This evening I went along to my old haunt Kingston University to attend a lecture giving by a past colleague, Jonathan Briggs to mark him becoming Professor of eCommerce at the University.
The Talk entitled “eCommerce 2.0: How AJAX, blogging, mashups, search engines and social networks are changing business” pretty much did as is says on the tin and covered both technological change and societal impacts of the new “web 2.0” processes and how they are changing business.
All very good, but what impressed me most was Jonathan’s approach to his career so far, although an academic with teaching responsibilities, he has set up a successful internet business the other media , which some blue chip clients and has helped create new educational establishments for teaching new media in Sweden and Kosovo. He runs an excellent blog, which is one of the ways he communicates with his students.
So what we have is a real practitioner of their subject, who can provide their students with real business experience gained by actually building sites, competing to work for clients and running a successful business – for potential employers this is just what they want to hear.
Congratulations to Kingston University for giving Jonathan the freedom to do this, your students I’m sure benefit far more from this, than they would, if he published x peer reviewed journal articles each year.
Web 2.0 has massive potential to change the way higher education works, I wonder how ready Higher Education 1.0 it for it ?
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
