Thanks to a colleague of mine, I have just caught wind of a new blog called Tomorrow’s Professor, which is worth highlighting for a few very important reasons.

According to the header, Tomorrow’s Professor is:

“A partnership between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University to create a forum for comments and discussion about articles from the Tomorrow’s Professor Mailing List and about general issues concerning higher education”

This blog is significant for a few key reasons.

First, it is a collaborative effort between two recognised and highly respected institutions covering emerging issues that affect countless other institutions, teachers and students around the world.

Second, it is formatted like a scholarly journal – and indeed features long-form papers that are published in peer-reviewed publications elsewhere – and yet does so using an open format, which solicits open comments and discussion. Its intent is not simply to distribute and disseminate, but to discuss as well. Most scholarly journals don’t do that – in fact I’m hard pressed to think of a single one that does.

Finally, in incorporating a simple, open format – using a bare-bones WordPress installation and default theme – Tomorrow’s Professor demonstrates the ease and speed with which collaborative efforts can be pulled together using social media tools, and yet offer significant benefits to the academic community – not just in terms to access to information and emerging research topics, but access to each other as well.

To me it’s an important symbol of the potential in educational use of social media, and what can happen when you start focusing on the possibilities rather than the politics.

Tomorrow’s Professor is located at: http://tomprofblog.mit.edu/