Hank Horkoff calls out the ‘dinosaurs of education’ here. There are copyright/legal issues involved when a university professor wants to sell his lessons on iTunes, and a good case to be made that the university has claims on that intellectual property. That’s fair enough.

However, I think there is another level of resistance involved, as academia is forced to deal with the new media tools that will make more and more change possible. I foresee a clash looming as podcasting starts to make it clear who lectures well and who doesn’t. In fact, podcasting threatens to force open the doors of our universities and let us all see much more of what happens within. In closed circles, transparency can be painful when it becomes necessary, but I woud argue that more transparency is inevitable. Some tenured professors will see this as a threat.

Ken Carroll