And to be honest students, high school students, are very media savvy today.

But what about students not pretending to do radio but actually doing it for real?

How often to we hear students on our local commercial or national radio networks DOING RADIO?

Never really!

And that never is exactly why every other week the students from Wellington International School in Dubai come on my show, Nightline, and take over the broadcast.

Risky? WC Fields said never work with pets and children.

Challenge? You bet!

Worth it? 200%

These students are doing a live broadcast every other week for an hour and doing well!

Imagine this program in 2 months time!

Why don’t more stations and presenters do what I am doing?

No clue!

And I can’t help but look at the results and ask if I have achieved my goal.

The goal being very simply to make my students laugh and think.

And of course there is the application of the laughter and thinking into some real world possibility.

How often to we link the comic side of things with the thinking side of things?

Not often enough is the short answer.

Well there is an answer to this challenge.

Marc Abrahams: The founder of the Ig Nobel Prize describes some past favorites – including some connections to other Gel 2011 presentations. See also Marc’s Annals of Improbable Research.

Marc Abrahams at Gel 2011 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

About 100 Hawaiian-language newspapers published from 1834 to 1948 are being translated by roughly 3,000 volunteers. The newspapers are currently housed in Hawaiian archival collections as originals and microfilmed images, but when the project is finished, more than 60,000 pages of daily life in the Hawaiian Kingdom will be available for viewing on the Internet.

This is the coolest idea I have read about in a long time.

And the 1st thing it made me think about was the rich history of the printed press in the UAE.

Well, if we go back before the federation of the UAE there were a handful of people writing broadsheets, by hand, and placing them on their Majalis doors for the community.

Imagine if these publications could be brought back to life?

In a sense this is the type of historical journalism that the UAE needs to embark upon.

A history project that is still young enough to have materials and people of the era around.

The Awaiaulu project is a great example and a doable idea here in the UAE.

Anyone interested?

What is a teacher?

Public education?

Smart?

Not?

Economics vs intellectual?

I am moving to a new school in September to help create the UAE’s leading mass communication program.

I say leading because if we are going to just do what is typical today there would be no point in moving to CUD from ZU.

We are going to put a program in motion that is in constant re-invention.

We are thinking of journalism in terms of the craft and the delivery.

We are thinking advertising in terms of what, who and where.

We are thinking about PR in terms of the story and delivery.

No more we need huge expensive pools of equipment to make media, WE DON’T NEED A HUGE SET OR A HUGE LAB.

What we need is people who are engaged as mentors and learners.

Watch this video this to me is where CUD’s mass communication program is going.

One of the greatest challenges to any education institution is how to take what is happening inside the walls to a larger community.

Think ideas and think finances.

What we are talking about is a win win.

What if I could get a million people doing courses and for 1 dollar they could get a certificate?

That would be cool.

And what if the certificate had value because my course completion was authenticated and validated?

MIT is well on the road to making a global open education possible.

MITx will endeavor to break down barriers to education in two ways. First, it will offer the online teaching of MIT courses to people around the world and the opportunity for able learners to gain certification of mastery of MIT material. Second, it will make freely available to educational institutions everywhere the open-source software infrastructure on which MITx is based.

This sounds really cool and I wonder how Zayed University where I am now or the Canadian University of Dubai where I am moving to in July can borrow a page from MIT.

Of course not literally but they are generally not thinking about how they are presenting ideas and instead getting caught up with the noise.

Video artists Mac Premo and Oliver Jeffers summed up 2011 for The Daily in a stylish stop-motion clip that chronicles the year’s biggest stories, from January’s shooting of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords to the curtain closing on the Iraq War.

This is just cool!

What I would love to see is more students trying to do stuff like this and beyond!

I have been using Evernote for a while and can’t figure out why it isn’t a must use tool for every student?

And professors/teachers should also be at the front of the Evernote line.

What I really like about this tool is the ability it gives me to take my work anyplace!

And the fact that I can add images, audio… and the list goes on.

There is a lot of stuff out there that distracts and obscures but this is a tool that works.

It would be interesting to know what tools you have tried and abandoned and which you keep using.

I bet there are more abandoned than used.

What are the top 10 apps you are using today?

What are the top 5 songs on the iPod today?

What are your top 3 podcasts?

If you are like me the list is small and very easy to manage!

You name it, from National Geographic to a local radio station, it is being broadcast to the world through Livestream.

And what I really love about Livestream content is the simple fact that this alternative content is easy to find and watch.

How much SXSW do you get to watch?

And Facebook Live? Did you even know about Facebook live?

And when was the last time you listened to Mike Tyson talk about his ability with a computer?

Again here we have a resource that is being under used by so many groups and organizations who need to get their message out.

And once you start watching Livestream content it is hard to turn back to traditional TV.

Why? That one word, convenience.

And then there is this little piece on fashion that made me sit back and listen as Oscar de la Renta talk about among other things truth and business.

There is a lot of noise out there on the Internet and once again a way to break through the clutter is with a service like Livestream.

But I always thought of IBM as this big faceless company that made mainframe computers.

Yes I know they had been a big player in personal computing but that never stuck with me, and not them either.

Then I happened upon this whole new face of IBM, the idea of social business.

Cool.

And the 60 second videos say it all!

And what was the revelation for IBM over the last 10 years? Really the same one we are all facing and for the most part in a corporate context doing very poorly, speaking to people as people and not objects.

It’s no longer a BtoB or BtoC relationship. It’s PtoP.
People to people isn’t about file sharing. It means that every department, from HR to marketing to product development to customer service, uses social media the way it uses any other tool and channel to do its job. A company that uses social networking tools fluently to communicate with people inside and outside the company acts as a Social Business.

I love the way IBM has framed the idea of a social business because as I think about radio or education the rules also apply.

IBM has identified three distinct characteristics of a Social Business:

• A Social Business is engaged—deeply connecting people, including customers, employees, and partners, to be involved in productive, efficient ways.
• A Social Business is transparent—removing boundaries to information, experts and assets, helping people align every action to drive business results.
• A Social Business is nimble—speeding up business with information and insight to anticipate and address evolving opportunities.

This is a little piece worth reading and keeping on your desk the next time you are asked where are we going in this industry.

There are many models of alternative education and each has its place.

Shai Reshef founded University of the People in 2009 and I think this is a model that we should sit up and take a look at.

Here is what UofP says about itself.

Economic and geographic constraints exclude millions of people from higher education. With the aid of technological developments and the help of volunteers, however, access to a tuition-free online education is within reach courtesy of University of the People.
University of the People is a nonprofit venture that is beginning to revolutionize higher education by providing universal access to tuition-free online education, even in the poorest areas of the world.

I love the way Reshef looks at what he has started, not as competition with other institutions, but a model that fits a space where nothing is being offered.

We’re not here to be an alternative to Ivy League universities, we are here to be an alternative for people who have no other option to get access to higher education. We hope that this model will be duplicated and adopted by universities and governments of developing countries to educate even more people around the world. We’re not reinventing the wheel. We’re just taking everything that’s out there, wrapping it together and creating a university out of it. Everyone can do this.

Imagine just for a moment if each and every traditional university had a people’s university arm!

And I am not so sure that this would even be a difficult task.