via TechCrunch – C-SPAN gets a lot of things right…
Several months ago, Karen pointed out how libraries could learn something from information portals created by major media outlets and news organizations. The example she used at the time was a site about the U.S. Elections produced by the Globe and Mail. There was a lot of stuff going on on the site, but the overarching theme was a rich body of information presented in interesting-looking and attractive graphic forms. By presenting and re-presenting the information, the Globe and Mail provided some context and analysis to the data, and also supported the user as they made meaning out of that information themselves.
Karen asked then –
is this a kind of instruction that we’d like to work towards developing? Should we be training ourselves to create materials like this–if not a guide to the electoral process, then maybe an interactive history of African-American migration after emancipation, for that American History class we teach every year?
I think it is. Another major media outlet that has generated a bunch of notice lately for its informative and engaging visualizations has been the New York Times. Examples here, here, here and my favorite, here.
Karen pointed out at the time some of the barriers to this kind of thing, one of them being money and another expertise. After all, So today, when I saw that C-SPAN is augmenting its coverage of the upcoming major party conventions with a variety of familiar social software tools, I thought back to this post.
C-SPAN’s got two connected convention “hubs” augmenting their main politics site. They’re going to launch for real in the next few days, but you can get there now from the politics site or the TechCrunch review. They’re video-heavy, but much more stripped down and flexible than the videos normally provided by C-SPAN. These will be embeddable. There are also connections to YouTube, and to Twitter, and content aggregated from several blogs – some state-focused, some national. Bloggers can ask to be included in the aggregation, and can also ask for help getting their hands on video not readily available from the site. It’ll be interesting to hear how well that works.
There’s also a twitter feed. By using official tags (#DNC08 and #RNC08), people twittering from the conventions can get their comments included on the C-SPAN feed.
What I like about the site isn’t just that it’s exciting and more dynamic because of this content, but the social content seems purposeful. One of the TechCrunch commenters grumbled about C-SPAN jumping on the twitter fad, but I don’t know – I think this is the kind of focused thing twitter can do well. I use twitter now to follow live sports events in other countries, or film festivals I can’t go to. And recently I picked up a few people to follow through the TV Critics Press Tour and Comic-Con. This seems similar – and like it could provide two kinds of information that twitter provides very well – that vicarious sense of being there and in on exciting things as they happen and the sense of being connected to other people participating in or watching the same thing you are.
So I think this might be a connected but not exactly the same example of the ways we could build information portals that would help our students and our users make meaning out of the information and events around them — both with us and with each other.
info-fetishist 