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November 29, 2006, 03:01 PM ET
When Professors Are More Wired Than Their Students
Kevin Lim, a doctoral candidate at the State University of New York at Buffalo, has posted a video of a lecture he gave this week in an organizational communication class about Web 2.0, a term used to describe highly interactive Web features. Mr. Lim, who describes himself as a trendspotter and “gadget pornographer,” urges his audience, which appears to be composed of students with interests in business and public relations, to consider how the social Web might affect business decisions in the future. Some retailers are going to fight the collective intelligence of the community, but smart retailers and businesses will find a way to harness it, he says. He cites Dell and Amazon as two companies that have responded and reacted to the power of the networked Internet community.
We can assume that the crowd he’s speaking to is young, and yet, surprisingly, they seem out of touch. Lim himself is a blogger who monitors hundreds of news outlets through RSS feeds. He takes seriously virtual worlds like Second Life. But the students, who should be receptive to these ideas, express some skepticism. One student asks: Isn’t spending energy on Second Life just wasting time in your first, real one? Lim asks how many students in the class blog – none of them. “Come on, you guys are way behind!” he says. —Scott Carlson
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