Educational Services by BBC Public Service Broadcasting in the New Era
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Educational Services by BBC Public Service Broadcasting in the New Era George AUCKLAND The British Broadcasting Corporation has been involved with the production and delivery of educational services from close to the start of broadcasting in the United Kingdom. After a variety of experiments, broadcasting began in 1922 with the British Broadcasting Company as a consortium of radio equip- ment manufacturers with John Reith as general manager. Around this time David Sarnoff, general manager of Radio Corporation of America, referred to the use of radio/wireless for education, information and entertainment. It is likely that John (later Lord) Reith, managing director of the BBC, picked up on this idea, because his book, Broadcast over Britain1 contains two chapters (“The Best of Everything” and “The King’s English”) on how broadcasting must move beyond the confines of pure entertainment and enter the world of education. The BBC broadcast its first national education program on April 4, 1924. In May, the BBC appointed John S. Stobart as its first director of education. The Radio Times (the Official Organ of the BBC) on June 15, 1924 carried on its front page an article called “A Broadcasting University.” So the stage was set very early on in its history for the BBC to be a signif- icant player in the world of education in the United Kingdom; to this day the BBC claims to “inform, educate and entertain.” The British Broadcasting Corporation is constitutionally established under a royal charter, the first of which is dated December 20, 1926. This phrase, “Inform, Educate and Enter- tain” appears in the first royal charter and is repeated in the exact same form in the most recent royal charter that took effect on January 1, 2007.2 It was not long before the members of the early BBC Education department George Auckland joined BBC Television after graduation from university in 1969. In 1995–1996, with a colleague, he created BBC Education Online as a pilot project. He is now Head of Learning Innovation for BBC Learning, and recently received a “Lifetime Achievement Award” from the Royal Television Society, Educational section. 1 J. C. W. Reith, Broadcast over Britiain (London: Hodder and Stoughton Limited, 1924). 2 See appendix, extract from BBC Charter, available at www.bbc.co.uk/info/policies/charter. 1 2 GEORGE AUCKLAND began discussing the dangers of one-way communication; it became clear that for real education and learning to happen some activity was needed beyond the broadcast. The solution at the time was to set up listener groups, so that members of the audience could discuss a program they had heard together and gain insights from the ensuing conversation. This is the background of BBC Education or BBC Learning as we are now called.3 For producers and executives working in education in the BBC the “Beyond the Broadcast” activity has always been a significant part of their work. Viewing and listening audience figures and the Audience Appreciation Index show how effective broadcasting can be in stimulating and engaging the audience. The guide section of the diagram is where the Beyond the Broadcast part of the operation starts in earnest. This activity can take many forms— telephone help lines, leaflets, books, CD Roms, DVDs, events, and so on, but it is the digital world that has created the biggest change, fundamentally alter- ing the way the BBC delivers its educational remit to audiences and fulfils its royal charter commitments. For BBC Education and Learning our involvement with the digital world goes back to the late 1970s. In 1978 the BBC transmitted a “Horizon” docu- mentary program called Now the Chips are Down.4 Essentially the program 3 Throughout this article BBC Education and BBC Learning are essentially interchangeable. As a department within the BBC they are the same, but we are now called BBC Learning, with a distinct emphasis on the learner. I will try to use the term that was current at the time. I hope this will not cause too much confusion. 