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 that according to Google, MegaVideo is just Spanish for YouTube (h/t debedb).

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Many things I wanted to mention probably got lost. So I’d like to recap:

The good

• President Obama Signs U.N. Convention On Rights Of Disabled Proclamation
• We joined the Deaf Twitter Group

The uncertain

• COATAccess (of which Overstream is a member) and Jamie Berke (whom we are reading) are doing a great job in getting HR3101 to pass.
• The House of Lords recommends video embedding recommended for Parliament videos — we need to make sure captioning is included.

The amusing

• To our Russian-speaking readers, we’d like to point out a great blog run by an Overstream user and dedicated to translating comedy sketches from around the world: http://sketch-comedy.blogspot.com/

If we may be so bold as to flatter ourselves that there are those that care, we’d like to explain a bit on recent posts.

• The nature of blogging and Twitter is such that Twitter Tools in the Twitter-to-Wordpress direction don’t make for good reading. Although some improvements can be made here:
  • Some ad hoc (yet laconic) syntax hints that some words plus the accompanying link should be translated to an <a href=”link”>text</a> structure in the blog.
  • Some sort of querying the URL shortening service for the original URL (because some die-hard verbose bloggers hate this part of Twitter and refuse to click on some obscure URLS. I can’t say that I necessarily blame them.
  • An option in Twitter Tools to make Twitter digest go into a draft instead of a published post.
  • This was not helped by my ill-fated decision to pipe the feed of newly created Overstreams right into our main Twitter account. The noise was, well, deafening, pardon the pun.

  So, at least until the above-made WIBNI (”wouldn’t it be nice?”) suggestions for blogging/Tweeter integration are done, we’ll tread carefully and will:

  • @Overstream on Twitter is still the Tweet Stream from the Overstream Team. The feeds with latest Overstreams, updated many times daily, are now available from @captioned on Twitter for those that want it — and we see that quite a few of you do!
  • In general, render unto Twitter that which is tweeted, and render unto WordPress that which is… well… more coherent.