CNN was already publsihing in the electronic sphere - they are ‘changing hands’. I do not think it was such a big shift for them. Education on the other hand has a looooong history with paper.

Yet those community centric efforts probably are a drop in the bucket of the scholarly actiity at colleges and universities. Most of what my campus and similar campuses do in terms of managing and utilizing digital content is done on behalf of the creators (the faculty in the main) and a narrower community with whom the faculty are in direct communication. The essence of this is peer review and the Darwinian process that drives it is publish or perish.

That you find good and useful information for instructional technology on individual Web sites that have not been reviewed doesn’t in itself mean the traditional publishing process should be modified or ended. It just means it should not have a monopoly on the use and management of information. It never did.

That more effort should be put on creating and managing information that can benefit the broader community is probably right. But for all the talk about greater accountability to the public, it is faculty who rule the realm so I think the right question is how to make that broad mission in their interest. Then we might be ready to learn from CNN.

I’m reminded that (apparently) it took thirty years to realise that movie cameras could be used for more than just filming stage productions, and that they could taken outside and used in a completely different context. It has taken ten years to get used to the Internet becoming a ubiquitous tool (in the developed world, anyway). The impact of video phones will change that even further, in ways that we can’t imagine at the moment.

Tooth fairy or not Alan, I’ve sent a link to this blog around to all the members of our Flexible Learning team. It’s drawing a long bow to suggest that we’ll get our educational beaurocracy to buy into the idea that students can educate themselves, we do have to become more creative about the ways in which we allow them to participate more in the process of learning.

I question the assumption that citizens are unable to provide quality content. Does not WikiPedia, WikiTravel, Wiki_____ counter that? I cannot tell you how many times I have found crucial helpful information, how tos, resources in my area (instructional technology), NOT from the “approved” sources of information (publishers, software vendors) but from free web sites created by individuals motivated by their own good nature to share their corner of expertise.

I wouls say everyone has some piece of expertise worth sharing, but then again, I believe in the tooth fairy

I’m a member of my campus Institutional Repository working group, which oversees a fledgling D-Space project. Comparing that to CNN is like comparing Champaign-Urbana to New York City, a completely different scale of operation. So, apart from our comparative poverty within Higher Ed, as Scott Leslie points out, we are probably way too disaggregated to be efficient at information ingest. Why most research universitites have their own IR project rather than participate in some more aggregated repository project is beyond me.

On the other hand, I do think CNN and other News organizations have it much easier on the filtering of content question. The IR project is charged with collecting the scholarly output from the campus community. How one determines whether some artifact is suitable for collecting or not is a fairly difficult issue and our kludge solution is to make the faculty brokers - they can submit their own content without it being scrutinized elsewhere and they can vouch for content by peers, students, or the man in the street. But I really can’t imagine that content produced by “average citizens” will find its way into the repository this way. They wouldn’t know where to begin.

For determining what is newsworthy, however, an editor or a small editorial staff can make those calls effectively. So individuals can be empowered to act like reporters and the filtering process is sufficiently efficient that it is not inundated with complete junk. Furhermore, news happens somewhere so there is an obvious efficiency in empowering locals to report it. The entire News organization can then market this idea so individuals do know where to turn when they find themselves in a position to report something.

Is this in itself hurting higher ed? At present it seems to me only very informed insiders worry about this stuff.

You miss the point widely, and sadly as now you lump Katrina in with Michael, Natalee, and Laci. The original article by Maise had nothing to do with arguing over what is “journalism”

I realized at the time of writing this was an unfair comparison… CNN is well funded and can more directly “mandate” a way of working, and I was comparing all educational institutions to one media organization. CNN is much mroe focused on a “product”.

Still just the sheer effect of reading Maise’s points rung clear like a bell of how far down a different track education rolls. Maybe it does not matter, and maybe there is a lot of innovation that can brew from the free wheeling enterprises within education (can we think that private business would ahve come up with something like Mosaic?).

It just makes for some interesting thinking, and while education is still a unique environment, in the networked fast paced world of the present, it cannot be just a thing unto itself.

Hmmm, maybe I can become a One Trick Pony?