From YouTube to YouNiversity

I just read the Chronicle article (From YouTube to YouNiversity, Feb 16, 2007) by Henry Jenkins on what might be learned by universities from the current buzz surrounding Web 2.0. It's a great piecce that reminds academics to get up to speed with the new social spaces online or face a new kind of redundancy! He raises the importance of comparative work in media studies to accommodate this new componenent of global culture. I think it particularly difficult for publicly funded bodies to develop tools that are truly cutting edge unless they find ways of utilising open source platforms. I have worked with so many new platforms for teaching that either fail to materialise due to funding changes or just simply were not competitive, that it's hard to see how universities can continue to innovate with online platforms without acknowledging the limitations of a top-down system.

I particularly like his final claim:

The modern university should work not by defining fields of study but by removin obstacles so that knowledge can circulate and be reconfigured in new ways.