Thursday 1 May 2008

One year on, the BBC have cancelled Jam forever

The sharp-eyed amongst you may have spotted the BBC Trust's effective complete cancellation of Jam, with a few caveats, published on 27th February. This is very sad. I hope that at least the SEN materials (some of which we are proud to have worked on) will see the light of day. Thus far, we have not seen very full details of the BBC's plans to "meet its educational purpose for children and young people by enhancing its existing portfolio with some new online educational initiatives which are skills based". I hope they are brave and big, in line with my post of a year ago.

At the moment, it feels like corporate greed has won the day, and removed any space in the market for the development of truly innovative and exciting public service educational online materials. As I have said previously, commercial publishers can create good stuff, but I firmly believe that there is material which can and should be created as a public service, and for which there will never be a commercial market. I suspect David Attenborough would agree, given his comments about the BBC last night (and I share many of his views as reported, by the way!).

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