As I'm planning the spring 2006 semester of "Introduction to Science, Technology, and Society," I'm toying with having the class create an Internet 'television station.' The station would have a theme, say, "East 7th Street." One group might research how technologies shaped life on that street in the last 100 years (there's an Internet backbone running near it now), and maybe another group would cover social history of the street by recording oral histories. Maybe we could collaborate with Austin Free-Net on this or something similar? I'm meeting with them in early January.

What's an Internet television station, you ask? It is a high-resolution TV show or animation or movie that anyone in the world with a computer can watch. Sort of like TV, but it's fast, cheap, and global. The technology is nothing radically new: you just need a Web site that publishes an RSS feed with video enclosures that one can download via various protocols such as HTTP or peer-to-peer protcols such as BitTorrent. One fun example is RocketBoom. So what's the difference between the video we find on the Net today, and this 'DIY TV'concept? Well, because the RSS aggregators can download the videos automatically in the background and then delete them once they're watched, instead of being thumbnail sized videos that can be streamed over DSL, these DIY TV shows can actually be better quality audio and video than broadcast TV today. 

The channel could be viewed using any RSS aggregator: iTunes and DTV are just two. We would use freely available and GPL-licensed tools, such as Really Simple Syndication (RSS), Maybe the  Participatory Culture Foundation wold help publicize our efforts.

Perhaps the class could be divided into groups of 4, and each group would be responsible for creating content that relates to a single aspect of technology and society:

• Technology-enabled Social Networks
• Emerging cultures and technology
• Adaptive Re-use of Technologies
• Revenge Effects
• How technology relates to class and social Issues

But there are many other ways we could collaborate with Austin Free-Net, the Austin community, and with each other. I'll be trying to rack my brain to come up with other ideas.