http://education.guardian.co.uk/elearning/story/0,,2116835,00.html

I think it shows a bit of a blur between blogs and journals

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Dr Timo Hannay, director of web publishing at Nature Publishing Group, which runs Nature Network, says no one could mistake the site for a peer-reviewed journal; it is more “cafe chat”. “If a user made outlandish scientific claims that were potentially misleading, we would take them off,” he says.

He predicts that scientists who post comments, blogs and data from experiments on sites like Nature Network will eventually be allowed to count these as part of their research output. “We are increasingly seeing the online world with its informal rapid communications complement the slower, more formal communications of academic journals,” he says. “There should be a way of measuring the impact of a scientist who posts comments on a site like Nature Network. These could be added to their publishing record for the research assessment exercise [in which every active researcher in every university in the UK is assessed by panels of other academics]. I think the funding bodies will see that these contributions add to the scientific knowledge base.”

More importantly, look at what corporatization has done to politics, journalism, religion and popular culture in this country, and extend that to education and you’ll get an idea of what has been happening to the biggest employer in the United States in terms of people employed.

The revolution will not be accredited, however, and that is where the analogy tends to break down a bit. A “good, standard infrastructure” for granting online credits probably already exists at least in nascent form, and university students are already joining in with other online students in ways that are not sanctioned or supervised by education authorities.

There is nothing stopping anyone from developing their own course and posting it online to share with whomever would take an interest and pay. Administrators and accrediting bodies who issue the professoriate’s marching orders want 15 “contact” hours a week for 15 weeks, or the equivalent of that with learning goals that transfer readily from one institution to another and that aren’t redundant, redactive, or ridiculous. Telling personal stories is not going to take up that much time, I don’t care how traveled and self-absorbed the Internet instructor might be. Eventually, the lay instructor is going to have to find good, thought-provoking content by relying on other authors and deliver the material in a way that does hopefully a bit more for the students than make class fun to be in an open, virtual classroom.

If the advertising were hands off (like Google adsense) then one could keep editorial independence.

As for the use of public funds for public media, why not? I realize libertarians don’t believe in this for philosophical reasons, but we have lots of areas that are publicly funded. The trick is to keep the funding at a distance (like the highway trust fund).

The BBC works pretty well with the TV tax, but it is flawed because the government gets to pick the head. Governance remains a sticky issue, but how much governance control does the public have over CBS or NBC?