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Re: Charles M Best Announces MIT Decision



On Wed, 4 Apr 2001, brian whatcott wrote:

Charles Best is moving to make the materials for all MIT classes
available freely by Internet in the course of the next decade.
Now *there's* a President I can salute.

At 18:13 4/4/01 -0700, John Mallinckrodt responded:

I'd be curious to know why you (apparently) think this is a good
idea. I understand the superficial appeal, but it seems to me
there might be a pretty significant downside.

What's your position on napster?

John Mallinckrodt mailto:ajm@csupomona.edu
Cal Poly Pomona http://www.csupomona.edu/~ajm

There is a stark contrast in various distance learning schemes.
Diploma mills aside, there are the life-experience and trade school
equivalency credit hour schools serving niche markets, and there
are the integrated radio, TV, video tape, summer school, correspondence,
phone and internet schools serving huge chunks of national populations.

These are the avenues which many wage slaves must use, if they wish
to taste some of the academic flavor. I take the view that if there
is to be a distance channel, then let it be the best there can be.

If you have walked round MIT, you can hardly have failed to see the
legions of military students in dress uniform. So this is not the
typical college ambiance. But there is adventurous, exciting project
work visible there too.

What Best appears to be proposing amounts to quite a bit more than
the slides, diagrams and lecture notes to be seen from other schools
(welcome though they are.) There appears to be enough structure for a
determined person to run with the pack, to some extent.

I expect the osmotic effect to be a national gift.

I don't quite see how music sharing services like Napster figure into
the same universe of discourse as distance learning opportunities
from an important school. I don't use them and I don't need them.
But I am receptive to the metaphor. What is the comparison?

brian whatcott <inet@intellisys.net> Altus OK
Eureka!