In the Future, the Cost of Education will be Zero. It should read "nearly all the way down to zero."

In the Future, the Cost of Education will be Zero
"The average cost of yearly tuition at a private, four-year college in the US this year was $25,143, and for public schools, students could expect to pay $6,585 on average for the 2008-09 school year, according to the College Board. That was up 5.9% and 6.4% respectively over the previous year, which is well ahead of the national average rate of inflation. What that means is that for many people, college is out of reach financially. But what if social media tools would allow the cost of an education to drop nearly all the way down to zero?" . . . and open source or reusable and adaptive learning materials can drive costs down even further.

Clickable A4's and clickable newspapers are adaptive learning materials.

One vision for the school of the future comes from the United Nations. Founded this year by the UN’s Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technology and Development (GAID), the University of the People is a not-for-profit institution that aims to offer higher education opportunities to people who generally couldn’t afford it by leveraging social media technologies and ideas.

The school is a one hundred percent online institution, and utilizes open source courseware and peer-to-peer learning to deliver information to students without charging tuition.
. . .
“It’s not for everyone,” said Reshef at an education event earlier this year. “You need to know English, you need to have a computer… our assumption [is that the students will be from] the upper end of the lower class or the lower end of the middle class… it’s people who almost made it… who could have been at the university but missed their chance.”

Software engineers usually wear "people-like-us" glasses. They have a blind spot for the fact that without Print nothing can go mass market. Print + TV are the mass media. Everything else is a niche medium for growing niches. It is not a question of more technology. The reality is that push media thrives in the physical world. Pull media thrives in the cognitive world.

Google is a pull media in cognitive space. Wal-Mart is a push media in physical space. Print lives in physical space. Clickable print connects the two. Just as Amazon connects the two.

Once you take off the "people-like-us" glasses it becomes clear that Wal-Mart is the mass media for most of the people-NOT-like-us.