I got such a kick out of Cole Camplese's podcast of his Web 2.0 lecture that I checked out Penn State's ETS (Educational Technology Services) podcasts. (available on iTunes) This is a weekly round table of Cole and a few peers discussing current tech products and trends, particularly as they have to do with learning, education and PSU.

Back in the 80s and early 90s I used to interact with people at universities a lot. It was the cool deal if you were a prof or grad student to have a Sun SPARCstation 1 in your office.  As you might know Sun has it's roots in academia, and SUN is an acronym that stands for Stanford University Network. The Sun founders were all from Stanford with the exception of Bill Joy who was from Berkeley.

As I've been listening to the ETS podcasts I can't help but thinking we have a lot in common with these guys! At least in the Web 2.0 and collaboration space we share many of the same issues, though we may be coming at them from different directions. I'd imagine there is much to learned from both sides of this fence.

My other thought was, these guys are good.  I'm a regular listener of the top tech podcasts such as TWIT, ExtremeTech, DL.TV, Cranky Geeks, etc., and think the ETS podcasts are at least their equal. They even broadcast in stereo, a feature I wish the others would adopt.

Web 2.0, collaboration, openness, and transparency are pretty cool.