOL project supported the encoding of an instructional video collection (leased through various distributors such as the Agency for Instructional Technology) into a digital format and provided for its distribution by streaming the video to both the classroom teachers’ and students’ computer desktops. AITOL’s goal was to make instructional video available where teachers could access it, on their computer desktops, and deliver that programming in a way that was easily searched to find the appropriate curriculum materials. A final report on the AITOL project is available online at http: //www.stations.cpb.org/
pdfs/tv/grants/ff/aitol_etools.pdf.

The Connecticut River Education Initiative (CREI). This is a groundbreaking educational and telecommunications initiative in partnership with WGBY in Springfield, Massachusetts. CREI utilizes the Connecticut River Watershed as a regional education resource for the benefit of teachers and students across the four-state region of Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. With many lessons to be learned from studying the river valley, CREI gives teachers the skills and resources to bring these lessons to their classrooms, incorporating subjects ranging from geography, math, and environmental science to history, visual arts, and poetry. CREI is a collaborative project consisting of a uniquely fluid partnership of nonprofit educational institutions that includes PBS stations, museums, schools, and environmental agencies from the four New England states in the Watershed.

The Curriculum Connections Pilot Project. This joint project of Nebraska Educational Telecommunications and the Nebraska Department of Education is designed to experiment with on-demand delivery of instructional video programming to Nebraska K–12 schools. Programming is accessed through a Web interface and delivered to a computer located in a classroom. Teachers are able to search a database for programs that fit educational criteria and then call up the program on demand. “Curriculum Connections” provides students with a new tool by actively engaging them in the learning process. The purpose of this project was to test the pedagogical parameters of video on demand. To achieve this goal, the “Curriculum Connections” project is conducting follow-up focus groups and online user surveys. Results of their study will be compiled and released in late 2001.

Internet Service and Backbone Provider. WHRO, the public television station in the greater Hampton Roads region of eastern Virginia, provides K–12 learning services to 19 public school divisions, 14 independent schools, and home schools—representing 286,000 students and 25,000 educators. WHRO’s institutional Internet services, designed for use by entire school divisions or individual schools, currently connect more than 250 area schools and other nonprofit agencies to the Internet. The station is also an Internet Service Provider for individual educators and its contributing members. WHRO.net currently provides Internet services 24 hours per day, seven days per week to more than 2,000 individuals.

Virtual Field Trips. KLVX, the public television station in Las Vegas, created a series of live, electronic dialogues addressing specific curricular themes through a virtual field-trip series. These engaging programs, called SAT-CHATs, feature an individual who uses science, engineering, or technology in a highly adventurous way in his or her career. The one-hour events are delivered live via the public television station to more than 70 rural schools throughout Nevada and many more nationally by satellite. Participating students from classrooms ask questions of the featured guests via toll-free phone, fax, email, or Webcam.

The control room is a busy place during production of Sat-Chat at KLVX in Las Vegas.

The topics and featured guests for these virtual field trips have been as varied as the school curriculum. The inaugural event was titled “Astro-Chat” and focused on the space program. NASA Astronaut Carlos Noriega worked with the instructional designer to build the program on math and science principles and to encourage students to seek careers built from their academic pursuits in these areas. Other programs have included “Desert-Chat,” which looked at native environments; “Cat-Chat,” which featured the MGM Lion Habitat; “Jet-Chat,” which featured U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds pilot Kevin Mastin; and “Sea-Chat,” with the Mirage Dolphin Habitat as the host location.

—Michael Connet and James Fellows

The Third Generation of the WWW

Whereas digital television has yet to make its presence felt in the consciousness of the average American, the Internet has reached adolescence as a mass-market service. As the Internet has evolved and grown in its sophistication with the rapid expansion of its user base, so have the ways in which people use and interact with the World Wide Web. Early iterations of the Web were often static, promotional pages that contained impersonal links to more information of the same variety or genre.

While broadband media—the technology to deliver increasingly richer content online—has been developed, the basic structure of the Web has remained fairly constant.

A second generation of the Web, one that was more conducive to distributing broadband content, began to emerge in the mid-to-late 1990s. Fueled by the growth of faster, higher-speed Internet connections made possible through wider availability of T1, cable modem, and digital subscriber lines (DSL), Web sites evolved with increasing capabilities to present information to help the user to interact or navigate.

