While educational television affords developmental fuel to a hungry audience around the world, in Britain, as we have seen, it is migrating to different platforms in an increasingly fragmented digital universe. This does not mean it is in decline, far from it. In 2005, the UK government launched a whole education service on digital television and online called Teachers’ TV. Costing the Department for Education and Skills £20 million a year, but granted full editorial independence, this channel not only makes programmes for teachers, heads and school governors, and support materials for key stage curricular needs, but debates and documentaries around the key issues of the day. One documentary strand – What’s Going On? – sees the world and its problems through the eyes of children in the front line. Indigenous Children in Australia, Child Refugees in Tanzania, Street Children in Mongolia and Child Soldiers in Sierra Leone are just some of its many pertinent titles. What in the World? is another series of documentary human stories from countries such as Malawi, Ecuador, Guatemala and India. Ingenious Africa is a series that ‘highlights the strengths of African innovation’, attempting to subvert the frequently negative images of Africa by celebrating its ingenuity in everything from agriculture to astronomy, engineering to sustainable development models. An African project manager, Melanie Naidoo, sets the tone:
Africa is the place that you will find some of the solutions for the globe, because conditions in some of our African countries are so dire. The solutions are equally exciting for me, the solutions that are generated here need to be shared universe-wide. I believe the perseverance of our people will lead to a total transformation for Africa and it will inspire the rest of the world.26
Other documentaries take on the hard subjects mainstream channels are increasingly shy of: the brutalities of war, gang warfare, refugees and asylum, and the veil in Saudi Arabia.
With some 2,500 programmes freely available to download from the internet, Teachers’ TV is a valuable resource keeping the internationalist, liberal conscience of education alive and well replenished with original material. It is a significant user of documentary techniques and sensibilities. But it is also part of the wider renaissance of educational programme-making at the forefront of the multimedia universe.
Since 1997, the Royal Television Society has run a separate Educational Awards ceremony, celebrating a rich panoply of categories from specialist pre-school and primary programmes to educational impact in mainstream television and multimedia awards. In the first year, it was largely a head-to-head between BBC Education and Channel 4 Schools, with largely predictably worthy programmes winning. Perhaps the most prescient was that year’s Multimedia award, which saw off the then conventional CD-Roms also nominated:
In January, viewers of BBC2’s The Net were invited to get online after the programme ended and take part in a project called ‘The Mirror’. This was an exercise in ‘shared spaces’
– whereby a large group of people can come together to create a community based on mutual interests in a virtual (shared) environment. It was also a major piece of research between BT, the BBC, Illuminations (the production company behind The Net) and Sony for the future hybrid of TV and online communications . . . More than 600 successful registrations were logged within an hour of the programme finishing, and over the project’s 7 weeks, 2,250 people from as far afield as South Africa and Australia joined
‘The Mirror’.27
In a world of millions networking through Facebook and interacting in the virtual world of Second Life, this may seem like small beer but, at the time, it was breakthrough stuff that helped put the BBC and educational television in the driving seat of multimedia develop-ment. Ten years on, the BBC was still in that driving seat, securing all four nominations for the multimedia award and the winner being what has been heralded as ‘the world’s first broadband interactive film’.28Based on the HBO costume drama series Rome, CDX was a mystery video game built around a notional BBC drama executive who goes out to the Cinecitta film studios in Rome, using documentary footage especially shot in Rome. The RTS Jury said:
This is a beautifully designed and delivered piece of educational material, which effectively blurs the line between learning and entertainment, making a truly compelling experience. The combination of video, gameplay and links to programme resources demonstrates an extremely high level of integration between content and format.29 The 2006 primary school interactive award was won by one of the commercial education companies who had just successfully scuppered the BBC Jam project, Espresso Education.
