How Web-Savvy Edupunks Are Transforming American Higher Education

If you want to perform a proper string quartet, they noted, you can’t cut out the cellist nor can you squeeze in more performances by playing the music faster. But that was then — before MP3s and iPods proved just how freely music could flow. Before Google scanned and digitized 7 million books and Wikipedia users created the world’s largest encyclopedia. Before YouTube Edu and iTunes U made video and audio lectures by the best professors in the country available for free, and before college students built Facebook into the world’s largest social network, changing the way we all share information. Suddenly, it is possible to imagine a new model of education using online resources to serve more students, more cheaply than ever before. — Fast Company

I’m happy to see open content and edu-hacking getting some mainstream attention. It’s a little depressing to see the focus on the commercial potential, though given the source of the article, that focus is not actually surprising.