The snail, the snail!

Tom Coates is back on form and - in the wake of the BBC’s All Your Base Belong to Us [?] announcements earlier in the week - is asking: “Is the pace of change really such a shock?“.

“My sense of these media organisations that use this argument of incredibly rapid technology change is that they’re screaming that they’re being pursued by a snail and yet they cannot get away! ‘The snail! The snail!’, they cry. ‘How can we possibly escape!?. The problem being that the snail’s been moving closer for the last twenty years one way or another and they just weren’t paying attention.”

I agree with most of what Tom says. My only worry is that it’s sometimes how the need for change is signalled, and how management actually percieve it, might be different for very good reasons. “Things are changing - steadily!” isn’t quite as good a rallying cry as “It’s all got to change - now!”. It reminds me of the old joke about a Lib Dem demonstration: “Whaddya we want? Proportional representation! When dowewannit? In due course!”

A degree of showbiz doubtless matters if you’re trying to shake up a place of the Beeb’s size. And let’s not forget that, for some of the people inside, it may actually feel like the change is continuous and rapid. That can be a very unsettling thing indeed, especially if it’s mentally lumped in with redundancies and outsourcing, as it must be at the BBC.

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COMMENTS / 3 COMMENTS

Of the BBC, snails and polar ice caps

There’s a really fun game being played on the web right now. It’s called “let’s see how much we can agree with Tom Coates but still find a little something to take exception to, so that we can join in the debate without looking like yes-men.” And it’s …

Pigsaw Blog thought this on Apr 28 06 at 4:24 pm

Having been advising the BBC for the past wee while on how it might use new tech in its Learning proposals I think you’re spot on. I reckon they know exactly what they are doing in making these bold statements, but fear it might just be a little reactive rather than proactive.

What I wonder is, in the scope of education and learning, if they will surprise us with a new generation BBC-Jam-type service that no-one was expecting in the next few years, based on social tech.

The BBC have the influence to make our relatively niche pass-time/profession of blogging and social networking a phenomenon with the 35-55 brigade who aren’t seeing where this is going. The value of this influence cannot be underestimated in our teaching population and, by proxy, in the way our students will be taught in the years to come.

I wrote a more coherent post at the beginning of the day over at my blog:

http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/....._why_.html

Ewan McIntosh thought this on Apr 27 06 at 7:41 pm