Chuck Grimes:
> What I think Yoshie was referring to by ``a catch may lie future class
> relations'' is the appropriation of whole courses into a multi-media
> format and then presented to students, for credit, thus completely
> by-passing the need for a teacher. So, in effect the capitalist class,
> embodied as the university has automated the production line of
> eduation and elimenated the need for labor, aka the teacher. The
> possibility becomes much more realistically achievable and acceptible
> or sellable with computers, high speed connections, and the internet.
>
> But MIT, Cal, Cal Tech, Ohio, etc has always been in the busines of
> selling information and knowledge. I mean that's is what they
> do. Textbooks, teaching materials, as well as all that specialist and
> scholarly stuff and then the really expensive custom shit, case
> studies, medical research, weapons development, and even the really
> really expensive stuff like extra special secrete algorthims and so
> forth.
>
> Anyway you know this, so maybe that isn't what you meant. What did you
> mean?
I was referring to MIT's educational role, not its role as a research enterprise, and in this regard, I mean that MIT sells not information but class position (or it used to, anyway). As noted elsewhere, there is nothing in an MIT classroom that couldn't be found outside it, except the positions, present and future, of the inmates in the class system. The result of an MIT education is not the acquisition of information but credentials, social connections, and experience with certain kinds of culture not available to the general public.
So MIT loses no stock in trade just by publishing course materials on the Net.
The process Yoshie is noticing is more ambiguous. Academia, in adopting more efficient models of production, cannot push too much product without taking care to also produce additional scarcity. I don't know how this is supposed to happen.