Is it to teach commercial skills (like how to run Adobe InDesign) or is it to push people to explore their fields and themselves?

Steve Sloan is asking for feedback about his innovative podcasting class because the university wants to change it to be just a pure skills class.

Sigh.

You can learn InDesign from a book. You can’t have a small group interaction with speakers like Steve Sergeant, host of Wildebeat, David Weinberger, author of Cluetrain Manifesto, Aaron Uhrmacher, Second Life expert, Phil Wolff, SkypeJournal author, or students talking about their own podcasts. I spoke to the class as well. Notice how all those link to podcasts of the actual class sessions!

It’s a shame, because San Jose State University needs more innovative classes like these, not fewer.

Steve is hosting a meeting Thursday evening to discuss the situation and see if they can do anything.

Hey, I’m not using my cell phone here in Europe, but this will prove to be very cool for blog and news fiends like me: MiniTechMeme.

I love this quote from Dave Winer: “Wes Felter says that “most people” don’t want to connect their computers to a TV. Well, most people, in the day in horses and buggies, didn’t want to ride in an internal combustion engine-driven mobility device, but today it’s impossible to live in modern society without using the darned things.”