Attack of the Digital People: The BBC goes fully Bong

Too big, too safe

It's a strange thing, there's a lot of concern out there that [insert your least favourite private sector leviathan] is getting too big and that this cause problems for you, me, world peace and global warming

However similar behaviour in the public sector tends to be treated differently and I've never understood why.

If bad outcomes are caused by size then it seems irrelevant what those bad outcomes turn out to be (profits, too many bureaucrats, overpaid "talent", whatever)

Anti-competitive practice in the public sector is loosely described as illegal state aid

it's not as if the BBC hasn't been here before with its digital curriculum.

Excellent

It's exactly this kind of article that allows El Reg to win my lunchtime "browsing time".

Contradictions

I think you illustrate the Beebs main problem perfectly, by making the same mistake they seem to make. Firstly, you say the Beeb should " fill a void, providing news and programmes that the market won't make". And I agree, that is what it is there for. But then you say you "want it to...Broadcast, rather than narrowcast to niches".

Surely this is something of a dichotomy. If something is of general, broad interest to the population then it is something the commercial channels will be making or, if they haven't thought of it yet, will want to make. After all, they want to sell advertising to as many people as possible. The voids, the gaps, the spaces in which you seem to believe the Beeb should be working are, by their very nature, niches.

The Beeb does the same thing. It seems to judge it's own success by viewing figures and "reach" when you could almost make the opposite argument. Once a program or format becomes successful, the commercial operators will always copy it. Arguably, at this point, the Beeb has carried out its function and should stop and move onto something else.

Why does the BBC, an organisation whose main function is to make programs nobody else makes, make Eastenders, a southern copy of Coronation St? Why is it allowed to bid for football rights when that uses public money to inflate the value of those rights which are then sold to the public? Why does it have two mainstream music radio stations?

The BBC needs to be cut back hugely and should not be allowed to enter segments already catered for and should be forced to leave segments if it succeeds in creating new ones that come to be adequately served by the commercial operators.

Complete waste of fee money. The majority of these will become Frisbees or landfill, teachers wont know what to do with them. It is unlikely that support will exist in schools to plug your own devices in (majority of schools I visit are VGA rather than HDMI), a large chunk of parents will baulk at the idea of plugging a bare exposed board into their 50" TV.

so what is the point? Don't get me wrong, I love little PCs, I have a PI and a PI2. My kids have rooted cheap Chinese android tablets and I show them how to flash roms, ADB and am slowly showing them scripting. But I doubt even a small minority of parent will be able to install Linux to the degree that it will do something good, let along program a multiline display.

Now really!

At first look the Microbit looks a bit simple, like an Arduino. But there's a lot more- a 32bit ARM and bluetooth for over the air programming. And of course lots of blinkenlights. This is even cheaper than the board-du-jour the ESP8266. 5000 trainers will be needed to spread the gospel, Raspberry PI style,and the BBC is well suited to pull all this together.

Post-Hutton BBC

Fully agree that it would be preferable for the BBC to concentrate its efforts on numeracy or real literacy, but the Government has decided that all kids should be taught to code.

It's been commented here many times in the past how cynical that policy is.

But since Hutton, the BBC has to support the Government's policies, even if it might disagree with them. It's a sad state of affairs, but I don't think the BBC deserves most of the blame for it.

Yes, No

A sign I think of the simplest possible denominator arrived at from too many, poorly connected and direction-less 'stakeholders' homogenising a solution that meets tiniest parts of everyone's agenda. A complicated way maybe of agreeing that we see the Beeb as a solution without a problem in this area.

I would say, derived by young Auntie minds that don't want to offend the digitally stupid (if there are any) and regarding anything more ambitious as patronising (or more likely beyond their own capacities). Docker, Quantum Machines, Bio-comp, IOT could be some of the more dry matters on the agenda. Less of Stephen Fry's angst of Twitter and Grannies with Oculus rifts.

But I suspect it's actually the Beeb setting their own rather esoteric and largely irrelevant agenda that estimates we all think in Fisher-Price blocks of logic and need to be preached to accordingly.

Good article.

The BBC, dont get me started....

1. BBC News, aka Ground Hog Day

2. Time. Really amazing as the 'owners' of Dr Who, a Time Lord, they fail miserably to get their programs started on time.

3. Website oh how we love all those trackers and surveys to show how wonderful we are.

FFIFOTTP

If you have been affected by the events in this article please call...........

Whose initiative?

It seems to me it is primarily a government aspiration to get people coding and developing. With the BBC in a position to deliver it would be rather remiss of them not to jump on that bandwagon to demonstrate the benefits of public broadcasting.

would a digital person know...

what map, filter and fold are?

Come to think of it would an oo programmer know?

:)

Hmmmm

Is this kind of malarky well paid? If so it sounds like the kind of indoors, easy to do, hard to measure work that I like to be involved in. Time ot polish the CV

I find myself thinking that Wally from Dilbert really has the right approach more and more each day.

Beeb

You have done it this time Orlowski. Clarkson is on his way round, and he hasn't had his dinner.

The last people we need...

...running the country's IT education are the Apple fan club.

Careful

I am sure you will now receive the wrath of the BBC cult! I doubt their tune will have changed by this topic when it hasnt for the many before.

However from me- Thumbs up

W1A?

Have the Twenty Twelve / W1A script writers been put in charge of this laughable idea?

Why not teach us something useful?

