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Matriculate At Lost U: Low Tuition, Lots of Relevance, High Fun Factor

The Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus Blog has this piece about Lost University, a project of the folks over at ABC's Lost, which links the show's content to, well, the real world. Real class materials include Bluray discs of the show, and you won't get any spoilers. Rats. First semester offerings include a course on time travel by a physics prof at USC, philosophy from other USC profs, and hieroglyphics from a UCLA professor.

Here's more from the Los Angeles Times.

Nicholas Warner, who teaches the physics course, told the Chronicle,
?There used to be huge disconnect (sic) between watching television shows and academic investigation. Anything that provides channels to follow up questions is a wonderful thing.?

Now, Professor Warner is right--building bridges between the two cultures is indeed a wonderful thing. But I think academics have been building those bridges for a while now. College courses (and graduate school courses) integrating popular culture and everything else, including law, have been around for a while now, as have books about tv shows and films in which academics study the impact of popular culture (think about all those books about the meaning of Star Trek). I think the "disconnect" vanished into a black hole some time ago. What's different about this enterprise (ha!) is that it's a joint project between the show and academia.

Full post as published by Law & Humanities Blog on December 08, 2009 (boomark / email).