Conclusion
What all this reflects is not just the possibilities of the evolving technology, but the fundamental shift in education practice and learner perception. Schools no longer wanted long form narrative programmes that wrapped everything up, nor had the time to accom-modate those slabs in their lessons, so uptake was fast declining. Students brought up in a
channel-hopping environment, with the dexterity of gaming and the associative elisions of the internet, were bored with the linear, passive paradigm. What these new multimedia approaches do is offer a media-rich experience which puts the learner, as Mike Flood Page says, ‘in the driving seat’. As opposed to offering the definitive take on a subject in a virtual lecture, however well filmed, they develop ideas with what they call ‘user case scenarios’:
We’ll go and say: ‘Who are the audiences you are trying to reach with this? What do they want?’ We will then go and research them and we will come up with something. It is not rocket science. If this is your proposition and this is your audience: What is it they want?
What is their daily life style? How are they going to use this? And we work from there.
That underlying approach works through all the resources we develop.30
And Flood Page’s company, Illumina Digital, do not just make educational programmes.
Their approach to development is increasingly common throughout television, inverting the traditional approach whereby programme-makers decide what to offer the public. In an attempt to retain audiences, the audiences get to help define what they want. Where once a subject of public importance would have been identified and a documentary commissioned, now the research is commissioned to identify the importance and then the approach that will sustain it. Old forms and approaches are merely some of the options on offer. As Flood Page says, ‘Video has a crucial part in a lot of it, but it’s not what you’d call documentary any more’. He cites one project, Breaking the News, as a good example, which employs documentary techniques and sensibilities – and a whole lot more:
Channel 4 came to us and said: Let’s have kids make the News. What you have on that site31is a very good example of a cross-platform project. You have a straightforward course that tells you how to broadcast news, for 14–19-year-olds, across the board.
You have a ‘behind the scenes’ look at Channel 4 News, a whole day you can inter-rogate, from before the morning News conference to the debrief after the evening show’s gone out, with four strands. You follow the News Editor, who’s obviously critical; you follow the presenter, Jon Snow; you follow a producer-reporter making a package;
and you follow the people making the News belt. You see the editorial process in close-up, and there are some master classes as well. But the third thing is: there are some tools there. There’s an online video editor. ITN has provided some rushes and you can edit your own material . . . You’ve got great content, great learning resources and the capacity to generate your own content . . . That’s a total education resource of a new kind with good video in there.32
As a part of the project, ten schools submitted young journalists who spent a day at ITN making and presenting their own news programme, which was transmitted along with the documentary that charted their experience.33 So linear programming and documentary have not disappeared, but just become part of a wider, richer mix; and the internet ensures that programmes and projects have a longer shelf-life, Teachers’ TV being a good example.
On their website,34as seen at the RTS Educational Television Awards, are many fine examples of the documentary form, consistent with the form’s established traditions, but all with the focus on getting a message across. The next chapters concentrate on particular uses of such focus.
Expert briefing – multimedia project management
Although those who have grown up familiar with multimedia platforms and interactivity do not find multi-platform approaches alien, they do require more sophisticated planning and management processes than conventional documentary. The BBC breaks the process into five stages: Planning, Design, Production, Validation and Maintenance, which I have adapted here to laying out the basic process. This, and the software programmes available, tend to change rapidly:
A. PLANNING
1 Shared skills: Television is essentially teamwork. Even the lonely video-journalist needs someone to buy his work and technicians to distribute it, but most projects are much more collaborative – and multimedia work has elevated these synergies to a new high. There are three core skills areas involved, which may mean as few as three people, or three teams:
(i) Editorial and content: These are the more conventional programme-making skills of conception, writing and shooting, which would normally deliver the finished product, but now only becomes one prong of the trident. This includes the newly expanded role of the (creative) director/project manager, who has to interpret the brief and manage the team, as well as liaise with the client, although the business side may well have been taken care of by an executive producer.
