My Day

I love Farhad Manjoo's article in Slate Magazine about Academic Earth... it's something we here at UK can learn from, I think.  The site allows viewers to grade each class (a combination of videotaped lectures and other materials) - which then can give something to people who already attend the universities featured, but also to those who are considering attending.  "Say you're the lucky future computer scientist who got into Harvard and Stanford—how do you choose? Spend an afternoon watching each school's intro CS courses." 

 

Are we here at UK brave enough to try and do that in NetworkBlue?  There we could have what Academic Earth has: playlists. Manjoo writes: "These are collections of lectures from different professors at different schools on a single theme—among others, there are playlists devoted to history's great wars, building successful companies, and recipes for a happy life. Queue them up on a lazy afternoon, and there's no doubt you'll learn something.... No essays, no finals, no classroom discussions full of inane opinions about what Nabokov is really trying to say in Lolita. Instead, just an hour of the world's experts talking about stuff they're passionate about."  How cool is that?