Tom Altman’s Wedia Conversation

This is brilliant…how much great press can a university get - Standford is offering free tuition:

The university is making the change in the wake of published reports last month that its endowment had grown almost 22 percent last year, to $17.1 billion. That sum had begun to attract attention from lawmakers who want wealthy institutions to do more to reduce tuition costs.

Wow - this is huge…it will be very interesting to see how other colleges respond.  All I ever hear from the state regents in Iowa is how much more they are increasing tuition.

I’ve been out of town for a couple of days - so I’m posting this from a Caribou Coffee house. The post makes an interesting point…

My advice is instead of going to journalism school, go to school for something concrete like medicine or some kind of science or something and then use the knowledge you get in that field as a wedge to get yourself into journalism. What journalism really needs is more people who are reporting who actually know something.

What do you do when too many students are USING Wikipedia to write their term papers - throw out the term paper and make them write Wikipedia articles!  Freaking brilliant.

This is exactly the type of thinking we have to promote!  If people are cheating on their term papers - take the resource out of the equation.  You cannot plagiarize from Wikipedia if the assignment is to update Wikipedia.

I’m sending her an email right now - brilliant!

This is a long video (7:41) - and moves a little slow, but the point is great and the same thing applies to us with our readers, viewers and consumers.

We have to engage them in the way they want to be engaged - are we willing to take the news and information we have compiled and send it to their phone, iPod and whatever device?

The video was originally posted on a site called “T4 - Pay Attention” and was designed for teachers.