News, Analysis, Academia and Demand Education

Some threads that I can see tangling:

• as Google starts to fight back against content farms such as Demand Media (e.g. New York Times on Google’s War on Nonsense), the Digger seems keen to get into education: Murdoch signals push into education;
• for a long time I’ve imagined some sort of sensemaking spectrum that leads from news stories, through analysis and feature articles, to a more academic take on subject (if I can get my act together, I’d like to try to pull a workshop together in the Autumn between media and education folk to look at this…); I’m not necessarily suggesting a bigger role for “celebrity academics”, more a consideration of how academics can make content available to the media to add depth and deepened engagement to a story, and how the media can provide timeliness and news hooks to education as a way of adding contextual relevance. Here are two short (2 minute) takes on it, one from Martin Bean, the OU VC, in hist ALT-C 2010 keynote, and the other from Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, on the Radio 4 Media Show:
  • Martin Bean, ALT-C 2010 Keynote
  • Alan Rusbridger, on BBC R4’s The Media Show
• the OU starts a new sort of campaign: Youtube learning campaigns, such as this one on The History of English…

So where’s all this going? And what role might openly licensed content created by academics as part of their daily duties have to play in it?