Going Off the Record at #durbbu

Why Not  Record It All?

photo by Dustin Baxter via flickr

Ray Land delivered the second keynote of the Blackboard Users Conference today giving a great presentation about the imperatives and risks of Open Education in a world being transformed by speed. Yesterday, Grainne Conole gave us a tour of the open educational horizon in the context of using the VLE as a way of encourgaing educators to enhance their teaching ( here are her slides)

Both of the presentations were so rich that I know I would benefit from being able to review them again.  I just had the chance to speak with Malcolm Murray, one of the conference organizers about why the keynotes are not recorded.

Although there are some issues with copyright and licensing that arise with the use of borrowed images and embedded youtube videos, Malcolm suggested a deeper reason as well. The act of recording changes behaviours.  Not only does it have the potential to greatly expand the size of the audience, it can also have an inhibiting effect discouraging speaking freely and being critical. So going off the record can contribute to special type of environment, especially in today's world of near ubiquitous surveillance.

I actually heard in mentioned in a session here that a University is considering recording all lectures by default and making them available to the students.  While there is an obvious benefit in for the student's access to the lectures, would it truly be outweighed by the potentially stifling effects?

So, while it's a loss that these keynotes will not be widely shared as video recordings, perhaps they were of a higher quality for taking place in this "special" type of environment.  I'll take some time to reflect on them here in the future as will many of the other attendees I'm sure.

In the mean time, here's a sample from Ray Land: