I heard a few days ago that Village 900 radio at Camosun College is going off the air on March 4th.

Village 900 is/was licensed as an instructional radio station, one of a handful of stations across Canada that had this instructional designation. Meaning it’s primary purpose was to train broadcasters. It was  experiential education at is finest, and, for the past 20 years, students in the Applied Communication Program at Camosun have been using the station as a launching pad for media and communication careers.

But, as we all know, times are a-changing for traditional media, and for the educators who teach in that field. I won’t get into the details of why the station is going off the air. Suffice to say, this day has been inevitable.

Why do I care?

I have wonderful memories of managing that station from 1995 (when it was then CKMO radio, a small 50 watt FM radio station) to 2001. During that time, I had the opportunity to work with so many people who, if you live in Victoria and pay attention to any media outlet in the city – mainstream, public or alternative – are probably part of your everyday life. I turn on almost any radio station in town, open a newspaper, scan a local website, hear a soundbite delivered by a spokesperson of the government/non-profit/corporation/event, hear an announcement on a ferry, voiceover in a tourist attraction and I see and hear the voices of the graduates of the Applied Communication Program. So, my first memory is of the students and faculty I have worked with over the years associated with both the station and ACP.

I was there for the birth of Village 900. Early on, the idea of Village 900 was unique. Moving away from the traditional block formatting you usually find on alternative or campus radio stations, we focused on ways in which we could continually provide an aural reflection of the cultural diversity in our community. We created a melting pot of sound, blending world, worldbeat, traditional folk and roots music continuously throughout the day. One minute you might hear the Algerian club rai of Cheb Mami, the next the lipstick, lies and gasoline of Fred Eaglesmith. We dubbed the music format Global Roots, and tagged the station with the identity of Village 900 – A World of Music, A Community of Ideas.

We imported programming from around the world, airing shows from Radio Netherlands, the BBC, Channel Africa, the United Nations. We took this idea of global culture seriously, and tried hard to reflect it on the air by making connections with public broadcasters from around the world to air their programming . This was really early days of the Internet when this stuff wasn’t available with a click like it is now. Radio programs arrived weekly in the mail on cassettes, reel to reel tape, and CD’s. If we were lucky, we might get a satellite feed.

There was also a real commitment to local artists from Victoria, the Gulf Islands and Vancouver. Chances are, if you were a world or folk/roots act based in Victoria, you passed through the doors of Village 900, often with guitar in hand, pulling up a mic and tossing out a few tunes live on the air.

Village 900 and its predecessor CKMO are intensely personal for me in a couple of ways.

First, as part of the development team, it was a station that embodied and reflected my own deeply held beliefs in the power of universality, multiculturalism, education and culture.

It also introduced to me the entire world of alternative media through the works of people like Noam Chomsky and Neil Postman. By virtue of being a “campus” radio station, I had the opportunity to see both radio and the media in a whole different way than when I worked at a commercial radio station. In fact, it validated for me that community radio is what radio is supposed to be, and that commercial radio (and, by extension television as well) is, for the most part, a tragic waste of a publicly owned bandwidth.

I used to be passionate about that (and God love ya VIU for keeping this students writing from 1997 alive and available on the web 15 years after the fact. It’s a credit to you and your IT people that you have not trashed this stuff and sent me scrambling to the Internet Archives to dig it up). But today, in a world where anyone can be the media, I don’t care that much any more. The media has been democratized, and there are other, more important battles these days.

Village 900 was also a low risk experiment which afforded me the opportunity to play; to try things unencumbered by a ton of constraints. Sure, I had some parameters, but for the most part as long as the station met the mandate of training communication students while abiding to the broadcasting laws and regualtions we were governed by, I was pretty well left to my own devices. I had autonomy to make decisions and try different things.

