We get lots of over-the-transom submissions to Radar, most of which we don’t cover. (Just like an open source project, we generally take our news from experienced “committers” who’ve worked their way up from commenter to lead source to guest blogger to full time participant. We generally don’t take news from PR agencies or people just looking for coverage.) But sometimes, an unsolicited submission is news not for what is submitted but for who submits it. I was tickled to receive this email from Peter Holland of the Department of Continuing Education at Oxford University:
Please consider the following University of Oxford events for inclusion in your events listing page:
Mobile Social Networking – the Financial Saviour of the Mobile Sector (3 July 2007, University of Oxford, UK)
The smart guys working in 3G now accept that the one-to-many broadcast of mobile content is a broken business model. So what now? The passion of connected people to socialise words, voice, media and digital possessions around their personal networks never went away – it just went mobile. Mobile Social Networking. It’s time is right now. MobSocNetUser Generated Content and Web 2.0 – A Strategic Viewpoint for Decision Makers (5 July 2007, University of Oxford, UK)
Designed for decision makers, this intensive one-day course offers an opportunity to learn more about the threats and opportunities arising from user generated content.Mobile Web 2.0 and IMS : User Generated Content (from a telecoms / infrastructure perspective) (6 July 2007, University of Oxford, UK)
This intensive one-day course will have a dual perspective. It will approach Web 2.0 from the user perspective and also from the IMS standpoint. It will cover the basics of IMS and will then discuss how IMS would apply in a user generated content / Web 2.0 world.
The fact that Web 2.0 is now the subject of continuing education courses is a sure sign that the meme has hit the mainstream. That the first of these courses I’ve heard about are at Oxford is a nice grace note to that mainstream acceptance, because of the university’s history, dating back to the middle ages, and its status as one of the most prestigious universities in the world.
According to Wikipedia, the first literary mention of Oxford comes in The Canterbury Tales, which referred to a “Clerk [student] of Oxenford”: “For him was levere have at his beddes heed/ Twenty bookes, clad in blak or reed,/ of Aristotle and his philosophie/ Than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sautrie”. Now we can say: “For him was levere have at his beddes heed/ Twenty bookes and a deli.cio.us feed/ of Web 2.0 philosophie/ Than windows riche or filthie, or gray SOA.”