New Media and Learning in the 21st Century is a small article in the Jan/Feb 2006 issue of EDUCAUSE REVIEW by Lev Gonick - the CIO of Case Western Reserve University. Gonick writes about new media literacy and MediaVision, which is a search tool for the first-year courses captured on video. Other universities also are developing similar projects to capture lectures, courses, and other academic activities on digital video. It’s an endeavor that I expect will become increasingly popular.

Students are spending two to three times more hours on their subject matter and are able to watch and search for key concepts, to outline subjects, and so forth. In some courses, historic benchmarked performance data is shifting positively for the first time in decades. When students are surveyed about MediaVision Courseware, they say it is “cool.” But, like wireless access, such courseware is simply de rigueur. For them, integrated streaming media courseware is an entirely normal extension of how they live, play, and learn.

Gonick also says something clearly aimed other administrators:

…it will be the ways in which we leverage the latest generation of infrastructure for teaching and learning that will differentiate and distinguish academic institutions.
….

The next decade may well be seen by future historians as transformational. The internalizing of the institutional imperative to absorb and project future success through new media will change the dynamic forever. Clearly, old patterns of hierarchies, research traditions, and teaching and learning practices will not disappear overnight. However, just over the horizon, many of the contradictions experienced during the first evolutionary phase of the new media revolution will be resolved. The prestige of our institutions may well depend on that.