Workshop B - Session 1

Title: Using Broadcasting and the New Technologies - A European Overview Chair: Dr. Josie Taylor, Open University, UK Dr. Josie Taylor, Open University, UK

Introduction by Dr. Josie Taylor

In the UK lifelong learning is associated in the public's mind with the Open University, and the main reason for this is because Open University television programmes have been available to the nation's television viewing audience through the BBC for 25 years. Television has a unique role to play in providing us all with windows into other worlds, other lives and other possibilities than the ones we may be currently struggling with, and we at the OU know that television has proved a powerful device for awakening a thirst for learning in the many different kinds and ages of people who enrol for our courses.

But times are changing in the media - broadcast television is undergoing massive change across Europe with increasing deregulation, and increasing competition. The launch of digital services later this year in the UK will release new channel spaces, new opportunities for broadcasting. And the impact of these services on audiences could be dramatic - audience fragmentation will provide opportunities for targeted niche channels, reaching not into the mass audiences of previous generations, but, for example, supplying high quality educational materials to increasing numbers of our populations who receive digital services, and the potential market for such materials across Europe is enormous.

Convergence

As a direct consequence of the digitalisation of broadcasting is media convergence - the unique power of television to reach into our homes and lives, combined with the computer's potential to provide us with vast amounts of information, knowledge and computational abilities. Already major TV producers and distributors are engaged in Internet content provision. Also companies like Anglia and the BBC produce off-line multimedia, mostly in entertainment, education and infotainment.

How to capture the interactive potential of these new media forms for educational purposes is occupying the minds and energies of many a broadcaster and multimedia designer! The more technoromantic amongst them have a hope that the digital future of TV transmissions could be combined with telecommunications and enhanced set top boxes to provide live interactive media in a domestic setting, and that will have clear educational benefits for the general population.

The technosceptics might ask questions about how this interactive potential can possibly be realised in ways that viewers can - or are willing to - engage with. Interface design, usability, understandability, will all be essential issues for designers and broadcasters to consider. It will become an essential component of the equation that audiences actively participate in the transmission - learning is about empowerment - not passive acceptance of whatever is foisted upon an audience in the name of progress. This may result in audiences who are unwilling to tolerate a level of service even slightly below that which they expect.

Faith

When the Labour government of the '60s first proposed the idea of an Open University to the public, it was in an atmosphere of faith and belief in technology to deliver social good, and it was in an era when the black and white television set had not quite made it into everyone's home. We are now in a position where the computer is making inroads into that domestic setting in one form or another, either at the deliberate behest of the consumer, or covertly contained in an innocuous box sitting on top of the familiar TV.

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