(ii) Design: Much under-used in factual television, maybe only thought of for graphics, here design becomes a key player in conceiving the look of the multifaceted
Figure 8.2
Channel 4’s Breaking the News got kids making the news
project and the experience it offers. This will probably incorporate animation, modelling, photographic and art direction roles.
(iii) Technical: Again banished to the back room in television, here taking a lead role in the functionality of the project, particularly in its interactive elements and delivering the tools to enhance the experience. Not only does this include the key role of programmer, but also network manager, ensuring the hosting, support and interactive services work.
2 Team building: Ideally, all three skills areas are represented on project teams from inception, so as to extend the possibilities, but in realisable terms. Each should know what is feasible in their area, within the constraints of time and budget available, so that development of ideas remains focused on the practicable. The ergonomics are arguably even more vital than the open-plan offices of conventional television production, allowing creative collaboration across sophisticated technological
platforms. Modes of work and forms of communication are necessarily less hierarchical – see Silicon Valley and the triumph of the techno-garagistes – as the work culture helps define the creative parameters.
3 Costs and constraints: Just as television commissions are driven by the tariff available for the slot, the money justifiable for any given programme output, multimedia projects have to work within cost parameters. One rule of thumb for computer-based training materials is a development ratio of 100:1, i.e. 100 man hours’ development for each computer-based hour of user experience,35but complex demands can easily compound that and the limits of ‘blue sky thinking’ trial and error have to be agreed.
Project briefs, resource limits, product licences and progress reports need to be meticulously documented if teams and clients are to continue in harmony. It takes time to get things right, and even more time to get them simple. Creatives have to learn to compromise.
B. DESIGN
4 End user and market research: The key determinant is the project brief: not so much the subject, but the object. Who is this to serve, to what end? This requires a
‘user needs analysis’. Programme-makers used to doing things in their own ‘auteurist’
way find this the hardest paradigm shift. The most valuable experience for them is to get involved in the market research themselves. Having been set a goal, the first stage is to get to know their target audience. The conventional marketing tool of focus groups, carefully selected to represent the demographic cross-section of desired audience, give first-hand knowledge of tastes, desires, knowledge base and skills.
Such groups need to continue to play a part in development if the product is to be user-friendly.
5 User dynamics: End-use modelling builds up a profile of the audience’s character, behaviour and likely usage. Brainstorming among team members uses research knowledge to identify approaches that should meet that user’s needs and interests.
These can be defined by linear features – narrative arcs, learning progressions, targeted outcomes – and by lateral elements – interactive tools, parallel information paths, knowledge reinforcement – all designed to give a constructive, active learning model, as opposed to the passive paths of old. They can be expressed in flowcharts that can fill whole walls of the production office, or interactive storyboards, for which there are software packages.
6 Component design: This is the stage at which content is refined and defined, and secondary sources (such as pictures, text and music) are researched, copyright is cleared and acquired. Not only should the pictorial and graphic representation, the script and interactive features be designed to cohere practically and aesthetically, but the conversion rates, file storage and delivery platforms all need managing to ensure seamless delivery.
C. PRODUCTION
7 Prototyping and road testing: Having planned the overall reach of the project and how its elements will interact, the team then sets out to build the parts. However well conceived, the key test is when those parts are brought together, as a prototype, with strains emerging at the points of intersection. These issues require flexibility and mutual understanding of the difficulties encountered by other team members in fulfilling their contributions. Once there is a working model, this is the time to road-test it, before all the budget has been spent on final passes on the film material, graphics, etc. User testing has to be sufficiently rigorous to test every aspect of the user journey, how it meets or conflicts with their expectations, how easily and successfully they manipulate the elements, how they rate the experience and outcome. It is important that this stage is forensically observational, not overridden by maker interrogation.
8 Revision, integration and mastering: Revision is the application of the information gleaned from testing and internal trialling, ironing out faults and fine-tuning the project.
