[LINK] Leacock and 'university' [Was: The Work of Information Mediators]

[Bruce Kay]

Hi there,

Bernard's trailer caught my attention too.
It made me think about the early Greek universities.
They were primarily discussion forums.

To answer your question, Roger.

I think there is a place for a cyber-university.
Universities themselves have been evolving this concept for 25 years or
more.

The best pieces of software for this are those that promote discussion
forums.
... probably why I used to enjoy Usenet News so much

I think discussion forums like LINK are close to being the user interface I
would prefer.

my 2c

Bruce

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-link@www.anu.edu.au [mailto:owner-link@www.anu.edu.au]On
Behalf Of Roger Clarke
Sent: Wednesday, 31 May 2000 12:36
To: link@www.anu.edu.au
Subject: [LINK] Leacock and 'university' [Was: The Work of Information
Mediators]



Leaving aside the paper that Bernard brought to attention, I'm even more
rapt in his quote-of-the-message than I usually am!

>--
>If I were founding a university I would begin with a smoking room;
>next a dormitory; and then a decent reading room and a library.
>After that, if I still had more money that I couldn't use, I would hire
>a professor and get some text books.
>-- Stephen Leacock

The reason it spearks my interest is partly because I'm currently framing a
possible virtual professorship in EB/EC.

That's forced me to re-visit the longstanding question as to whether
virtual universities are just existing ones that apply electronic tools, or
something rather different from mainstream
vocational-training-at-the-expense-of-education institutions.

Or, to frame the question less naively, do we need two kinds of
universities, and distinct names for them, so that we all know which kind
we're talking about?

To my shame, I'd never heard of Leacock;  but MetaCrawler turns up:
http://www.tceplus.com/leacock.htm
http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/leacock/leaw.htm

Roger Clarke              http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/

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