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I gave this presentation as part of my final project for my Masters in Communication in Digital Media (MCDM) class at the University of Washington. Here’s a transcript (essentially) with what I said during my presentation.

Slide 1: Intro

The top-down traditional dissemination model of public television is being replaced with an open, many-to-many networked media environment. In today’s world, the famous PBS tagline of “Viewers like you” is no longer as applicable as it used to be thanks to this transition. Now, something along the lines of “Participants like you” may be a better fit. Technology shares a strong relationship with public television—a relationship initially sparked by education.

In this presentation, I’ll focus on PBS and its nearly 360 member stations that make up America’s largest classroom. From its beginning as educational television to today’s public media, PBS has remained committed to using media for the public good and has remained in classrooms across the United States.

Slide 2: A history of PBS in the classroom

Post WWII, the FCC set aside 242 television frequencies, or 12% of available frequencies, for noncommercial educational purposes. Just two years later, in 1954, the Philadelphia School District and the nation’s first community-owned television station, WQED, launched classroom-based instructional television because of its expansive potential reach and to compensate for a teacher shortage due to the baby boom. Teachers expressed little enthusiasm to having someone else teach their class by television and resolved that television not become the core of the school curriculum. The teacher in the classroom (not on television) would ask follow up questions after the broadcast to prompt further discussion thus using the television as a technological tool.

By 1967, thirteen years after its start in televised classroom education, WQED offered instruction in practically every subject to more than 800,000 pupils in over 23,000 regional classrooms. Televised classroom instruction was deemed “effective” but dependent on the quality of follow-up by teachers in the classrooms. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act in 1967 and said, “I believe the time has come to enlist the computer and the satellite, as well as television and radio, and to enlist them in the cause of education.”

Slide 3 – Consumer-centered public media

In the early 1970s and through the 80s public television began to move away from the locally-focused model at each station and share more national content. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, public television was widely accepted as important, but rarely loved. Educators continued to use PBS television segments and video in the classroom setting as needed to supplement their lessons but not in the daily live broadcast format.

Then came the Internet, followed by a decade of quick-fire innovation—and the individual user has moved from being an anonymous part of a mass to being the center of the media picture.

Today, more than 95 percent of public television stations are engaged in providing educational services directly to K-12 and higher-ed schools. Public television stations are on the cutting-edge of technology advancements, planning for and testing emergent technologies that hold promise for delivering educational content.

Educational services provided by public television stations range from:

• in-person reading programs for parents and childcare providers,
• to professional development resources for teachers,
• to online activities designed to spark student learning
• to classroom specific resources designed around the great programs you see on PBS, such as NOVA, FRONTLINE, History Detectives or American Experience.

PBS content is now designed around the idea that it is a multi-platform engagement opportunities consisting of offline, online, print, social media, electronic greeting cards, widgets, interactive maps, educator materials, etc.

Slide 4 – PBS Education division

The PBS Education division is building a collaborative network of 21st century educators and learners who turn to public media to transform teaching and learning both at the national and station levels.

The PBS Teachers Website offers:

• searchable library of over 9,000 free local and national standards-based teaching resources
• the leading online teacher professional development service, PBS TeacherLine.
• PBS Teachers Connect which I’ll talk a little bit more about in a minute.

Here are some recent stats about digital media use in the classroom:

• 76% of teachers stream/download video content from the Internet to aid classroom instruction – more than ever before.
• The majority of K–12 teachers (82 percent) continue to believe that video content is more effective when it is integrated with other instructional resources or content.

Challenges:

• Most teachers (78 percent) encounter problems with streaming video include skipping, pausing or constant buffering.
• computing devices or technology infrastructure, or both, do not yet have the capacity to handle teachers’ increasingly Internet-dependent instructional activity.
• Students’ ability to use these devices at school is severely limited.
• More than half of K-12 teachers report their school media budgets have decreased over the past year, but strikingly teachers spend 60 percent of their time using educational resources that were either free (like PBS’ resources) or that they paid for themselves.

Slide 5 – Modern day educational media

Teachers’ perceptions of the usefulness of discussion boards and the ability to connect with other teachers increased significantly in 2010. PBS is positioning itself as the hub of teacher communities with The PBS Teachers Connect. This online community fosters the participant’s discussions of effective ways to integrate digital media content and technology into the curriculum to help educators promote 21st century skills development and improve student achievement. It also allows them to be part of a group of people affected by a common issue.

Education and technology remain intertwined and are seen as the drivers for public television’s future success. But public media 2.0 won’t happen by accident and change must happen.

Slide 6 – Partner, create, distribute

The Center for Social Media reports that the “mission of public media 2.0 is to enable publics with media to recognize and understand the problems they share, to know each other, and to act.” There will be many more partnerships, spanning museums, schools, health care organizations and other nonprofit organizations with everyone creating content and distributing it through multiple platforms, essentially blurring some of the traditional organizational lines.

Many public television stations are already providing journalistic training to citizen media makers and integrating their content.The challenge will be matching up the professional with the amateur, and there are definite standards for public media 2.0 will need to establish:

• Freedom of expression
• Fact checking/quality control
• Ethics
• Copyright practices
• Use of open source tools

PBS carries a powerful brand and a drive for education innovation. Schools and public media will become more closely connected than ever before with PBS acting as a hub for local, national and education-specific digital media content – an obvious place for public media and education to work together.

It’s an exciting time for PBS as America’s Largest Classroom and for the teachers and students involved.

Resources and credits are listed on the last slide.

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