"Disintermediation" brought to you by You Tube, Google Video, etc.

Check this out...

When I was in the 6th. grade, I remember reading a story depicting a day-in-the-life of a student of similar age, only at some point "in the future".. They lived in houses where the beds were essentially built-in cushions in the floor, the showers were cubes with omni-directional jets of water and warm air (to wash and dry you off), and they wore spray-on clothing.

One of the things that I thought was really cool was the idea of going to school without leaving my house, which showed the student sitting in a room in their house with a television monitor showing their teacher and classmates.

We've had some form of interactive televised knowledge transmission for over 10 years now, with both the education and the medical fields leveraging the technology. But there's another reason why I find this new feature from Google interesting...

Disintermediation.

If ("when", actually) this gets coupled with better two-way, rather than one-way, knowledge transmission, Google has the ability to establish a great position for itself. MySpace is already filled with most of the demographic that want to get (or are already pursuing) college degrees. It's no great leap in logic for them to "naturally" look to the web for their course lectures (in fact, college students are citing Wikipedia references in scholarly papers, over the protests of their professors and the founder / editor of Wikipedia!). Professors can leave their entire lecture "on reserve" rather than just their written notes (which never convey the nuances of an idea).

This will also have an impact the pricing associated with getting a degree ("Eventually", anyway...). Will there be sufficient cachet associated with a degree earned this way? Yes, but it will take some time for the Majority to endorse the idea - at least in the U.S. Baby Boomers are going back to school in record numbers, for a variety of reasons. Other nations who don't have the infrastructure of estbalished universities, however, can now take advantage of this right now.

And so can anyone who has an internet connection.

Think about that for a moment...

True, they won't get the college credits for attending the class, nor the degree to "certify" their "knowledge acquisition". But they will gain the information that they can use.

And isn't that what learning's all about, anyway???