The website, for example, was my ongoing personal learning laboratory – a project for me to experiment with. Which meant that, in 1995, I could do things like make a station website even when I had no idea how the web worked.  I did it because I could follow my interest (passion based learning?)  into this new thing called the web. I was an active BBS user in the early 90′s, so was curious as to what this whole web thing was about. After building a website, and then another, and another, I got hooked. My love of the web – both the technologies and the culture – was ignited at that station.

Working at the station also ignited another lifelong passion for me; a love of education. One of the truly unique aspects of the station was the requirement that we air educational radio programs. What that meant was that we had to, as a condition of our broadcast license, work with faculty at the College to create for-credit courses that aired on the radio. In 1995 when I first got to the station, I saw this requirement of our license as a bother – a technicality that needed to be filled.

Oh, how wrong I was.

What started as a requirement soon became one of my favorite activities. I loved working with the faculty and producing their radio programs. We did all kinds of wonderful programs.

I remember working quite closely in those early days (95/96/97) with a Psychology instructor named Gary Anderson. With Gary, we created a handful of Psychology radio courses. Each course consisted of 12, 1 hour radio shows. We went all out. Gary was full of ideas and had tons of energy. He had vision and a passion for radio. He loved the medium. The storytelling, the conversational aspect that great radio presenters have, the theatre of the mind, the ability to connect with experts via telephone. We interviewed psychologists, created radio dramas, had panel discussions, dramatizations, went out of the studio and did streeters. This was not a single instructor talking for an hour at a time. These were full on productions. At our height, we were airing 30 hours a week of educational programming, including English, French, Psychology, Geography and Physics courses.

Little did I realize that during the process of creating these courses, I was being turned into an educational technologist.

Looking back on it now, I realize that this was the pivotal moment in my career when I began to feel more like an “educator” and less like a broadcaster. Which is funny because, even though I worked as an instructional assistant with students carrying out the day to day operations of the radio station, it was working on those radio courses that made me feel like I was doing something “educational”.

It was during the development of these radio courses that I first heard the word pedagogy (wish Wikipedia was around that day), and was lucky enough to work with both a skilled broadcaster and educator in Helen Pearce, who understood more than anyone I have worked with, how to use audio in an educational context.

So, here we are…at a thousand words and I could probably write another thousand about what a profound influence working at CKMO/Village 900 and in the Applied Communication Program at Camosun has had on my career and my life. Transformative experiences in higher education are not limited to students.

In recent years, my involvement in the operations of the station has diminished. After leaving the Applied Communication Program in 2001 to delve deeper into the web side of the edtech world, I did sit on the board of the station for a few more years. But I found that I was too close to it and had taken it as far as I could. It needed new blood to survive. Like a parent who knows that it is time to let their child go, I had to step away.

After hearing the news, I’m feeling both sad and nostalgic. Like an important piece of my life is passing into history. Perhaps this is a eulogy written for an old dear friend who, when we were both younger, would walk along the same path. But upon reaching the fork, chose different directions.

It will be an odd sensation on March 5th when I hit preset #4 on my car radio and hear nothing but dead air.

This first clip is from Radio London, dated 1965. In it you can hear some of the most well know pirate radio jingles – the “wonderful Radio London” jingles made famous by The Who on The Who Sells Out.

Radio London (5:56)

Up until I heard these clips in the mid-90′s, I had always thought that the pirate stations in the UK in the 60′s were a response to the reluctance of the BBC to play rock and roll – they were an an outlet for youth culture to have a voice after being shut out by the mainstream BBC. While that might be true to a certain extent, when I listened to these clips, I was surprised to hear advertising. Lots of advertising.  Companies were looking for ways to reach an audience, there was no commercial broadcasting to speak of in Britain, so entrepreneurs set up these floating money factories off shore to pump adverts into the UK, piggybacking on the latest Beatles & Stones cuts.

Yeah, it bummed me out a bit, too, when I made that connection. I had a romantic’s view of the pirate stations; that somehow they were fueling the youth rock and roll subculture of the mid-60′s when, in fact, it was just the man out for a buck.

