television in the 21st century

Brian K Smith
MIT Media Laboratory
20 Ames Street, Room E15-020G
617 253 6537
bsmith@media.mit.edu

Introduction

In 1935, the first television broadcasts began in Berlin. 64 years later, television has become theinformation technology. 98% of homes in America and Europe have moving images piped onto little boxes in their living rooms. In developing nations, the rate of television buying increases by 130%. Television is the technology of the masses. You don't even have to read or write to get information from a television: try that with the world wide web.

In 1998, the Public Broadcasting Corporation (PBS) aired the first digital television broadcast. Digital television? Yup, instead of sending signals through the airwaves, we can now send good ol' bits. The result: a picture quality that can't be beat. So-called High Definition Television (HDTV) lets you see the sweat on a quarterback's forehead, the drool on a hunting lion's lips, the lies coming from a politician's speech. Better picture. So what?

PBS wasn't concerned with a better picture; they realized that the benefit of having increased bandwidth for television signals was providing services. In other words, you can send an ordinary picture down the pipe and augment it with extra "stuff". For instance, you may want to click on an advertisement to buy products related to a television show. Or you may want to bring up a cast of characters if you're curious to see who actor X is. In other words, you can begin to interact with your television in the same way that you do with your computer.

In 1999, noone is quite sure what it will mean to interact with a television program. In 1999, we're going to start to figure it out for the television industry. In this seminar, we will think about the digital future of television. Specifically, I want us to think about how educational programming can be expanded in the digital world. Barney is a pretty annoying dinosaur, but maybe we can make him less annoying with a microprocessor and some interactive programming (doubtful, but we'll give it a shot).

Why Education?

You may wonder, "why are we thinking about education?" For one, that's my primary research focus. I build systems for people to learn. More so, I think it's important to think about ways to use computation to transform the ways that people learn. Many innovations have changed the ways that we learn. Blackboards, for instance, established a culture where teachers can stand in front of a classroom and lecture to students. Pencils allowed students to create reports. It's unclear what the computer has to offer as a new medium. You've probably seen lots of "educational software", but most of it is pretty horrible. Some of us at the Media Lab think about ways to get computers to help people learn things they never could have learned without them.

So that's why education. Why education and television then? In 1990, the United States Congress created a regulation called the Children's Television Act (CTA). The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) made a stricter version of this in 1996, and you can find the original document here. The gist of the CTA is that broadcast television networks must provide a certain amount of educational programming for children if they want to keep their licenses. In the seminar, I'll tell you some stories about the origin of the CTA ... it's interesting folklore. We'll also look at the CTA and think about why it works and why it doesn't.

A lot of people are thinking that digital television will help children learn in different ways. I suspect that we'll see a lot of the same things we've already seen with computers - a lot of really silly software. So I want us to think about ways to make good educational television, digital style. More so, I want us to develop a prototype solution. Which means, we're gonna be making some television.

This Old Brick

Mitchel Resnick and his group at the Media Lab pioneered a technology that some of you may be familiar with: the programmable Lego brick. The newest Media Lab version of this is called the Cricket. After 10 years of research, Lego finally released a commercial version of this called Mindstorms. We'll be working with the commercial version, as it's available to lots of people.

With Mindstorms, people can create Lego projects that come to life with a little programming. You could make a robot, a car, a greenhouse, a moving sculpture ... you can do all sorts of things. You can do so much, that it's hard to imagine what you can do with it. One of the problems I'll discuss around Mindstorms and the programmable bricks in general is how to get people to let their imaginations go wild. If you played with Lego as a kid, you know that they always come with instructions on how to make certain kinds of things. Mitchel's group tries to get people to come up with their own inventions. That's hard. Inventing is hard. How do you help people become inventors? Maybe with television...

There's a popular show on PBS called This Old House.On the show, four guys go around and build entire houses in 30 minutes. It's pretty amazing how fast they can build a house. I guess it's cause there's four of them. Or maybe it's television special effects. At any rate, they make stuff. And people watch the show to see people make stuff. Sometimes, people go out and make stuff on their own as a result of seeing these guys make stuff. What kind of stuff? Well, whole homes. Or, at least, whole bathrooms.

Now imagine a show called This Old Brickwhere four kids go around making stuff. It just happens that they don't use wood and nails to build things; they use Lego bricks and programming languages to build stuff. And kids at home who have a Mindstorms kit can build with them. There might be design challenges to the kids at home. When people build homes after watching This Old House,there's no way for them to show them off. But in the digital television show, This Old Brick,kids have a way to communicate with the television. They can show off their creations to others. They can learn by doing, and they can share their learning.

There's no such show right now. But by the end of the term, we'll have created the first episode of the program. You get to man a camera to produce a television show. So you'll be filming, editing, and playing the part of television producer. You'll also be working with a digital infrastructure. So, right now, there are few digital televisions, but we can fake broadcast over the Internet. We'll need to build a streaming video architecture to do so, so we'll be doing a little video programming with Quicktime. And there'll be some other digital goodies that we'll have to build to make a totally new experience.

So What To Do

A lot of what we do next depends on you. We'll spend some time looking over literature on educational television. There's a lot of interesting findings about how people use television. From there, we'll think about how to change the world.

Every so often, I'll give something for you to read. Light readings, as you'll be busy with 8.0x, 18.0x, etc. At each session, we'll discuss these and try to think about how we can solve the problems posed in the readings. I'm getting some state of the art gear for you to work with. With that gear, we'll start to create a digital infrastructure that will let us make the television show for the future.

This is going to be fun. If it isn't fun, please tell me immediately, and we'll make it more fun.