I began this blog on one topic and found it morphing as soon as I began to write. The real focus didn’t emerge until the end.

Tama’s eLearning Blog notes a Melbourne appearance by James Wilkinson, Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard. Tama’s pulled a fine quote and links to the remainder of the address, available both as a Word file and as an audio recording. (Three cheers for the document, four cheers for the audio.) My thanks to Tama for the link, and his work and support generally.

Wilkinson’s metaphor argues that specialized education builds high on a narrow base, like a obelisk, while generalized education builds less high on a broad base that enables rebuilding when necessary without tearing the whole structure down. The metaphor strikes me as intriguing but limited, though I’ll obviously need to listen to or read the whole thing to understand what Wilkinson’s getting at. That he’s getting at something of great importance in the way we conceptualize higher education, however, is undeniable, and I’ll look forward to mulling over his address. UPDATE: five cheers for audio, as I got to listen to half the talk on the way to work today. So far it’s a fascinating and helpful overview of the history of the idea of curriculum. NB: the idea of “majors” was invented as way of bringing coherence to a mass of free electives. But I digress (if one can say that in an unusually digressive blog post).

One larger point: the educational blogosphere is particularly valuable to me for the way it alerts me (and others) to contributions like Wilkinson’s–and more, for Tama’s link brings me to an entire page of Menzies Orations on Higher Education, a resource I didn’t know about. I’m delighted by the discovery. It seems to me that such intense, focused, expert, and highly philosophical discussions of education are more important than ever, given the reach and power of high-speed telecommunications.

Richard Weaver once wrote that any theory of education is a theory of what it means to be human. I agree with him, and I believe that these basic questions should always guide and shape the educations we create for ourselves and for others.

I also applaud the University of Melbourne for making these orations available to a worldwide audience, and look forward to the day when every university has a “speeches and presentations” section (with an even broader title) that makes such rich content face outward, toward the public.

Musings and surfing bring yet another discovery: though it’s not structured as a systematic repository, “Harvard@home” (which I found by clicking on the link at the Derek Bok Center) publishes about sixty videorecordings, primarily of lectures and panel discussions featuring Harvard professors and guest speakers. The site dates back to 2001, and it has an interesting mission: “The mission of Harvard@Home is to provide the Harvard community and the broader public with opportunities for rich in-depth exploration of a wealth of topics through Web-based video programs of the highest calibre.” I’m happy to see there’s an RSS feed, too. Look for even more items of interest in Harvard’s Office of News and Public Affairs, though there’s no RSS feed here.

So: click on some links, and courses of study begin to emerge. It occurs to me that once all these resources are RSS-enabled, it should be possible for some large-scale aggregation to occur that will collect these scattered resources in something more valuable than link-farm directories. Something like a YouTube for higher education. UTube?