Anyway, you can hear the hucksterism in full flight in this second clip from 1965, this time from Radio Caroline. In this clip you can hear some of the ad’s that ran on the station, plus an announcer pushing the benefits of advertising on Radio Caroline.

Radio Caroline (4:21)

This last couple of segments are my favorite because there is some serious drama here. These clips are from Radio North Sea and their infamous ship the Mebo II. The clips are from 1970 & 71 when Radio North Sea was undergoing some ownership issues. As you’ll hear in this first clip, things start off bad with the British government jamming their signal from the get go, and the Radio North Sea musical response to then UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

Radio North Sea getting jammed (2:58)

Then, things get heated when a tug pulls alongside the ship and a partner who has been shut out of the radio operations tries to board the ship.

Radio North Sea being boarded (3:57)

This last clip is one of the most compelling pieces of radio I have ever heard as Radio North Sea International and the Mebo II are attacked. A bomb thrown onto the Mebo II by a passing speedboat prompts these panicked moments. The bizarre juxtaposition of the panic-stricken announcer calling out mayday mayday over the top of an ever-looping bed of optimistically happy 60′s music is nothing short of eerie to hear, and utterly compelling to hear. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to hear this live.

Radio North Sea 1971 bombing (6:06)

Wikipedia has some more info on the Radio North Sea attempted 1970 hijacking and 1971 bombing.

So many people in my network are participating (including one of our Art instructors) that I am feeling quite bummed about not being able to take part. But this winter/spring will see me finishing my Masters thesis, and, after the time I spent putting this together last night, DS 106 would just be too compelling a reason to not transcribe that 90 minute interview.

Here is the gist of a potential DS 106 assignment (suggested, I believe, by Tom Woodward)

Make an animated gif from your favorite/least favorite movie capturing the essence of a key scene. Make sure the movement is minimal but essential.

So, here is my contribution.

From Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. This captures the moment where Alex, sitting with his droogs in the Korova Milk Bar, hears a woman singing opera. As that sly smile creeps across his face, we are fooled into thinking that he has nothing but scorn and derision for the older group of well dressed people sitting in the bar, and that he is about to call his droogs and go all malarky on their asses. But, what becomes clear a few moments after this, is that smile is not a smile of wicked delight at the thought of going ultra-violent, but a smile that revels his love of music. It is this moment that reveals both a weakness and a humanity that is ultimately both sympathetic and repulsive.  And, if you know the movie, that love of music becomes a key plot device later on when his behaviour gets modified.

I did this using the frame capture feature of the VLC player, and then created the animated gif in Adobe Fireworks.

This is the reason why I can’t do DS 106. As I beavered away on this in the basement last night, 20 more invitations to participate in my thesis research didn’t get sent out. Too…much…temptation.

What I find really interesting about this (besides the subject and the delivery method) is how Jim has taken the Instructional Design of the courses out into the open. Jim is certainly at the helm here, but he has asked his network for ideas. What kinds of assignments should this course include? How does one go about designing a MOOC?

He is crowdsourcing instructional design.

@jimgroom another #ds106 idea, 3 degrees of wikipedia competition http://bit.ly/fkc9nq see who can come up with most obscure wikiP “triple” (from @sleslie)

I’d like to see someone write a story/poem with a “googlewhack” in each line http://bit.ly/Vehkm #ds106 (from @twoodwar)

5 Card Flickr #ds106 Story: Life is Like a Barrel of Pandas http://bit.ly/h5TtSV Add to pool tag ds106 in flickr Play http://bit.ly/ga6xEr (from @cogdog)

Maybe a good idea to use in #ds106 “Tim Burton’s new project: Storytelling with Twitter fans” http://ow.ly/3nVzz (from @jtcf)

It’s a conversation that not only are his network of educators contributing to, but also potential students for the course.  This course is being designed, at least in part, by the crowds, led by a trusted network of educators that Jim has invested the time and energy in to developing relationships with.

