What is Big Think?

We are Big Idea Hunters…

We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? Big Think is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.

A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think

Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.

Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.

Big Think Features:

12,000+ Expert Videos

Browse videos featuring experts across a wide range of disciplines, from personal health to business leadership to neuroscience.

Watch videos

World Renowned Bloggers

Big Think’s contributors offer expert analysis of the big ideas behind the news.

Go to blogs

Big Think Edge

Big Think’s Edge learning platform for career mentorship and professional development provides engaging and actionable courses delivered by the people who are shaping our future.

Find out more

Transcript

Topic: What Journalism Schools Do Wrong

Jay Rosen: Well, Jay Schools, first of all, have to stop simply reproducing the environment of the newsroom and try to be an R & D wing of the newsroom. That’s one thing. Secondly, they have to realize that simply educating new recruits by platform magazine journalist, newspaper journalist, you know, broadcast journalist, is not really a valid concept for organizing your school anymore, and find a better concept, they have to do that. They also have to find a way that an older faculty that’s grew up on one platform can engage with the new without all this storm and [IB] and ideological conflict, right, that can happen when you have platform overhaul like that. They have to do that. And they have to take advantage of the flood of talent that’s being expelled from the news business, right, as we enter this period of contraction so that Jay Schools themselves can play a role in catalyzing a new system for news, and I would love to see journalism schools do exactly that and I think a lot of people are kind of thinking in that direction and figuring it out how to do that. So it’s a major challenge. There’s no question about it. I kind of compare it in some ways to Agricultural Schools. If you know anything about how agricultural education works is this whole extension part of it where we’re not teaching people to be experts in agriculture, we’re teaching farmers how to grow better crops, right, because that’s our mission as an agricultural school. So there has to be almost that part of Jay School to the extension part of the enterprise which is not something journalism schools have specialized in before but certainly is… something there’s a demand for now, right? So that’s the landscape. It’s pretty challenging one for people in my biz.

Recorded on: 08/19/2008