July 27, 2009
“Knowledge is, as the economists say, a non-rival good,” wrote venture capitalist Brad Burnham in May. “If I eat an apple, you cannot also eat that same apple; but if I learn something, there is no reason you cannot also learn that thing. Information goods lend themselves to being created, distributed and consumed on the web. It is not so different from music, or classified advertising, or news.”
So in the future, the cost of education might be free, or nearly free, which could just level the playing field.
(Link: In the Future, the Cost of Education will be Zero – mashable)
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Stumbled on your blog this evening when Googling for an answer to a Rails question. Great stuff! I’ve spent a lot of time in the educational technology/for-profit education world, first at Princeton Review where I ran their software development team until 1999, then at Thinkwell where I was CTO so your blog covers a lot of things I find quite interesting.
I do disagree with the claim made here, however.
While “knowledge” may not be a non-rival good, one of the most effective forms of knowledge-transfer, teaching, is. First, there are a finite number of people who have the requisite knowledge to transfer, and the more esoteric the knowledge, the fewer. Second, there are a finite number of people that the teacher can teach effectively.
Note, I take it as a given that effective teaching requires interaction with students to assess whether each has grasped the material and if not to try to present that material in a way that might be more accessible to that student. Current technology can dramatically increase a teacher’s efficiency by both making it possible to reach larger audiences and by allowing asynchronous interaction with students, but it doesn’t eliminate the scarcity of the teacher’s time. To achieve that, we’re going to need much better, AI-based instructional software.
–Ken Riley