In Their Own Words

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. In Their Own Words
In Their Own Words is not a bad publication, especially, but I really wish the authors and editors had managed to resist the cliches. Like the photographs of one person using a computer while three others look on (and compare the ones on pages 7 and 8 - they're just wrong). The "students' words" themselves, of course, are carefully edited and polished, and in the videos presented with them have theme music and narration, to make sure you get the point. And it was jarring to be confronted with a 20 megabyte .mov - I realized that the large and fast Flash videos have become standard for me. Some of the comments are right - for example, "Content is no longer 'fixed' and 'valued'. It is a starting point, something to interact with, to cut and paste, to adapt and remix." But the entire production looks and feels and reads like a lot of work went into making it non-threatening to educational officials. And those words, I would imagine, are not the students' at all. More...