In this second generation of Web architecture, it was observed that users frequently responded to attempts to customize Web pages that more closely met their personal preferences. This user-defined customization is now approaching a threshold to accelerate the maturation of the World Wide Web to a third generation of design and interface.

This third-generation Web holds the potential to redefine what, how, when, and even where we learn. The shift fueled by broadband, yet to occur, will be less about how we use media and more about the integration of media across the platforms of television, computer, broadcast, and Internet. This shift, coupled with the renewed linkages in local communities, is the true potential for public television as we arrive in the 21st Century.

In this generation, the creation of World Wide Web programming must exploit several resources:

broadband delivery
the rich media assets of public television
the strength of community experts
the selective criteria important to individual users

Public Television in Transition Today

We can forecast a transformation in educational technology comparable to the impact that new and emerging technologies have had on electronic communications overall.

For public broadcasters focused on fulfilling their mission through educational partnerships, the prospects for success are doubly exciting. Not only is there a resourceful set of new technological tools at their disposal, but a spirit of innovation and cooperation is clearly evident.

Public broadcasting is indeed at a crucial turning point. Fortifying it is its legacy as the nation’s attempt to construct a public service media system designed to educate, enlighten, and entertain. Ahead of it is the potential and promise of that same public service orientation, now given momentum by the capacities of new technology that will enable this mission to be pursued as broadly and intensely as the needs warrant.

The future, however, is not a distant shimmer. You actually can see it from here.

Many public television stations are aggressively seizing the opportunity of the rapidly changing media and technology environment to experiment and reconnect with their educational partners. In communities all across the country, educators—from preschool to postgraduate institutions—are being asked to join forces with public television organizations. See the accompanying article, “Public Television and Education: A Closer Look,” on page 31, for some examples of the unique partnerships and educational technology applications that are already under way.

Beyond the Spectrum

As public television stations ponder exciting new ways to reach audiences using their digital terrestrial spectrum, cable and satellite programming distributors are briskly developing broadband content and business models to deliver data (interactive or enhanced TV, hereafter “eTV”) over their analog and digital platforms. Upgraded for interactivity, new advanced set-top boxes provide for two-way communication among viewers and between the content provider and viewer. As eTV services become widely available in the United States over the next several years, PBS will rapidly evolve its interactive strategy.

Interactive television represents the point for local public television stations where two-way communication with their audiences becomes a reality. eTV impacts the local station’s ability to serve educational audiences; offers new ways of leveraging content assets to reach viewers on different levels according to the viewer’s interests; and builds community through eTV applications that allow public television viewers to talk to each other and to their local station.

With only 10 percent of public television viewers receiving their local station signal over the air, the million-dollar question is how to create and integrate a compelling local DTV service with existing modes of transport (cable, satellite, and terrestrial) to ensure public television content reaches 100 percent of the potential viewing audience. Only through cooperation with network operators can significant audiences be reached to achieve sufficient learning and to support sound business models for interactive and digital television at PBS.

The most promising, immediate, and market-savvy opportunity for digital television begins with interactive broadcasting, which is the first fully converged medium that blends PBS’s rich, entertaining, and educational programming in both the broadcast and Internet worlds.

Beginning in late 2000, PBS producers began to create interactive television content for “live trials” with selected multiple system operators. Today’s most prominent and advanced delivery systems for eTV are represented in these live trials. Each trial is intended to have a 12-month term, providing a contained environment for development and analysis. These real-life “laboratories” incorporate the strategic objectives governing production, business, and technical issues. The knowledge gained from these trials is key to making sound decisions related to a future coordinated rollout of interactive programming on public television.

Finally . . .

The diversity and efficiency of new media, coupled with ever increasing speeds of connectivity, create a new product known as broadband delivered content. However, as with so many claims about educational benefits from previous technological innovations, broadband is not a teaching or learning panacea. It is, rather, a potentially remarkable resource for students and teachers to advance educational achievement. Perhaps the truly creative role for these educational technology tools will be achieved when they regularly help teachers, school administrators, families, and related community organizations transform learning into a highly sought and truly rewarding 21st-Century experience.