Professor David Wiley is bullish on online education (as are we. But his claim that the “institutions will be irrelevant by 2020″ should be tempered by the qualifier “some”. Some others embrace the future, and these are not just trendy upstarts, but such bulwarks as our alma mater and another school in the same town. See Jimmy Ruska’s list for other impressive names.

This is the future not merely because of internationalization, or accessibility. Just like taking notes in a live lecture helps retain material even if you don’t ever look at the notes again, students who also read a text version of the video retain more vocabulary and specific details than they would have otherwise.

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And on a lighter note, have you heard taht according to Google, MegaVideo is just Spanish for YouTube (h/t debedb).

We’ve been busy recently with releasing an update to the Overstream.net, so not much chance to blog…

MagicHerbs makes a great point about same-language subtitling.

Good point. This, combined with initiatives such as MIT Open CourseWare, can go a long way.

But on a smaller scale it’s being done right now, for the same purposes - like Nelson’s The Giving Tree or Tanya’s “Merry Chipmunks Christmas”. (P.S. Tanya, thanks for considering us user-friendly, we appreciate it!)

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P.S. A while ago, proud-geek expressed concern about embedding Overstreamed videos into Wordpress. Apparently, it’s been fixed — see our previous blog entries powered by the very same Wordpress.