Doctor Recommended
100% All Natural

In a day filled with military coup’s and UFOs it is nice to be able to reflect on fanciful, childhood memories:  Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood Gerrymandered To Serve King Friday’s Make-Believe Agenda

See my other nominations for excellence in journalism.

Earlier today Peter Klein pointed to a very interesting article regarding elite universities from the WSJ aptly titled, “Any College Will Do.” In it, the author notes that only 10% of the chief executives of Fortune 500 firms attended an Ivy League school. In fact, most of the executives simply matriculated to seemingly generic schools (e.g. large State-supported schools).

This piece is germane as The Economist recently noted that because of the advent of relatively cheap and easy-to-use electronic media (e.g., e-reserves, bulletin boards, listserves, electronic digests, etc.), the top universities no longer have a resource-based advantage over their less-affluent counterparts with respect to conducting cutting-edge research.

It also ties into learncasting (educational podcasting) and of particular interest: the case of Robert Schrag, a communications professor at North Carolina State University. At the beginning of the Fall semester he began to sell his lectures in podcast form for $2.50 — to both student and public denizen alike. However, he was recently required to take them down until the University had come up with a formal policy to handle the intellectual property issues surrounding the class material.

This is a perfect example that illustrates my thesis regarding the transformation of the traditional, residential-based college in the “Web 2.0″ era.

The administration and its stake holders are at cross-roads. On one hand they could adopt this technology - as numerous Universities have - and use it as an additional revenue source. Ignoring the much maligned DRM issues, in the long-run this could enable Universities to reach the distance-based education customer who is short on commuting time and/or lacks the ability to pay for lodging each semester. They could even develop these lectures into a full-blown video series, a low-tech product that everyone is familiar with and capable of reaching mass-markets.

On the other hand, if the administration did decide to go this route, they would tacitly be admitting that the competitive advantage of attending classes via meatspace is at a dead-end. This is not to say that there are no advantages of living at a residential college: building a social rolodex can still enable students to gain advantages over their isolated, virtual peers — in theory at least (one could argue that because of chat rooms, newsgroups, blogs, wikis and a slew of other social web services, a self-motivated individual could become just as proficient as their college-bound peers).

See also: 1 2 3

Update: according to The Chronicle, the professor’s podcasts are back online.  However, they are password-protected and thus are currently only accessible to students (and now for free).