From YouTube to YouNiversity

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. From YouTube to YouNiversity
Henry Jenkins has been getting some media recently, probably a result of his recent books on culture, blogging and gaming. I saw most of his talk in Boston, and the text is the Web 2.0 line familiar to most readers. George Siemens picks up on this assertion: "To educate such students, we don't so much need a faculty as we need an intellectual network." And this is exactly right: "The modern university should work not by defining fields of study but by removing obstacles so that knowledge can circulate and be reconfigured in new ways. For media studies, that means taking down walls that separate the study of different media, that block off full collaboration between students, that make it difficult to combine theory and practice, and that isolate academic research from the larger public conversations about media change." More...