4 See http://www.offthetelly.co.uk/factual/computers.htm; http://lowendmac.com/orchard/07/ 0228.html; http://bbc.nvg.org/history.php3. BBC Education made several series “starring” the BBC Micro, which included: The Computer Programme, Making the Most of The Micro, Computers in Control (about robots and other hardware), Micro Live (weekly computer news magazine), and it also made the ground-breaking Domesday Project in 1986. Specifically, • The BBC was often seen on BBC television programs such as The Adventure Game, Tomorrow’s World, Beat the Teacher, Doctor Who (where it provided many graphics and even special effects) and on countless educational programs during the 1980s. • BBC Radio 4 had a program called The Chip Shop which broadcast some software for the BBC Micro that could be taped and then loaded. • The BBC Micro was also used to provide little cartoons between children’s programs for a couple of years. EDUCATIONAL SERVICES IN THE NEW ERA 3 asked the question “why was the United Kingdom apparently so far behind the U.S.A., Japan, France and Germany in the use of computers and Information Technology in general?” So powerful was the message in the pro- gram that questions were asked in the U.K. Parliament as to how and why this situation had come about. Later, in 1979, ITV transmitted a series called The Mighty Micro, which predicted the rise of the microcomputer and home com- puters in particular. BBC Education department decided that computing and information technology were educational issues, and out of this sprung the BBC Computer Literacy project involving the development of a microcom- puter for home and, as it turned out, educational use and also a series of tele- vision programs running through most of the 1980s. These included The Computer Programme, Making the Most of the Micro, Computers in Control, and Micro Live. In the mid-1980s I made the BBC Schools TV series Micro- mindstretchers to encourage the use of microcomputers in primary school classrooms. The Domesday Project An early example of encouraging the audience to join in was the Domesday Project, created by BBC Education to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the Domesday Book (created for William the Conqueror in 1086).5 The techno- logy was based on a BBC Micro Computer and an analogue Laser Disk Player. The combined cost of the equipment was rather high, so not many ver- sions were sold, which is a great pity because the project contained a jewel that shines bright today. One of the disks contains 24,000 photographs and many times more short articles. Much of this material was created by school children; some 10,000 schools took part in the project. It must be the largest collection of what we now call “user generated content” (UGC) up to that date. All this material was collected by conventional methods—letters, forms, 35 mm color slides and so on—although the articles could be sent on the flop- py disks of the time. Only recent developments using the Web have enabled larger UGC projects to happen, we are now all familiar with photo collections such as Flickr and online encyclopaedias such as Wikipedia. Although the • The BBC broadcast Telesoftware on Ceefax (its teletext service) that could be downloaded if you had a teletext adaptor connected to your computer until 1987. • The BBC had a software arm “BBC Software” that supported the BBC Micro, and released several books through BBC Books. • The BBC also branded a multi-purpose robot, called “The BBC Buggy,” which worked with a BBC Micro and was made by the Microelectronics in Education Programme (MEP). • The Domesday Project. 5 For more about the Domesday Project, see www.atsf.co.uk/dottext/domesday.html. 4 GEORGE AUCKLAND Domesday Project has been dormant for some time, we have extracted the photos and the articles and are investigating ways in which we can create a twenty-first century project using mobile technology. The BBC Networking Club In 1989, shortly after the World Wide Web was created by Sir Tim Berners- Lee, BBC Education started to consider the educational possibilities of the Web and the Internet. The BBC Networking Club www.bbcnc.org.uk was launched in April 1994 and ran until November 1995. The idea was to help our audience make some sense of the emerging Web and get online them- selves. On April 13, 1994 we started to transmit a TV program called The Net,6 made for us by Illuminations and little later a radio program called the Big Byte, made by our own staff. Each of these programs developed early websites. Soon afterwards I produced the BBC Education series This Multimedia Business. It was the first U.K. TV program to use a virtual reality set. This program had two kinds of Beyond the Broadcast support: a series of five flop- py disks which, when loaded up on the computer, created a miniature CD- Rom-style experience and a website. We did not produce a CD Rom at the time because very few personal computers had CD-Rom drives (unless you had the latest Mac). The idea behind the floppy disk set was to give the audience a taste of hypertext, audio, and even video running on their office computer. We created an extensive, somewhat multicolored website and included the rather spooky URL http://www.bbcnc.org.uk/tv/multimedia_biz in the closing cred- its of the programs. It was from such activities that BBC Education Online started, as a pilot project with the blessing of John Birt (now Lord Birt) direc- tor general at the time.