There are two excellent articles in today’s Sunday NY Times business section. The first by Anne Eisenberg is about using ipods in academic settings. This is an excellent idea that now goes beyond simply recording the video of the lecture and making it available (as in much of what’s on I-tunes U). Rather the software indexes every single word during the lecture and essentially creates a very sophisticated database of the content to go along with the video (and slides). Read it, I think this points the way to the future in academic education.
The second, by NY Times veteran John Markoff is about the history of the public-private partnership that birthed the modern commercial Internet twenty-years ago. Centered in Ann Arbor while I was in grad-school (an outfit called Merit with IBM and MCI as collaborators), it was an incredibly exciting time. I remember the first time I was able to send an email from Ann Arbor to Champaign–Urbana over the Internet, it seemed incredible. This was long before the web. It’s a history of a great success: read it also.
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 