The This Week in Ireland weekly podcast on this week's news, and what to look forward to, is here. I'd highly recommend subscribing to the podcast--2000 people do already--this is an example of professional podcasting in action.
The bit of the podcast I'm involved in focuses on Anglo, NAMA, and the Innovation Report.
I listened to the podcast interview yesterday. You are probably correct Stephen, it is much more fun to listen to you give your lecture over a podcast, rather than showing up to a lecture theatre purely for the purpose of listening to the said lecture. The lecture theatre experience could and should be about something more - a kind of colloqium.
When I attended architecture school at DIT in Dublin, I was probably the worst student of all time. Anyhow, over the course of my training there which lasted practically a full decade, I did witness one very major 'big bang' change to the educational approach. It was made by one of the guys who was a young buck when I started at DIT, but by the end of a decade had progressed to being a signifigant voice within the department (his career was fast forwarded by the fact that many staff left to work as architects in the building boom years).
One of the standard things always in architecture training was the idea of the all class, wall crit. The wall crit was where you pinned up your rubbish on the wall, and the professors proceeded to rubbish it even more, in front of everyone. It was supposed to toughen you up, or so the thinking went. For a class of 50 students, this process repeated itself 50 times. The professor I refer to decided one year, the wall crits were a waste of time, and thereafter only did desk crits. I left DIT architecture before I had a real chance to ascertain how this change worked out - but believe me, in terms of teaching architecture, it was every bit as large a change as the one you describe in teaching of economics.
I wish there was some kind of technology like the podcast or even a Sony pet dog called Aibo, that could change the way architecture is taught in schools. But unfortunately, either I am too dense, or the course is taught really poorly. If you like, I can give you the name of the architecture professor at DIT, if you want to pick his brain on his experiences.