There are many reasons to criticise the BBC, but you have to be sorry for them when presented with the "why do they not do X?" question.

Because if X is popular there will be complaints that it should be done on a commercial basis and if it's unpopular there will be complaints about it being done at all.

In this case, I think the punters are no longer prepared to devote their full attention to a TV screen for more than a few minutes at a time and any broadcast attempt at "worthy" education is doomed to failure.

Now, whether the BBC would be better putting its resources into doing more education online (where all its language courses, for example, are described as "archived"), rather than attempting to breathe digital life into BBC 3, is another matter...

Gravy train

You must admit it would be a great gravy train to get on, you don't even have to show it works, could work or even provide results..... just howl "think of the children"

Most of those micrbits will end up on ebay or in the soles of their parents feet.

"The Register asked the BBC's comms department how much "Make It Digital" would cost, whether BBC Trust approval was needed (as it is for initiatives costing over £50m), and if it was, whether approval had been sought. We have yet to hear a reply."

Of course you haven't heard a reply; they're still working out how to count to fifty.

House of Fail

Take a Raspi, some of the available commercial components and distributions, create a few more to fill gaps if needed. Mix the lot together with a series of TV/WEB programmes that provide the detail on how to write the code that interfaces w, x, y to get a working z.

FFS they could have gone to the Raspi foundation and handed them £10m to produce packaged kits. But no, like any monopoly, the BBC only sees good in things it has complete control over.

It's about time they stopped looking back at the BBC micro. It was a different world with different rules.

The BBC can do this kind of thing pretty well when they're not being railroaded by vested interests - compare this scheme with the BBC Performing Arts Fund (which is financed by the telephone voting income from BBC TV shows).

A slight correction

I thought the saing wnet "If you can't do, teach. And if you can't do or teach, become a journalist"

bbc + digital = fail

this all comes in the month that BBC turned off the digital ip streams that so many of their audience relied upon. They assumed everybody has an iDevice.

Re. bbc + digital = fail

(Gets the salt)

Damn you Sneaky Uncle Beeb, Damn you to Hell. Extra hot Hell with lashings of plutonium hexafluoride rain for good measure.

(hopes that a medium sized asteroid takes out Television Centre very, very soon)

what's with all the BBC bashing on here?

Not sure what's with all the BBC rants on the Reg these days. Love a lot of the BBC programming. Don't see why it should only make niche programs. - only it's rivals will benefit from that. BBC should keep making a great mix of programmes that entertain, amuse and, if they must, educate. Not bad for 40p a day. Have a many more objections on how a hell of a lot more tax money is spent. If the BBC want to do a bit of marketing/educating/cross-promotion I don't see what the big fuss is - especially as it doesn't seem to be costing fee payers anything. Some people seem to be proponents of the idea that public services must be rubbish otherwise it's unfair on the competition. Well, I don't know what that says about the competition or the tax payers.

Omit the remit, dammit

> So expansive and vague is the BBC's current Royal Charter, that BeebWash would actually tick all its boxes (not only the "mission to inform, educate and entertain", obviously, but also "sustaining citizenship and civil society") and happily sit within the corporation's remit.

I have the sneaking suspicion that whoever wrote the BBC charter naturally assumed that the phrase " ... by making programmes and broadcasting them " was such a blindingly obvious limit to the scope of the British Broadcasting Corporation's charter that it simply did not need to be explicitly stated.

However, the BBC has always had a penchant for jumping on trendy bandwagons (sometimes even creating them, then jumping on). When it involves something that few of their "customers" understand, then it allows them to go into full patronising mode, too. As well as collecting "charter" brownie points to make up for all the crap they push out, which clearly has no (positive) charter content, at all.

But it is just that: a bandwagon. The BBC has many more influential ways to promote "digital" stuff. The most effective, cheapest and least popular with its management and programme makers would be to present "techies" in a positive light. Have someone on Eastenders who does more than argue in cliches with the other characters and (say) gives them advice on how to fix their PC, or load apps onto their phone, or scan for viruses. They could even have programmes (gasp!) that don't ghettoise "geeks" by either assuming a set of interests, being banished to obscure channels and times (e.g. Click), talking to people as if they were 8 years old and limiting each "segment" to a sound-bite friendly couple of minutes - with all the annoying electronic background music that is used to inform us that this is a technical subject, and the worn-old theme of a literal "journey" of discovery.

Bong is as Bong does...

so full of contradictions...

Are you really pissed off about the beeb's latest favourite buzzword, or pissed off that you didn't think of it first?

a genuine question, by the way

Is this the same BBC?

Is this the same BBC that also has a rather poorly organized website?

Oh. The. Irony.

In case anyone is less than impressed by blithe assertions about the usefulness of DG CONNECT, you can check out what we actually do here http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/connect/en/what-we-do

Needless to say that the Digital Agenda ( http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda ) pre-dates the BBC's "Make it Digital" initiative by about 5 years, so comparisons are not exactly germane.

Great article, as usual. Although I do think that projects like the Raspberry Pi, Arduino, etc are needed to teach kids more about programming and electronics. I don't have kids, but when I do I'd rather they were building and programming electronic devices than browsing social media and playing video games when spending time in front of a computer screen.

I don't know a huge amount about this BBC project, so don't know how effective it might be, but I do get the feeling that it's largely political, and partly designed to prop up the government's crappy spending in our education system.