XplanaZine

I’ve been thinking about my living room a lot this week. That’s mainly because my wife has decided we need to upgrade to HDTV. Now, you can imagine that I’ve been trying to dissuade her. I mean, how you can justify that kind of expense for sports, HBO, and Lost . But there is Discovery , and.. Well, at any rate, we’ve been looking at systems and it’s made me contemplate media convergence all over again.

Best Buy is not too far from our house so we took a trip there to check out some of the possibilities. Much of what I remember bout the experience was this knowledgeable guy named Brandon who kept trying to convince my wife we needed the $1,200 surround sound system because of the audio quality when playing music. “You’ll be running everything through one system — movies, audio, games — so sound is extremely important,” he said.

What he didn’t know is that my wife already spent months rigging up a the perfect — at least for her — sound system downstairs in our house and that we were not about to move away from that receiver, the daisy-chained speakers in different rooms, and the 600 special CD compilations she has attached to it.

On the way home, I laughed a bit about Brandon not understanding that my wife had already put together a homegrown entertainment system. And just as I was finishing my chortle, we passed our local BlockBuster store. You know Blockbuster. They’re the company in a life-or-death struggle with Netflix, and they’re trying to compete by cutting back on late fees and pushing gaming. So, we were passing Blockbuster, my wife pointed out the window and said, “I sure wouldn’t want to have a bunch of stock bet on those guys. There’s nothing they’re doing that won’t be done by cable companies within the next two years.”

And that’s when the real discussion started. The one about convergence of media in our homes. I mean, my wife had a point. Cable companies already deliver TV feeds, Internet, movies, games, and music. The Web offers me most of the same along with IP telephony. And Microsoft and others have cool home entertainment systems that aggregate all of your media. So, for all practical matters, media convergence has already happened. Right?

Well, yes and no. Having all entertainment media available in digital format means we can send packets around fairly indiscriminately over any system that deals with digital content. The last mile for real media convergence, however, hasn’t quite been traveled yet. That’s because there are still three key elements, or obstacles that need to fall into place before we finally arrive at the gates of media convergence paradise.

First, there’s the issue of installation and setup. Convergence hasn’t progressed so far that it’s just a matter of plugging in one system and turning something on. When it’s as easy as my iBook, I’ll be willing to say media convergence has finally arrived. For now, I’m paying the extra money so that the experts can make sure the cables get hooked up properly.

A second problem is with storage and retrieval. This part just isn’t slick enough yet for most people. TiVo is my favorite interface for managing TV and iTunes is my choice for music. What I need is a combination of bothe interfaces sitting on top of an invisible media repository that gives me real control over my content. Control and manipulation of the content are the key elements here. It’s my living room and I should be in charge. Of course, I’m just using the dramatic “I” here. My wife will be handling most of this.

Finally, in order for media convergence to take over everyone’s living room, we need to have a better receiver for handling it all. It will likely be a television receiver/computer monitor in terms of the actual display mechanism. But that’s only part of the battle. A much bigger issue is how we access the information on the screen and how that information appears. iTunes and TiVo are the winners to date when it comes to usability, but with infinitely more information and types of objects, usability will be even more critical. Bottom line, if we can make it as easy to use as an iPod, everyone will gladly turn in all other devices (even my wife) and accept a new leader.

Now the most exciting things to me about media convergence is that, in the next iteration, it will include interactive education as well. There’s no technical reason we can’t start making our courses available now through TV channels as well as over the Web. But educational content is subject to the same obstacles as the rest of media when it comes to convergence.

In particular, standards, storage, and retrieval need to progress further still so that there is a full compatibility between almost all learning objects. In addition, we need to build on the work of the last two years with regards to learning object repositories and ePortfolios. Once we can handle all of our media through a single interface, I want my music collections and academic work organized on a unified system that is compatible with everyone else’s.

Finally, we’ve got to do some work on the “display” layer of our educational content. One could ask the question if, in its current and primitive form, most learning content is even worth converging with other media. We need to set our sights higher in coming years, realizing that what looks good in current LMS platforms, with their many display limitations, will appear extremely limited in a converged format on interactive HD display.

All that to say, the coming year is one in which we must continue to think big thoughts and craft enormous visions. It’s an exciting time, and the education community is in a unique position to make extraordinary advances.

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