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Workshop B
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Workshop A |
Workshop B |
Workshop C |
Workshop D
Workshop B - Session 1
Translated from French What I would like to do is to give you the position of RAI, Italy's public service radio and television broadcaster. What type of service do you expect from a public broadcaster? You expect information, news, but also training - a sort of parallel service to school. In theory it should be the priority for a public broadcaster to be a support to permanent learning and to training. That is the theory but it is not the reality. What happened in Italy, until two years ago, is that, though we had three big channels, two radio channels, offices in all the regions, publishing, video publishing, cassettes publishing, anything that had to do with education and schooling was put on late at night or even at 2 o'clock in the morning. This is not unusual, in fact, it is what goes on with most public broadcasters. So the question you have to ask yourself is whether that public service broadcasting is really a support to education, and what type of support it should offer. What I am going to put to you is one of the solutions we have envisaged. Eighteen months ago we created a new Directorate called Education which works through all our media. For example, our main channel provides 3 hours a day; there are Satellite channels 24 hours a day; there are some special windows within the radio schedule and there are also partnerships with private publishers for the creation of CD-ROMs, cassettes, records, books. This use of all our media transforms totally our working methods, and that is what I am trying to describe to you in a few minutes. Television has evolved totally. What we have to do is to use programming that is effective for training and education, but which will be valuable over time and pedagogically meaningful. That is programming which is going to bring into classrooms and also people's homes an extra value that could not be provided by the teacher. So it is quite different from simply shooting television film. You need to have at your disposal subject experts and scientists; you need to have specific pictures/images/illustrations which have subject or scientific value, with as little comment as possible. What we try to provide is the voice of the protagonist so that when the family, or more often the teacher in his classroom, decides to use the television programme, what they get is something new, something specific, something different as far as quality is concerned. So what I would like to do is describe two experiments to you. Two experiments There is our new satellite channel which started in October 1997. At the moment it is rather modest, it has been going on for only seven months, but it is 24 hours a day and we have learnt quite a few things. We started with two totally new programmes. The first programme is entitled Mosaico. It is literally a mosaic of resources. We work through the television archives and get little clips, 10 minutes/15 minutes at the most, of interviews, historical pictures, films - they are really historical documents, and it is then arranged, organised and cut. This is all accompanied with technical notes and it is on the Internet at http://www.educational.rai.it/internet/mosaico/index.htm It is a sort of encyclopaedia with history, philosophy, physics, maths, and so on. So the teacher at home can look at the Mosaico catalogue, and through Internet send a request for content. This is then programmed into the Satellite Channel. There is a two weeks' differential between the request and the broadcast. For example, from the catalogue you know that Tuesday is the day devoted to sciences and so you ask yourself, 'Is there something that I would like to be integrated within the programme two weeks from now?' This is how Mosaico is made up. It is broadcast twice a day for a total of six hours per day. The teacher is not supposed to do that during the classroom for example. It could be something that he does at home. Sometimes there are different perspectives on the same topic, and the teacher or the professor can record anything that is useful to him and he can ask himself, 'Is there something I wouldn't be able to teach to my classroom myself?' But it is for each person to take the decision because the basic principle in Mosaico is to respect the role and the responsibility and the remit of the teacher or the professor. When the teacher decides that he is going to use the 10 minute clips, he arrives in his classroom, he puts the video cassette in the machine and shows the 10 minutes. After that he is in front of the classroom again, explaining, commenting - so the comment and the explanation is the role of the teacher. Images and documents are the role of television. The second programme - I cannot talk to you about that in great detail, but nonetheless the idea is that you give pupils the possibility of creating their own television programme, so it is their content that they find within the television programme. It is entitled School Direct. So those are the prerequisites and the ideas we had when we decided to set up that channel. What we wanted to do was to provide classrooms, provide schools, with what they could not do on their own, and the idea is that television is a part within a whole technological structure which can only be managed if there is co-operation between the Ministry of Schools and the schools themselves.
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