My Day

More on the democratization of the academy - take a look at what some profs at Berkeley, Yale, Harvard, MIT, Princeton and Stanford are doing... offering their videotaped lectures to the world - http://academicearth.org.  This site joins the Open Knowledge Initiative that has been challenging how we think of the monopoly known as higher education (see MIT's OpenCourseWare at http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm and the proposed P2PU at http://www.peer2peeruniversity.org). 

 

But what about an open admissions such as the public lectures once offered by the historic Transylvania University for all of (white) antebellum Lexingtonians to attend (including women, horrors!)?  The Center for Open and Sustainable Learning (http://cosl.usu.edu) does this now.

 

Or even more intriguing, a crowd-sourcing and peer-to-peer environment to generate new knowledge such as the newly proposed Wikiversity - http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Main_Page), an initiative from the Wikimedia Foundation. For an inside view, see "Wikiversity; or, Education Meets the Free Culture Movement: An Ethnographic Investigation," First Monday, vol. 13 no.10 (October 6, 2008), http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2234/2031.

 

Why not get a Kentucky contingent going?