1. Suppose all information about every subject is at your fingertips. Why would you bother to go to University, indeed, high school, if only to learn the social rituals, find mating partners, travel together, get a good job? Human-to-human interfaces are good for some things, but for certainty of info the human-to-machine interface is about 20x better. See, Dr. Kent Stephens studies on the ICBM in the 1950s.
2. In the year 2000, I was in Pasadena at a certain prestigious University whose name will remain unnamed and I was speaking to the Dean who said that their Uni had just received $35 million from a billionaire-developer-alumna to build a beautiful new hi-tech law school building. The building was about 25 to 30 stories and they had their own television channel, and all lecture halls had at least two digital video cameras and the data from the lectures were sent to a Media Centre, where media workers developed the content into broadcast. The Dean said to me, "What will we (law school bricks and mortar) do when we put all these courses onto two disks?" I said, "Isn't one more than enough?"
3. The disintermediation of universities hasn't occurred YET because no one has yet figured out how to make a University within your own simple point and click powers. There's too much content on the Web and it's not at all clear what if anything but the certainty of exchange approximates reality.
4. I propose the Personal Learning Assistant. The PLA grows with you and mirrors your hobbyist interests (non-profit and at a cost of consumption) and professional specialised knowledge (for profit and chargeable at globally competitive rates). The PLA is not you, but it's pretty close to being your Web-clone. It can apply for jobs, do jobs, and even multiply in terms of identifiable profiles on the Web. BTW, the PLA does not simply exist in digital code, but will have significant impact on your physical being and others. For example, who'll find the best heart specialist just in time, get the appropriate therapeutic apps to manage your incipient diabetes, run every sort of psycho-chemical tests and ensure that you are aware of the survival odds at the next traffic junction other than your PLA? Who's your Guardian Angel and Protector? If you want to go on "auto-PLA" then you can turn down the control to subliminal 0,005 second input-outputs. What's the point of a university education if you can have this much fun at 10 magnitudes above and below the normal medium of perception? I guess this is what web-based education has to offer. Open the doors of perception and get a universal education. BTW building your own PLA immediately answers questions about long-term social welfare.
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