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Live from Blackboard World: NBC News Anchor Lester Holt Highlights New Blackboard-NBC Deal
July 16, 2009
By Margery Weinstein
Journalists and educators both need to provide new ways for audiences to gather and create learning content, said NBC anchor Lester Holt in the closing keynote address of Blackboard World in National Harbor, MD, today.
Holt described himself as a non-traditional student in his school days; one more interested in learning by doing and experiencing rather than by sitting in a classroom. "I was always looking for new ways to access information," he said. He pointed out that both journalists and educators need to provoke in their respective audiences a desire for greater investigation and exploration. Not only do today's media consumers and your learners expect instant access to information; they also expect to be able to use it or personalize it immediately. That means they want the ability to integrate it themselves into their curriculum or easily share it with fellow learners to aid collaboration. To stay relevant, Holt said both newscasters as well as educators need to facilitate the creation of content by their audiences. It's not enough to absorb the information. Learners also need tools to immediately take action with the material.
To that end, Holt pointed out the new deal between NBC Learn, NBC's educational division, and Blackboard that will give Blackboard users access to NBC's archives for integration into curriculums. Both the transcripts and videos of newscasts will be available to users through the deal. "We have the opportunity to put students in the moment," Holt said. Giving students and instructors the ability to access this content is essential as, he noted, "both journalists and educators are forced to evolve or risk becoming irrelevant."
He emphasized the changing expectations of students, pointing out they expect to have input on how and when they learn. The archives, Holt said, provide 24-hour, real time learning tools that "mirror the world the world they live in." The ability to link your lessons to last week's newscasts opens new opportunities for the next generation of learners that trainers are still figuring out how to satisfy. "Students want, and are able to create, their own educational paths," Holt said.
The information-sharing new technologies allow underscores for journalists and educators the changing parameters of information content consumers. "Education, like the news, is becoming a global enterprise," said Holt. He noted that journalists are just now understanding the many synergies between what they do and what educators do. He said he used to think of news as perishable, but has a different perspective now. "Today's news," he said, "is tomorrow's history."
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