Jon Udell has an entry on streaming video of course lectures and raises the good questions that universities are having to address:

Permission to make and use such recordings will become a hot issue, if it isn’t already. As a student, can I audio- or video-record a lecture as a memory aid? If so can I retain it for future personal use? If not, should I expect to be able to access this material using university infrastructure while a student? As an alumnus? As a non-affiliated person? What fees would be charged (or not) in these various cases?

This also relates to yesterday’s trial-balloon posting about the future of blogging as a form of resume and autobiography. Should professors, and more broadly all professionals who speak to audiences, publish audio and/or video samples of those talks? Will professional blogs be expected to include or link to these materials, and comment on them, in the same way they might be expected to mention and contextualize professional publications? What level of “fair use” can or should govern one’s own performances done for hire?

I’ve always thought that liberal arts colleges offer some of the best undergraduate education in the US. I’m biased based on my own experiences at such a school.

I learned practically nothing about technology at a liberal arts college in the mid-80s. Actually, I learned practically nothing about anything that was actually practical for getting a job at age 22 when I graduated. Yet, what I came away from college with was the ability to learn on my own and an understanding of critical thinking. Those were the skills that allowed me to master technology, which has enabled me to have a very good career.

Laura Blankenship, an instructional technologist at Bryn Mawr, wrote a very good essay for Inside Higher Ed about Technology as a Liberal Art. Of course, teaching and learning techniques at a small liberal arts college also can be applied to a university setting. Indeed, technology offers a pathway for large universities to involve students more fully in the learning process, thereby creating a learning environment that is similar, on some levels, to that of a smaller liberal arts college.

But students aren’t content anymore to simply be passive recipients of this plethora of information; they also want to create their own content and increasingly are provided the resources with which to accomplish that aim. In the lab that I run, I have helped many a student create multimedia presentations, using video, audio, and photos. Some have created Web sites and still more have blogs (some of which I read), on which they reflect on their schoolwork and college life. Last semester, in fact, a computer science professor, Doug Blank, and I co-taught a class that is studying the blog phenomena, mostly by writing in our own class blog and reading other blogs and media. The students write an average of two posts a week and comment on each other’s posts even more frequently than that.

They are creating content that is, in turn, being commented on by others, including the authors of the articles they’ve written about. In the beginning, we felt we had to post and comment fairly frequently to help get the blog off the ground, but now the students are the primary authors of most of the content. We use that content as fodder for class discussion. Not only do we discuss the topics that they have addressed, but we also discuss they way they’ve formulated their arguments and how they could be improved. We talk about any comments that present counter arguments and how they should address them. The students are learning valuable lessons about what it means to write publicly and how to evaluate what they say against the standards required by writing publicly.