It is a testament to the benefits of educators being open and engaged in social spaces, and taking a long term approach to developing relationships. If Jim had just started blogging or had just started using Twitter a month ago, this type of collaboration would not be possible. The network effect would not be there.

For me, a learner trying to understand the process of designing engaging learning experiences in a technology mediated environment, this type of transparency of process is invaluable, as it is to Jim, who builds on the successes and challenges of those who came before him. Standing on the shoulders.

Rock on, my droogs. I’ll be lurking along the sides and look forward to seeing what you all come up with.

The idea came to me while I was going through my old photo albums, which I have done periodically over the years. Every time I do I have this little voice inside me that says “I should really scan these”. But then real life took over and I never found the time.

This year, I am finding the time, mostly because my kids are starting to ask me more about my life, pre-kids. So, once a day I’ll be scanning and adding some old photos of my life pre-digital camera. I am really using this as an excuse to do what I have wanted to do for years – scan my old photos. And maybe share a few memories along the way.

One of the other reasons I am doing this is because in the past few months I have seen how a digital artifact, like a photo, can become a touchstone that connects people.

A group of radio announcers from CFGP radio enjoying a night out in Grande Prairie Alberta. From l to r: Peter Hall, Jeff Bolt, Paul Oulette, me, Daryl Olsen.

Last fall, a friend of mine named Peter Hall passed away. I had not seen Peter for 15 years, but had worked quite closely with him for many years early in my radio career.

I heard about his death via a post on Facebook from a mutual friend. I remembered I had some photos of Peter tucked away in my photo collection. So that night I went through the photos, scanned a few, and posted them on Facebook. Before I knew it, people I had not heard from for years who both Peter and I had worked with began to comment on the photos. I reconnected with numerous old friends I had lost track of (including one who now lives in the same city as I do and we have met f2f for lunch since), and many fun memories were shared, all spurred by these photos.

Over the past few years, thanks to social networks, I have meet a whole new circle of people. Thanks to a continual stream of tweets, status updates, blog posts and Flickr photos, I have a pretty good idea of who these people are today and what they are up to right now. But ask me about these people and their lives prior to around 2005 when I started actively connecting virtually with people, and I know squat. And I want to know. I like history and knowing what happened to people in their lives that brought them to the point they are at now.

So, if you have a scanner,  some old photos, and a Flickr account, come and connect with us in the 365Retro group. Fill in the pre-digital gaps in your life to give your friends and family a more complete picture of your life and history. These photos can be whatever you want to scan and share. If you can add some context or a story that fills in the details about the subject of the photo, all the better. Add some context and share your stories and your history with the group.

If you don’t have a Flickr account, you can set one up for free. Once you have your account, join the 365Retro Flickr group. Scan and post a photo a day to your Flickr account, and send the photo to the 365Retro Group

That’s it! You’ve participated. And don’t worry if 365 sounds daunting. Contribute what you can. Or, if you don’t want to contribute, you can pop by and laugh at the various mullets and facial hair combo’s I have spouted over the years.

In this video, student  Joe tries to interact with his textbook. The video was shot by the student’s teacher, Mr. Chase. I can see using this for more than one or two presentations I have coming up.

From Chris Lehmann’s Practical Theory blog.

Clint Lalonde

It is my pleasure to inform you that you are being considered for inclusion into the 2008-2009 Princeton Premier Business Leaders and Professionals Honors Edition section of the registry.

The 2008-2009 edition of the registry will include biographies of the world’s most accomplished individuals. Recognition of this kind is an honor shared by thousands of executives and professionals throughout the world each year. Inclusion is considered by many as the single highest mark of achievement.

You may access our application form using the following link:

<yeah right>

On behalf of the Executive Publisher, we wish you continued success.

Sincerely,
Jason Harris
Managing Director
Princeton Premier

Breaking News: All Online Data Lost After Internet Crash