Screencasting

This is not a particularly new idea but in the context of the developments of newish web-based developments to support teaching this notion is important to me for one reason. For much of the past 25 years, teachers have worked hard to shoe horn computing related technologies into classrooms. The old Cuban line: computers come to classrooms, computers win, more or less captures a lot of long debate about this issue. What is interesting about these new web technologies and under the influence of an old thinker, old in that I was taken by his stuff decades ago, George Lakoff, I have become more conscious of the metaphors I and others use to talk about the proliferation of ajax-based web products, is that they point to interesting disruptions to the way things are done. (It does matter whether we call it Web2, social software, participatory software, ajax-based software and so on. For now, I'm opting for new(ish) web-based software, acknowledging that blogs and wikis go back to the mid 1990's.)

What's the point of this long-winded preamble? One of the key features of this newish software is that it is being used to support quite radically rethought processes in a handful of instances I know of. In education, more often than not, we iwll go down the "let's apply it" route and more than likely the newish software will succumb like all previous attempts to "integrate" and "apply" these technologies into formal educational settings. All of which I am mildly excited by the emergence of the screencast.

To the technically adept I can hear the ho hums but this little idea is important because it does represent a modest re-engineering of educational practice, i.e. instead of working to fill the mandatory 40 minute or 1 hour lecture, a screeencast takes as long or as short as it takes.

Here is a collection of resources around screencasting.

Here is an example from mathematics: mathcasts