What makes mobile so transformative? Why is Google a revolutionary company? These are questions asked and answered in the Coursera course
Understanding Media by Understanding Google. Professor Owen R. Youngman (Northwestern University) focuses during six weeks on Google and what makes it so important, not just for media people but for all of us. If you use a smartphone or a social network, you should know why these technologies are so much more than gadgets. The course offers the typical talking head videos but professor Youngman also adds his talent as a curator by selecting half a dozen books and many press articles dealing with fundamental aspects of Google – and of course both highly critical and more jubilant commentators are being discussed.
MOOCs and embeddable content
This is a second run for this course. Of course, it would be interesting to ask the question What Would Google Do (title of a book by Jeff Jarvis) about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) such as they are organized by Coursera. In an interview by Youngman, professor Jeff Jarvis promotes the idea of the ’embeddable article’. Just like Google makes YouTube-videos embeddable, media companies could do the same for their news articles (incorporating their brand and ads in the embeddable content and adding a link back to their site). Wouldn’t this be a great idea for parts of the Coursera-content – or not really? Maybe this is less a problem for more connectivist-styled MOOCs such as Connected Courses – ultimately it boils down to choices about the business model (or lack of such a model).
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… or lack of such a model 🙂
I have myself become more interested in the parallels between Coursera/universities and Google News (and evolutions)/newspapers.
The key issue is legitimacy, as discussed by Jay Rosen:
– http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/facebook-has-all-the-power-you-have-almost-none/374215/
– http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/07/03/dont-blame-facebook-for-screwing-with-your-mood-blame-academia/
in the wake of the Facebook Experiment.
This has led me to write a few articles, that you might find interesting:
http://paulolivier.dehaye.org/posts/moocs-journalism-and-digital-disruption.html
http://paulolivier.dehaye.org/posts/thin-legitimacy-at-whisper-facebook-and-coursera.html
http://paulolivier.dehaye.org/posts/erosion-of-thick-legitimacy-by-coursera.html
Very interesting, I’ll have a look at these links and will post about it… The parallels between education/journalism are very interesting and might yield some interesting media experiments… Could news media become MOOC-like? Could they become cMOOC-like?
Still thinking about this, especially in light of Google AMP vs Facebook Instant Articles.