Interesting article on the NYT site today that points us to a new, YouTube for ideas. Backed by former Harvard Pres and Secretary of the Treasury Lawrence Summers, “Big Think (www.bigthink.com) mixes interviews with public intellectuals from a variety of fields, from politics, to law to business, and allows users to engage in debates on issues like global warming and the two-party system.”

I’m a big fan of this idea – while Wikipedia offers a non-visual repository of thoughts and facts – you can’t (for the most part) attribute them to anyone, and thus it serves as a rather limited reference guide. This, however, has the potential to play a large role in the facilitation of intellectual debates, and, if it gathers enough support among academics and thinkers, the spread of knowledge outside of academic journals and libraries. Now all that said, I have to point out that this isn’t exactly novel. Last spring, as a grad student in the UK, I often used the video interviews at BigPicture to get new ideas and thoughts from top thinkers from across the globe. And therein lies BigPicture’s current advantage over the BigThink – while the latter has a roster of experts almost exclusively from the US, the former has a more robust worldwide composition.

Nonetheless, if packaged correctly BigThink could play a role in broader open source education efforts, where informal students could use this and another OS curriculum to formulate theses and thoughts for peer-review and, eventually, some sort of accreditation. Think the Open University – a core component of what could be a neat menu of Education 2.0 projets.