The Wales-Wide Web

First the use of blogs as a notebook. Second, the idea of production as pedagogy. Third, informal individual and collective learning. And fourth, what used to be known as 'empowerment', now tends to be called 'active citizenship' and what I call 'politics'.

The first I have already written about. I increasingly like using this blog as a notebook for ideas. I often used to scribble them on the back on an envelope, in the pub at then end of the day, or on bits of paper which I subsequently lost or forgot what I meant. Writing them like this makes sure I keep a record - more usefully it allows me to send a quick note to others I think might also like to pick up on an idea.

So what is the idea? First the history. yesterday, I was downloading my emails. Amongst them was the weekly newsletter from the excellent LabourStart . LabourStart, run by Eric Lee from London, provides on-line information about international labour movement and trade union campaigns. It is a fine example of how the use of new technology can be used as an organising and campaigning force.

Extended text for this entry:

Some four weeks ago Eric launched Radio LabourStart (http://radio.labourstart.org) on the web. The service has gone from strength to strength. To quote from this weeks newsletter:

"This weekend Radio LabourStart is featuring our longest playlist ever -- 3 hours and 46 minutes of news, features and music including songs by Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Bily Bragg, Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen, Tracy Chapman, Peter Gabriel, Stevie Wonder, Ewan MacColl, Joan Baez, Malvina Reynolds, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and many others.

As usual we're running the latest daily news broadcast from the Workers Independent News Service as well as feature stories about Cesar Chavez, the struggle at the Duane Reade drugstore chain in the US, and plantation workers in Nicaragua.

We've even got a programme called "Tool Time" with some ideas about how you can better cope with all the Internet sites that demand passwords."

I've been meaning to tune in but had never got round to it. having five minutes to spare I went to the site. It can be found on Radio 365 (www.live365.com) which appears to be some kind of US based alternative web radio hosting service. It took me a bit of fiddling to get it to work - I had to download a player although I suspect it could work through i-Tunes. I have to say that the number of pop up adds were annoying - i was still closing them a day later. Radio 365 seems to host a huge number of alternative radio stations - most from my stray searches devoted to different genres of music.

What interested me was not so much the stations hosted on the site, but the potential of internet based radio.

Knownet is a partner in a European funded 3RL regional learning project. As part of the project we are trying to launch a community based music site in north Wales - www.tirnagog.net. The idea is three fold. Firstly to provide access and facilities for individuals and bands in the region. Secondly to build a community around the music scene in the region. And thirdly, to encourage informal and community based learning. A web based radio station could be brilliant for this.

Not only could it provide exposure for bands. Most bands are not worried about IPR - they just want a chance for their music to be listened to. And most bands, if they are making any money, are making it out of playing gigs, not from CD sales. To get gigs, they need people to hear their music. Streamed radio offers a much more creative format than just providing MP3 downloads. It also allows us to develop a community - with, hopefully, space for other forms of audio content.

And, it provides all kinds of opportunities for informal learning. Learning about recording, learning about internet technologies, and learning about media production for sure. But, also learning about what educationalists like to call communication skills.

Critically, the learning is through doing and participating, through being involved in something participants are interested in, have a passion about. E-motive learning, if you like.

From a pedagogical point of view, the learning takes place through producing things, through producing music, through producing radio programmes. I think there is a lesson in this. For some reason the education of young people is organized primarily through storytelling and production. it is only when children leave primary education, that learning becomes increasingly alienated form production. I suppose it could be argued that you cannot learn about more abstract ideas or develop theoretical or underpinning knowledge through production. But, I think would argue that much of human endeavor is at some level embedded in the production of artifacts, however high the level of abstraction of the thinking. Whist alienation in classical Marxist terms may be the alienation of the producer form the artifact produced, it may also arise from the alienation of ideas from the representations of those ideas. I'm going to have to do some more thinking about this (and some background reading). I'll post more on this topic in the next month.

Anyway, back to the radio station as a medium or object for learning. Of course we could offer access to formal accreditation and access to more formal learning programmes through such a project. Although that would make us popular with the education establishment, and some individuals might want to take up that option, that wouldn't be the main aim. I also worry that when formal learning programmes and accreditation are introduced it can take the motivation and passion out of learning.

The final attraction of internet radio for me is that it reclaims another level of technology and means of communication as a medium for individual and collective expression of ideas, out of the control of commercial interests. It offers an outlet for creativity and emotion and a platform for minority ideas.

From an educational point of view I have a number of ideas. For sure, we will try to launch a Tirnagog site. But it would also be very exciting to try to link three or four European regions, sharing programmes and sharing languages. I've talked with people in the past about doing this using streamed video. However, streamed video still requires a lot of bandwidth and not insubstantial technical know-how. The technology can overwhelm the purpose. On the other hand, many kids can cope with producing MP3 tracks. the technology isn't expensive. The success of the iPod and other MP3 players shows that music and audio still have much going for them.

A last technical note. I talked with Mike Malloch this morning about the idea and he has had a look at radio 365. he points out it is not particularly cheap - it seems they change $100 dollars a month for hosting a site. But it should be relatively easy to run web based radio on Flash MX server. We will look further into this.

Returning to my first point, on blogs as an ideas scribble pad, I've scribbled the idea. Now I am going to email the url for this entry to a number of friends and colleagues who I think might be interested. Please use the comment facility - either to comment on the ideas or to add your bit, especially if you might like to work with us on developing this project.