The more data acquired at this stage, the greater the chance of the project’s
successful uptake. It requires considerable humility in creative teams to accept criticism and the loss of cherished elements to the greater good of the team effort and ultimate goal, and this in turn necessitates good team management. Integration ties the elements or ‘assets’ together in that final form, which is then mastered.
D. VALIDATION
9 Market test: With the mastering done and the final embellishments made, the project is ready to air but, unlike television, this is time for final test runs because this is a product that will hopefully have an infinite life, rather than a brief moment of broadcast glory. These final tests should prove to both makers and the project’s commissioners that it meets the brief and will last the course.
Formal trialling essentially involves environmental testing, working how well the programme works in actual real user environments, observing the user’s own interaction with the material as well as the delivery efficacy, bandwidth performance, etc.
E. MAINTENANCE
10 Constant monitoring: Once up and running, the smart multimedia producer not only monitors the uptake data – page impressions and video downloads – but also keeps a qualitative evaluation running, which input data will be used to enrich team skills and future projects. Unlike the television programme, rarely viewed more than once, the multimedia project is a transparent machine inviting competitors to take it apart and improve upon the model. Informed self-criticism is the best chance the producer has to remain ahead of the game and, unlike conventional TV production, it is written into the culture of this work. As one BBC multimedia producer says: ‘It either helps further development of the product or it breaks it’.
propaganda n. the organized dissemination of information, allegations, etc. to assist or damage the cause of a government, movement, etc.
T
he internet has been welcomed as the ultimate releaser of information and enabler of free speech but governments have moved as best they can to regulate the flow and exclude what they deem unacceptable, whether it is child pornography in the West or political dissidence in the East. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch has said that ‘all forms of government ultimately are not going to succeed in trying to control or censor the Internet’, but many are making a significant attempt so to do. China, with the fastest-growing media industry in the world, employs over 30,000 people to police the net and eradicate any mention of forbidden subjects such as Taiwanese independence, the Dalai Lama’s campaign to free Tibet or the 1989 student massacre in Tiananmen Square. President Clinton famously once said that trying to control the net was ‘like nailing Jello to the wall’. The Open Net Initiative, based at the Harvard Law School, produced a comprehensive survey of China’s mastery of the art of Jello-nailing in Internet Filtering in China in 2004–2005: A Country Study:China’s Internet filtering regime is the most sophisticated effort of its kind in the world.
Compared to similar efforts in other states, China’s filtering regime is pervasive, sophisticated, and effective. It comprises multiple levels of legal regulation and technical control. It involves numerous state agencies and thousands of public and private personnel.
It censors content transmitted through multiple methods, including Web pages, Web logs, online discussion forums, university bulletin board systems, and email messages.1 Western media companies such as Google and Skype have been routinely condemned for going along with these restrictions to secure a foothold in this lucrative market, but the pragmatism of capitalism argues that if they don’t, someone else will, and their prime obligation is to their shareholders. In December 2005, Microsoft shut down a Chinese blogger’s site at the Chinese government’s request. More seriously, Yahoo! handed over email records of Chinese journalists to the authorities that resulted in Wang Xiaoning and Shi Tao now serving ten-year prison sentences for ‘incitement to subvert state power’. The World Organisation for Human Rights USA took the company to court in Washington in 2007 and
It censors content transmitted through multiple methods, including Web pages, Web logs, online discussion forums, university bulletin board systems, and email messages.1 Western media companies such as Google and Skype have been routinely condemned for going along with these restrictions to secure a foothold in this lucrative market, but the pragmatism of capitalism argues that if they don’t, someone else will, and their prime obligation is to their shareholders. In December 2005, Microsoft shut down a Chinese blogger’s site at the Chinese government’s request. More seriously, Yahoo! handed over email records of Chinese journalists to the authorities that resulted in Wang Xiaoning and Shi Tao now serving ten-year prison sentences for ‘incitement to subvert state power’. The World Organisation for Human Rights USA took the company to court in Washington in 2007 and