Robert Scoble has been talking about video blogging, and it’s got me thinking.

As to visuals Jon argues: “If I don’t have any visuals, then I should stick to audio.” Ahh, now I’m starting to get his point. He’s saying if you don’t have anything visual you should just stick with audio. Well, that’s true. But, what is “visuals.” Everything around me has a visual component.

I’ve been using audio and video in my teaching material for the last year. It’s changed the way my students interact with me (for the better, I hope) and I like to think we’re going to be getting better at delivering it institutionally.

But I had lunch today with two of the brains of the place, Bill Berry and George Love (George says he has a blog he needs to revise, Bill should be blogging, and he knows it — I hope he’s sufficiently shamed at his absence from the discussion). Our discussion wandered into the realm of standardizing media content into the classroom. So, before I get into the meat of my point, I have to give a little background.

To date, we’ve been moving down the road of standardizing content across classes. When you attend a class, you’ll get the content as constructed by the deans and academic development committees, assignments, etc. You’ll download a syllabus that’s been tweaked by a faculty member, but it’s far from a custom job. You’ll get access to electronics course materials and e-texts.

That’s our M.O., and a requirement of an institution of our size and expanse, in order to make a more or less seamless transition between campuses and modalities for our students. If I’m a student in Boise and I want to move to Maryland, I’d better be able to pick up my coursework lock-step when I land in order to finish my degree in the most efficient manner possible. Different locations, on-ground versus online, different instructors — we have to be able to account for those factors in courses. That part is common sense for us these days (though it’s making me think of some other things that aren’t so common sense as I write this… hmm).

But faculty have a point, too. We want to have a more intimate connection intellectually with our students. We want to get to know them, and want them to get to know us through the presentation of our course content. This doesn’t jive well with the standards approach, and you end up with faculty doing far more to build their own courses in the field than the course designers ever intended, and indeed than serves the growing population of students who move between campuses and modalities.

OK, so we have this “new student”. We don’t really know what that means. We say it’s the Echo Boomer, Gen Y… I’m feeling more and more that the new student for us is more representative of our current student with greater expectations of us. Yeah, we’re touching the post-high school crowd with greater intent, but we don’t have very many of them yet to know what they want — we can only make assumptions.

So this new student, they want to connect with course material in a way convenient to them. Since I’m the blog and podcast guy, I tend to go straight there in these discussions, and in fact, I’ve been using them (podcasts) in my classes as a skunkworks for the past year. Here’s what I’ve found, and what I brought to the attention of George and Bill today.

1. We have a tendency to focus on video because it looks cool and makes us appear more advanced than we are right now.
2. We have a tendency to focus on the technology at the expense of the student experience.

On the first point, it comes out in technicolor when you look at the “produced” pieces with long stints of talking heads, multiple camera angles, and 3-D rendered studio environments. But does this visual experience add anything to the student experience? Does it add anything to offset the sacrifices you have to endure to deliver it?

My experience over the last year tells me that introducing podcasts in class drives a few key factors. First, the podcasts are me. This impacts a social connection between me and my students and, particularly in the online weeks, this connection drives students to pay greater attention, to listen to the material more than once, and to regurgitate it in their coursework with greater regularity and sophistication. I find that most of the course material I produce can be delivered in audio, supplemented occasionally with a still slide of a graph or two, and that students appreciate that.

The listen where listening is appropriate. The watch where watching is appropriate.

And where is watching appropriate? Anywhere the listener’s created vision of the message in their mind’s eye serves to diminish or distract from the message. And you don’t need a talking head for that.

But that’s really not the biggest issue. The biggest issue is a cultural one only peripherally supported by technology. See, we’re going at this the wrong way (I’m telling George and Bill). We’re trying to provide podcasts and vodcasts for every course that are standardized with our best speakers in that field, for every instructor to use. If we were smart about this, we’d create the tools for every faculty member to create their own podcast material and let them support their courses themselves.

Of course, 8% of our students are still on dial-up. That puts us in the rather Microsoftian position of needing to maintain backward compatibility of all our resources for this minority. Minority: you know who you are. Please, join us in the information age. Put your high-speed bill on the level of a utility. You won’t regret it.

So, that’s the latest flag I’m carrying. I’m not sure who owns the process, but after I met with George and Bill, I headed over to our publishing division and met with Beth Aguiar, another stunningly smart person in this field. We talked about the concept of having a content library of current (like current-week-recent) media clips faculty could choose from for their course preparation. Imagine a licensed YouTube for internal use only that’s perfectly indexed and ready for plugin to illustrate concepts. If I’m talking about “Product Placement”, I just search for it and find the 20 second clip of the Ford Hybrid on “Alias” and record an intro and outro as icing on the cake. Dreams, but Beth’s comments stuck with me and leads me to the following conclusion: our faculty are terrified of that stuff. We need to do a better job of training and showing that this is a tool more than spit and polish. It’s not about who’s cool, it’s about the service to the students. Of course, if the students are well-served, that’s pretty cool in itself.