[ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class

[spike]

Jeff, your post is brilliant, thanks.  Read on:

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org
[mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Jeff Davis
Subject: Re: [ExI] mit's answer to the stanford ai class

>...The internet is clearly a paradigm altering information exchange
innovation.  It is so new and its power so great that we can't see the
forest for the low-hanging fruit...

Well said, me lad.

>...Newspapers are dieing, and the reason is trivially obvious...

Ja.  Why do we need a hard copy of yesterday's news?  I want today's news,
not yesterday's.


>... Universities are, if not next, high up on the list for imminent
obsolescence...

I expect they will put up one hell of a fight before dying.  Universities
serve as football minor leagues and a four year vacation at a sex therapy
resort.  

Unless one is a geek.  {8-[


>...  Why does Harvard (or U of X) charge big bucks for tuition?

Wonder how it will be 10 yrs from now?


>...A lecture series can be put on DVD.  ...  But it's still an old paradigm
model.  A dinosaur walking...  

Ja, and has been for some time now.

The internet isn't even an infant yet.  It's barely "crowning".

>...As an undergraduate at Case Tech, I took the standard thermo course...
Took Thermo yet again, this time from Jerome Fox a former hot shot project
manager from Bechtel or some such big league firm.  Best teacher bar none I
have ever encountered...

Cool coincidence:  I took a graduate thermo class from the best professor I
ever had.  Name: Tim Fox.

>...(Inter-personally a monster, but that's another story.)

But opposite: Professor Tim Fox was the nicest guy.

>...So what I see as the Wiki-versity is a micro-payment, for-profit site
where **anyone** can submit a lesson/lecture for sale.  No need to be a
University Prof.  Joe Nobody could do it...

The importance of this development is difficult to overstate.  If we can
work it out, we have created perhaps the most important application of the
internet.

>...Little side point.  The Meyers-Briggs 4 by 4 matrix generates 16
personality variants, and it's not hard to suppose that each has its own
learning style that needs a teaching style to fit.  So, for any given
subject, there should be a whole slew of lessons to choose from to find
something that fits...

Bringing in that angle is stellar thinking Jeff.

>...Bye-bye newspapers, bye-bye Universities.  What's next?  Best, Jeff
Davis

Before we get distracted by what's next, let us think the hell out of this
concept and work towards it.  Recall how you did in college, and compare to
how you study things on the internet.  You are now in the comfort of your
own home, perhaps comfortably married and your beer drinking phase is mostly
in the past.  Now we can think, ja?  Now we can laser focus on that which we
want to know.  We have such astonishing potential here.  If we can figure
out a way to accomplish the task of evaluating credentials, of measuring
randomly acquired knowledge, we have freed ourselves from an appallingly
expensive and partially effective learning model, replacing it with another
model which does everything better for some students, some things better for
others, and may be ineffective for another subset.  I feel I am in that
subclass which will fly like an eagle in the online environment.

spike



spike