Action for the BBC…

Posted on | March 17, 2007 | 6 Comments

Joe Wilson, of SQA, has commented on Ewan’s blog:

“I haven’t seen a single educationalist delighted by this decision which has been forced on the BBC.

But I haven’t seen a single suggestion barring. Gordon Mckinlay’s practical one
(http://gordonmckinlay.edublogs.org/2007/03/15/pots-of-jam/) about things we might do about this.

All those who can should be seeing what lobbying can be done here – Education needs this stuff. Some of the developments were aimed especially at Scottish Learners.

Let’s not sit (blog) around and mope – what can we do to draw attention to this loss and are there other positive steps we can take to recover these public assets.”

I agree with Joe. We need to start lobbying everyone and anyone who will listen – we could start with senior politicians both in Holyrood and in Westminster. Write to your MP and MSP, and write, too, to the Minister for Education here in Scotland and his equivalent in Westminster – details below. Let them know that this decision stinks to high heaven, and that young learners in Scotland could miss out on a valuable cache of content because of the selfishness and aggression of a few commercial companies.

The unalloyed greed displayed here by some parts of the commercial sector is about to deprive Scottish education of a major resource that we have been counting on since the early days of SSDN, when we worked closely with the BBC to agree basic standards and ways of working. Colleagues in BBC Technology, as it was at the time, were very helpful to us in Scotland when we were making early and critical decisions about some of the technical standards that now underlie Glow.

“She who has the most toys wins.”
Thanks to silverbees for the pic.

Is ‘greed’ too strong a word here? I don’t think so. When the BBC was told, in 2004, to allocate a minimum of 50% of the funding to independent producers (see Nick Kind’s pragmatic response to this), the BBC, in fact, decided to be very careful and retain less than the 50% they were entitled to. This means that more than £75m of the £150m allocated would eventually go to commercial producers. Add to that the £555m in England allocated to eLearning Credits and the many millions of pounds spent in Scotland, Ireland and Wales on commercially-produced content, and we can see that the companies congratulating themselves on the suspension of Jam are going after, probably, less than 10% of the total market. The reality, indeed, is that even this figure is inflated across the whole of the UK.

That is greed in my eyes. The main players behind the campaign against BBC Jam should be reminded how shameful their behaviour has been, and is, in this issue. I know from direct experience that the BBC has played with a very straight bat on this matter all the way down the line – they have bent over backwards at times to try to mollify the siren voices coming from the more aggressive part of the commercial sector. I guess it just proves that it is impossible to bend over backwards while successfully playing a straight bat!

Also – many of these companies have eminent educationists, people with national reputations, sitting on their boards, usually as non-executive directors – I wonder how many of these people are comfortable with what is being done to the BBC here? Might be worth finding out….

And finally, for the moment, we need our own august bodies, such as SQA and LT Scotland to weigh in on the matter too – some official comment from these major players in the Scottish scene about the likely effects of this decision on Scottish education would be very helpful. At the very least, the BBC deserves the formal support of Scottish education here!

Links:

Minister for Education in the Scottish Parliament

Minister for Education at Westminster

List of MSPs at Holyrood

List of MPs at Westminster

Technorati Tags: bbc jam, greed, ltscotland, sqa

Category: business, capitalism, content, education, glow, ict, politics, scotland, technology

Comments

6 Responses to “Action for the BBC…”

Gordon McKinlay
March 17th, 2007 @ 9:47 pm

Good idea, John. Elected members mught be listening just now. What with the elections nearly upon us!
Marlyn Moffat
March 19th, 2007 @ 9:21 pm

As a practicing teacher and Glow Mentor, I very much regret this action. Those materials I had used with children had been well recieved and as Andrew commented, represented choices for pupils and teachers. I have evaluated many expensive commercial schemes which did not take as much account of the people for whom they were designed, the children! And this was free to use, from the BBC, who have had a successful track record of excellent materials for schools, and whose integrity should not be called into question in their desire to continue to do so. So I will follow your suggestion to lobby, and trust that other more commercially motivated interests will contemplate the production of free materials, from their profits.
marlyn.moffat » I just get annoyed!
March 19th, 2007 @ 10:28 pm

[...] Â When I see anything I think should be in the public domain being removed from it, I just can’t help it. No!Â BBC jam wasn’t perfect, it was a work in progress, and the sort of stuff we pay our licences for, but would be free to all thereafter.Â Comment and input from teachers was welcomed and taken on board.Â So below is the letter I sent to the 14 or so MSP’s MEP’sÂ who have had histories in education.Â Oh and also sent to Education Ministers North and South.Â Got my links to do so from John Connel’s blog and got that from Andrew. I can’t help thinking that we have a commercialism versus progress thing with this. And after spending much dosh on software that is now useless in our school, web based stuff that we can cache, for free, seems like a much better option. So you can pass on my letter, or edit, more suitably. [...]
John Connell
March 19th, 2007 @ 11:35 pm

Power to your elbow, Marlyn!
Peter Evans
March 20th, 2007 @ 3:44 am

Not only has the BBC suspended its “BBC Jam” Digital Curriculum service but from the end of March the production of the educational TV programmes that BBC Jam was intended to replace will also cease and the staff associated with them will be made redundant. It was hoped that they would be resettled over in the hitherto expanding BBC Jam service, but not now, so it looks as if these key staff will be lost to the BBC. More serious is that the suspension of BBC Jam and the stopping of school TV production at the same time means that the BBC now actually makes no formal education provision at all for children and schools. I know the BBC Trust has asked for “..fresh proposals for how the BBC meets its public purpose of promoting formal education in the context of school age children”, but by the time this is completed, many key TV production staff will have been sacked. Definitely time to make a fuss, write to MPs, etc.
Hot theme 03: BBC Jam goes off air « Learning Technologies Conference Blog
March 28th, 2007 @ 9:08 am

[...] John Connell, writing from the Scottish Lowlands, slams what he sees as the greed of commercial learning providers in lobbying for Jam to be pulled. This attracted comments from teachers lamenting the suspension of the service. [...]