At the Future of Everything workshop a sizable portion of the attendees twittered during the event, including yours truly.  It was interesting to have a back channel of conversation.  I even had a colleague from Yale following the feed — a virtual attendee.  But I also found it a little distracting and while an interesting experiment I’m not convinced it really added anything substantial to my experience.  What role should Twitter play at a conference, workshop or in the classroom?

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We recently launched a publication site for case studies and articles generated our of our theater management department, the Theater Management Knowledge Base.  In our initial discussion on how to deliver the site, WordPress seemed like the perfect tool, and it has served us very well.  There were a couple of tricky requirements, but as it turns out nothing that we couldn’t address.

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In a commentary in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education Kevin Carey finds parallels in the recent newspaper industry troubles and colleges.  He sees the most vulnerable portion of higher ed the mid-tier private institutions focused on undergraduate education.  Their market is focused on convenience, price, and service.  And they have a growing range of alternatives offered by on-line and for-profit programs.  Carey suggests that institutions that distinguish themselves by integrating technology to improve learning will survive.  And points out that free course content offered by the Yales and Stanfords (safe themselves for now due to the prestige and affiliation aspects), and organized by services like Academic Earth are helping feed the competition in this market segment.

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iTunes U has been around for a while now, but viewing it requires having iTunes loaded, or (at least from a practical standpoint) utilizing some flavor of iPod/iPhone.  YouTube is browser based, Flash driven, and so just easier to get at.  You can also embed the videos in other pages, create your own playlists and all that other good stuff that has made YouTube the sensation it is.  There is plenty of content there so far from a pretty impressive cross-section of institutions.  Stephen Downes wonders if ‘education’ needs to be only top universities — an excellent point that will hopefully be considered as the content in YouTube U expands.

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While trying to find information about the Yale School of Art’s new gallery, I came across their interesting wiki-powered site.  It seems the entire departmental site allows personnel from around the school to make updates.  All changes to the site are tracked, wiki style, and visible to the public.   Overall it is a really interesting concept from a content management system (CMS) perspective, but in practice I think the site itself is a bit of a design trainwreck.  In fact I couldn’t find the information on the new gallery at all on the site.

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Offered as a class on Yale’s Open Course Initiative, Game Theory with Professor Ben Polak is a well executed presentation.  Recently I decided to give the class a spin – here are my thoughts. Dr. Polak is an engaging lecturer, clearly passionate and knowledgeable about the subject.  His classroom style is energetic with a good mix of humor, direct student engagement and demonstration.  It is easy to see why this course is a ‘must attend’ for Yale undergraduates.  But much is lost in the translation to the online environment.

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