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Comment by okmjuhb | Hacker News Reader

A few loosely related thoughts as to why I'm fond of the University system (in response to the negative tone of some of the comments here and at techcrunch):

- It's the only socially acceptable way to spend years simply learning as a full time job.

- The argument that "lectures will soon be online" only makes sense if you believe that physically being present in lectures is the way that people gain knowledge in school.

- University admissions maintain a level of intelligence in incoming classes that I don't think an online community ever could - so that the students who interact at a university are interacting in a productive way.

- Physical colocation is just a better way of interacting with people than communicating online is.

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Responding in reverse order:

- "Communicating online" is in its infancy. The way people communicate online now (facebook, twitter) is wholly different than 10 years ago, and will be wholly different 10 years from now.

- I agree that University admissions provide a useful filter, but one may emerge online, as well. Already, the people you meet on HN are not the people you'll meet on 4chan. I wonder what an HN clone would be like if membership were applied for and kept only as long as you maintained a certain comment point average.

- Agreed. A great deal of what Universities provide is a cultural submersion into a social class. This is hard, if not impossible, to replicate online. That said, it has nothing to do with learning. People can still learn online and go about indoctrinating in one social class or another in other ways.

- Social norms follow progress, not vice versa. Whatever Universities will be like in 1000 years won't be socially acceptable when it first appears.

The way people communicate online now (facebook, twitter) is wholly different than 10 years ago, and will be wholly different 10 years from now.

Different, yes. Better? Ten years ago, the conversations I had on mailing lists had a lot more potential than you can fit in 140 characters. The trend isn't very promising.

I was about to say the same thing. The step from usenet and mailing lists to facebook and twitter has been a huge step backwards in terms of quality discussion and meaningful communication.

The two aren't mutually exclusive. I think many people will want to both tweet and having deep conversations online.

>>>I wonder what an HN clone would be like if membership were applied for and kept only as long as you maintained a certain comment point average.

The group-think would become worse than Reddit.

These points have merit, yet I know of at least one pioneering effort that was successful: The "Higher Cracking University" or +HCU for short. It ceased functioning a long while back, but at that time it didn't just meet, but far surpassed the expectations of online learning described in these comments.

The link speaks louder than my words: http://www.woodmann.com/fravia/student.htm

Here you had a community that - spent years simply learning - shared their knowledge (for free!) in essays, email, and forum discussions - maintained a level of intelligence in incoming classes by use of strainers (reversing assignments such as http://www.woodmann.com/fravia/strain99.htm) - never needed to meet in person to contribute these great works

It can be done, but perhaps the question is, "why haven't we seen more of these in the wild?"

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